Two hundred ninety-eight primary teachers (88% female) from across all Australian states and territories reported on the frequency with which they implemented instructional adaptations for struggling writers in their classrooms. They also rated their preparation and self-efficacy for teaching writing. The majority of participating teachers…

This mixed methods study sought to extend what is known about preservice teachers' [PSTs'] enactment of the core practice of reading and responding to students' writing by examining their reading of elementary students' writing at the start and end of writing-focused methods coursework. PSTs' reading of students' writing involves analysis of…

The Chilean curriculum for writing education includes five paradigms: "cultural," "macro-linguistic," "micro-linguistic," "procedural," and "communicative." The implementation of such a poly-paradigmatic curriculum can occur in multiple ways. Therefore, we analyzed classroom practices with two…

Studies of early writing recognize that learning to write is a complex process requiring students to attend to the composition of the text and the transcription of the ideas. The research discussed here examined six dimensions of early writing--text structure, sentence structure, vocabulary, spelling, punctuation, and handwriting--and how each…

The research purpose was to identify (1) the problems encountered by academic and administrative staff in emails received from students, (2) positive and negative qualities of the authentic emails of higher education students, (3) functional explanations of the academic email, (4) the problems encountered by students in emails received from…

Writing skills are essential for success in the 21st-century school and workplace, but most classrooms devote far more time to reading instruction, with writing often addressed in isolation or excluded. In this insightful professional development resource and text, leading researchers discuss why and how to integrate writing and reading…

Learning to compose texts adequate for different purposes is crucial for becoming literate. We examined developmental changes in the rhetorical structure of written texts produced by Spanish children throughout the early years of elementary school in the light of descriptive writing purposes. Children had also performed tasks to test…

Verb use and the production of verb argument structure in the written texts of children in elementary school is a key stepping stone towards academic writing success that has remained relatively unexplored and is a notable gap in our understanding of writing development. To evaluate the role of verbs in the written narrative texts of children, we…

This report discusses AERO's 2022 analysis of student writing data -- the most extensive investigation into this area ever conducted in Australia. AERO's researchers analysed more than 10 million NAPLAN writing results, spanning 2011 to 2021, and 366 samples of students' NAPLAN writing. Overall, our research suggests that students' writing skills…

In 2022 Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) researchers analysed more than 10 million NAPLAN writing results, spanning 2011 to 2021, and 366 samples of students' NAPLAN writing. Overall, the research suggests that students' writing skills have declined over 7 years (2011 to 2018), with many high school students significantly behind…

Writing is an ever-creative artifice, elaborated in many different ways and used for many different purposes in different situations throughout history. From this perspective, each writer, embedded within a perceived sociohistoric moment, poses problems to solve, makes choices, and creates solutions from locally available resources and practices…

Writing is a key area of literacy in the early years, however writing receives less research attention than reading despite its impact on students' learning generally, and literacy development specifically. Writing skills have also been shown to be quite stable--good writers in the early years stay good writers in the later years. Therefore it is…

To have a clearer idea of the problems students with dyslexia may face during their studies, we compared writings of 100 students with dyslexia and 100 age matched control students in higher education. The aim of this study was to compare the writing of young adults with dyslexia and young adults without dyslexia. The study was carried out in…

Writing an essay is a very important skill for students to master, but a difficult task for them to overcome. It is particularly true for English as Second Language (ESL) students in China. It would be very useful if students could receive timely and effective feedback about their writing. Automatic essay feedback generation is a challenging task,…

Writing is a complex process, and this complexity poses particular challenges when researchers and teachers approach the task of analysing young students' writing samples. This paper outlines a program of research undertaken to develop a writing analysis tool. The tool is designed to map shifts over time in the range of skills and competencies…