This article describes a qualitative study of how two ethnic Burmese families in the United States authored storybooks that included their children's drawings and writings representing their families' stories. The theoretical perspectives of storytelling and the social semiotics multimodal approach were utilized in this inquiry. The data included…

In this study, we examined burst length and its relation with working memory, attentional control, transcription skills, discourse oral language, and writing quality, using data from English-speaking children in Grade 2 (N = 177; M[subscript age] = 7.19). Results from structural equation modeling showed that burst length was related to writing…

In this study, we examined burst length and its relation with working memory, attentional control, transcription skills, discourse oral language, and writing quality, using data from English-speaking children in Grade 2 (N = 177; M[subscript age] = 7.19). Results from structural equation modeling showed that burst length was related to writing…

How can social change become possible when secondary teachers approach argument as participation in ongoing conversations? The authors illustrate how--through writing, speaking, and reading to develop a letter to their principal arguing for a school policy change--secondary students participated in multiple conversational spheres across time and…

This study examines the question of how the feedback of peers and teachers on a collaboratively written student text, mediated by track changes and commenting functions in Microsoft (MS) Word, can act as a form of socialization into an academic or professional discipline. It focusses on a collaboratively written legal memorandum, authored by…

This book is the first to bring together a collection of recent empirical studies investigating languaging, an important construct first introduced by Swain in 2006 but which has since been deployed in a growing number of L2 studies. The contributing authors include both established and emerging authors from around the globe. They report on…

Writing is a change process. In writing, one clarifies his/her thoughts. When one shares his/her writing with others, they take one's ideas and contribute their own. And through this exchange of ideas they are both changed. It's clear that speaking and writing serve different purposes. Here, with the help of some "Exchange" authors, the author…

A subcommittee of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Executive Committee wrote the "NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing" in 2004. In over a decade since, the everyday experience of writing in people's lives has expanded dramatically. Increasingly, handheld devices are important instruments for people's writing,…

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,…

The purpose of this study was to determine what difficulties King Saud University students encounter when learning to write academic English and to differentiate between students' learning needs and objectives. The sample consisted of 50 postgraduate students enrolled in King Saud University during the academic year 2009-2010. Analysis of the data…

A study examined two questions: Do students include more information or present it more concisely and explicitly when speaking or writing? and, Does language show different thematic relationships (through syntax or diction) depending upon the mode? Twenty-four community college students viewed one of two brief films and responded orally or in…

Describes a psycholinguistic investigation of children's competence in the production of extended discourse, concentrating on discourse form (narrative versus expository) and production modality (written versus spoken). (SKC)

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that first-grade beginning readers could evaluate the referential-communicative adequacy of simple, two-word messages better if they received oral-plus-written messages rather than oral-only messages. Results indicated that oral-plus-written messages were significantly easier for children to…

Examines kindergarten children's use of talk during writing to draw inferences regarding how children use speech to make sense of written language. (HOD)

To find differences and similarities between spoken and written English, analyses were made of four specific kinds of language. Twenty adults, either graduate students or university professors, provided a sample of each of the following: conversations, lectures, informal letters, and academic papers. Conversations and lecture samples came from…