This qualitative case study investigated factors affecting EFL university students' use of teacher written feedback. Ten Yemeni EFL university students participated in this study. Data included students' written essays, teacher written feedback, and semi-structured interviews. Students' use of teacher written feedback was analysed using an adapted…

In language arts programs in the Greater China Region, textbooks are the primary materials used to teach children to read and write. Learning to read and write in Chinese is particularly challenging because elementary grade students are expected to learn, recognize, and write thousands of characters (the basic linguistic unit in Chinese).…

Education in Japan has drawn attention widely from overseas, including a quantity of research pointing out that the context of Japan's modernization and its present-day advanced science and technology can be found in the high literacy rates and prevalent education of Japanese society. However, there has been insufficient examination of the effect…

In this paper, we analyse the struggle for a unified style of writing in primary schools in the German-speaking part of Switzerland between the 1860s and the first decades of the twentieth century with regard to the contexts in which this struggle was embedded. In the late-nineteenth century, in German-speaking Switzerland, as in other parts of…

This study aims at analyzing primary school teachers' opinions on cursive writing and their metaphorical perceptions. The study is a qualitative research. Semistructured interview method was employed to identify opinions of the teachers more clearly. The study group of the research study consisted of primary school teachers who worked at public…

In the present study, 144 second- and 150 fourth-grade Chinese students were recruited to complete a Chinese character learning task to explore the specific contributions of sensory-motor components (i.e., visual, motor, and haptic systems) of handwriting to Chinese character learning. After matching for age, nonverbal IQ, and a series of…

The question of script was paramount in the nineteenth-century debate over Hindi and Urdu, two closely related languages that are characterised by "extreme digraphia". Rather than rehearsing the well-known story of the culturally and politically charged process of differentiation in which the two sister languages became prime markers of…

It is established that transcription skills (handwriting and spelling) constrain children's writing. Yet, little is known about the mechanism underlying this relationship. This study examined the mediating role of bursts and pauses on the link between transcription skills and writing fluency or text quality. For that, 174 second graders did the…

Research on adult writers has shown that writing proceeds through bursts of transcription activity interspersed by long pauses. Yet few studies have examined how these writing behaviors unfold during early and middle childhood. This study traces the progress of bursts, pauses, transcription, and written composition in Portuguese students from…

This study aimed to explore writing problems among undergraduate students at the university level, based on students self reporting technique and the verification from their teachers' ratings. Twenty-eight students were considered good candidates for this research using two criteria of self reporting and high means of responses. Twenty-five…

Writers typically produce their writing in bursts. In this article, the authors examine written language bursts in a sample of 33 children aged 11 years with specific language impairment. Comparisons of the children with specific language impairment with an age-matched group of typically developing children (n = 33) and a group of younger,…

This article examines the relationship between writing and attention problems and hypothesizes that homophone spelling errors coincide with attention deficits. We analyze specific types of attention deficits, which may contribute to Attention Deficits Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD); rather than studying ADHD, however, we focus on the inattention…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the handwriting characteristics of secondary school students with and without physical disabilities (PD). With the use of a computerized Chinese Handwriting Assessment Tool (CHAT), it was made possible to objectively assess and analyze in detail the handwriting characteristics of individual…

As Chinese characters ("hanzi") have three aspects--as a technical writing system, an aesthetic visual art (Chinese calligraphy), and a highly-charged cultural symbolic system--changing them is a complex process. In the 1950s when language planning campaigns were launched to modernise Chinese through "hanzi" standardisation,…

Undergraduates producing handwritten essays in university exams need to transcribe information onto the page in a rapid and efficient manner under considerable time pressure. In fact, capacity models of the writing process predict that the more automated students can make the transcription process then the more resources will be available for…