From a sociocultural perspective, this case study explored two intermediate-level Chinese university EFL students' multi-dimensional engagement with asynchronous computer-mediated mode of peer feedback. Data sources included student drafts, peer feedback, think-aloud protocols, stimulated recall, and semi-structured interviews. The two students…

Several barriers hinder students from producing clear and impactful written work. Writing assignments are often given on an individual basis, similar to homework, and without any assistance. Students in a classroom context have access to both their classmates and the teacher while they are working in groups or pairs as part of their assignments.…

The field of positive psychology has identified brief interventions that increase individuals' well-being and decrease depressive symptoms. An example is the best possible self (BPS) activity. It is a writing exercise that asks participants to project themselves into the future, and imagine they have met all their goals in every domain of their…

Wikipedia is a widely used resource by university students, but it is not necessarily regarded as being reliable and trustworthy by them, nor is it seen as a context in which to make content contributions. This paper presents a teaching and research project that consisted in having students edit or create Wikipedia articles and testing whether or…

There has always been a debate whether or not the learners' first language (L1) can facilitate the process of learning foreign language. Since foreign language writing (FL) is a complicated process, it seems that the role of the learners' L1 and its effect on FL writing is of great importance in this regard. The present study aimed at…

The current study investigates the applications of the pinyin input system, a Chinese word processing method, for writing on Facebook in order to help CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) learners from two Irish universities to improve their handwriting in Chinese characters on paper. The data were collected from writing activities conducted over…

The effects of progress feedback on university students' writing mastery goal, self-efficacy beliefs, and writing performance were examined in this experiment. Students in the experimental condition (n = 42) received progress feedback on their writing assignment, whereas students in the control condition (n = 44) received feedback without progress…

This study observes and examines how upper intermediate to advanced level college students perform and perceive one-topic-for-each student presentation as a means of learning English. It is also to have the prospective medical doctors ready for their future use of English presentation and paper writing since such demand is on the rise in the…

Seven sentence combining activities designed to be stimulating and effective for college-level Japanese students of English as a Second Language are described. It is also demonstrated that a wide range of subjects can provide viable and engaging topics for the activities. The exercises include the following: (1) combining sentences provided into a…

The activity of summarization relates discourse comprehension and production in a particularly striking way: it derives writing from reading, in that the rendering of a text depends on its previous interpretation. There are two very different kinds of summaries including: abbreviated versions and brief accounts. An abbreviated version is the…

A study investigated attitudes toward and practices of plagiarism of Japanese college students writing in English. Data were drawn from two senior theses written in English and two in Japanese, 30 other student academic papers, interviews with students, and a questionnaire administered to 46 undergraduate and graduate students. In both…

An experimental study compared the effects of controlled and free writing exercises and of evaluative vs. communicative feedback on the writing quality and apprehension of Korean college students of English as a foreign language (EFL). Students in two sections of a freshman reading course wrote dialogue journals as practice in free writing, and…

This volume is a collection of papers focused on a single theme, cooperative learning, written by classroom teachers of varying experience levels. This book introduces cooperative learning and gives examples of cooperative learning activities, units, and systems created by teachers in Japan, The United States, and Canada, who are currently using…

This paper discusses a framework for designing online tasks that capitalizes on the possibilities that the Internet and the Web offer for language learning. To present such a framework, we draw from constructivist theories (Brooks and Brooks, 1993) and their application to educational technology (Newby, Stepich, Lehman and Russell, 1996; Jonassen,…