Background Study: The integration of mind maps as a prewriting activity has shown potential in enhancing students' writing skills, yet there is limited research focusing specifically on third-grade elementary students' descriptive narrative creative writing within technology-enhanced learning environments. The use of digital tools, such as writing…

This study sought to examine the pre-task planning and post-task revising practices of adults with low literacy and how those practices affect overall writing quality. Seventy-six adults with low literacy composed essays in response to a prompt and were given time for pre-task planning and post-task revising. Results showed that participants with…

Educators play an important role in ensuring that students attain the necessary strategic actions to become skilled writers. Studies have indicated that teachers need to consistently embed a larger range of evidence-based writing practices in their instruction to help their students improve the overall quantity and quality of their writing. The…

Many children find writing to be a challenge. This exploratory case study included four students with a learning disability who had writing goals/objectives in their individual education program. The students participated in a larger project in which they learned and practiced writing with an iPad art app. Planning a text with digital art offered…

The main problem faced by English teachers in the current English as a Second Language (ESL) writing classroom was a lack of strategies to support the process of teaching and learning writing that would help to enhance the content quality of pupils' writing performance. Additionally, primary pupils were found to face difficulties with getting…

Planning plays an important role in the production of written texts. Little is known about why children plan and the plans they create when they are not explicitly instructed. This study explores the plans that elementary school children in Years 1, 3, and 5 create before writing a text. We compared performance of children educated in Catalan and…

Most students who struggle with writing have particular trouble with planning a text. They do not find themselves sufficiently able to generate content and organize the ideas they wish to address into a coherent order. STOP & LIST is a well-proven strategy that has the potential to help students mold an internal representation of the text in…

This study aimed at enhancing the Mandarin essay writing by learners of Chinese as a second language (CSL) in Singapore by using authentic contexts in Second Life (SL). The participants were students in two classes of eighth graders from a junior high school in Singapore, and the study lasted for 5 weeks. A quasiexperimental design was adopted by…

Against a background that raises problems associated with the classification of languages in current South African curriculum policy, this article describes a programme based on a visual approach to writing, implemented in a farm school. The medium of instruction was English. The home languages of the teachers and learners were Afrikaans and…

Drawing on assets-oriented, sociocultural theories of imagination and learning, the authors argue that the improvisational qualities and expanded resources of dramatic approaches to teaching make a positive difference in the quality of and persistence in students' story writing. The authors describe findings from a controlled quasi-experimental…

There is limited research on teaching narrative writing skills to students with moderate to severe intellectual disability. In the current study, we used a multiple probe across participants single case design to evaluate the effects of an intervention package comprised of modeling, story templates, and self-graphing, on the inclusion of story…

This multiple case study investigated how the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for writing and teacher evaluation system based in part on CCSS assessments might be influencing writing instruction in elementary schools. The sample included nine schools: Six achieved above-predicted performance on English Language Arts (ELA) as well as prior ELA…

Many students struggle with writing skills. This study focuses on three students (second and fourth grades) who were classified with a learning disability by their school. These children had writing goals and objectives (i.e., characteristics of having dysgraphia) included in their Individual Education Plan. In a single case design format, each…

The current study investigated the effects of different computer-supported cooperative prewriting strategies (text-based brainstorming, drawing, and mind mapping) on the writing performance of elementary-school EFL (English as a foreign language) learners in Taiwan. Three intact classes of fifth graders (N = 81 students; 27 per prewriting strategy…

Many students, especially English language learners (ELLs), struggle with writing expository texts. This study examined the impact of several writing strategies on ELLs' writing skills, including prewriting strategies and scaffolding strategies inherent in the Thinking Maps (TM) program. The purpose of the study was to see if ELLs were able to use…