The increasingly widespread use of social software (e.g., Wikis, Google Docs) in second language (L2) settings has brought a renewed attention to collaborative writing. Although the current methodological approaches to examining collaborative writing are valuable to understand L2 students' interactional patterns or perceived experiences, they can…

This state-of-the-art review research undertook a survey of a variety of studies regarding wiki-based collaborative writing projects and from this body of work extracted the best practices tenets of facilitation. Wiki-based collaborative writing projects are becoming more common in second language (L2) pedagogy. Such projects have multiple aims.…

A sequence comparison procedure, referred to as the edit distance procedure, has been shown to be particularly accurate for recognizing misspelled responses in second-language computer-assisted instruction. Experience with real dictation responses indicates that this technique reliably obtains markups that appear natural for users. (Author/VWL)

Examines traditional teacher expectations of and reactions to student writing, considers writing as the mental process it involves, and explores one method of involving students in editing their own work. It is concluded that when students realize teachers read their writing to understand what they are saying, they write more interestingly. (25…

Reviews some word processing programs that facilitate the writing task. These programs cover the following areas: 1) spelling; 2) punctuation and style; 3) thesauruses; 4) sexist language; 5) text and author statistics; 6) footnotes; 7) indexes; and 8) bibliography. Also provides an outline of the "Computer Education Assistance Act" of 1985 (S.…