Poor student engagement with academic readings has been frequently reported in college classrooms. As an effort to improve college students' reading engagement, researchers have developed a virtual environment in which students take on the role of tutor and teach a virtual tutee, the virtual tutee system (VTS). This research examined the…

The process toward academic literacy aims at developing academic reading and writing together with higher academic competences of increasing relevance for undergraduate students as future teachers and researchers. Such a process is even more complex in ELT vocational courses where non-English speaking trainees study English as a system while they…

This article makes a case for using creative writing in a second language course. Creative writing increases students' enthusiasm for writing skills development and supports students' creativity, which is a fundamental aspect of education. In order to engage less motivated students, a series of creative writing assignments was implemented in a…

Although academic writing is a complex interplay of comprehending and producing text the aspect of collecting information from source texts is hardly addressed in writing research. This study examined the impact of instructions supporting the collection process on writing quality, as well as the role of prior motivation and computer experience.…

The paper reports the findings of a project that assessed the benefits of peer feedback as a formative assessment intervention for postgraduate international learners in the United Kingdom. The aim was to improve participants' understanding of quality in academic writing, and hence improve the summative assessment scores, by improving the quantity…

Writing has always been regarded as playing a prominent role in learning a second language. UAE university writing center provides a key support service within the institution, and as such must find ways to evaluate the impact of the instruction they provide. However, many studies of tutorial effectiveness lack adequate analyses of tutorial…

Some teaching strategies grow out of the curricula educators inherit or develop through professional reading; others originate in the aromatic humus of their autobiographies. This article presents a proposal that has its origins in the latter. The author recognized that what delights her in prose or poetry is the figurative language a writer uses…

The purpose of this grounded theory study was to explore Native American students' experiences with writing in the first year of college at a public research university and two tribal colleges, exploring in particular what helped them succeed as writers. Individual interviews with students served as the main sources of data and included…

This paper reports on a study designed to investigate (a) whether peer review is an effective pedagogical activity with adult Chinese students in the teaching of second language (L2) academic writing and (b) how factors such as perceptions of the influence of peer reviewers' L2 proficiency, previous experience with peer review, feedback…