Writing training systems have been developed to provide students with instruction and deliberate practice on their writing. Although generally successful in providing accurate scores, a common criticism of these systems is their lack of personalization and adaptive instruction. In particular, these systems tend to place the strongest emphasis on…

This study investigates a new approach to automatically assessing essay quality that combines traditional approaches based on assessing textual features with new approaches that measure student attributes such as demographic information, standardized test scores, and survey results. The results demonstrate that combining both text features and…

The ability of educational games to promote students' engagement in learning and practice depends on perceived enjoyment of those games. This study investigated high school students' perceptions and enjoyment of games within the Writing Pal intelligent tutoring system. In accord with research on motivation, results showed that perceived…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore 71 secondary preservice teachers' attitudes about and experiences with sharing their content area as well as recreational writing with teenage students. Methodology: Preservice teachers who were enrolled in a required secondary content area literacy course in a Midwest university, including 48 in a…

The purpose of this paper is to define writing apprehension, describe the writing apprehension of 91 secondary preservice teachers of diverse subject areas, in a required content area literacy course, and explain how their writing apprehension was reduced significantly by authoring a "how-to" book. The "how-to" book assignment is explained and…

Many reports has been revealing that anxiety and negative emotion could appear and become an obstacle during language learners' language learning (e.g. Atay & Kurt, 2006; Cheng, 2001, 2004; Horwitz, 2001; Kurt & Atay, 2007; Leki, 1999). This qualitative study has been conducted to explore the anxiety the relevant reasons why university…

In 1975, J. A. Daly and M. D. Miller devised and validated a 26-item questionnaire to better understand why having to write produces an extreme level of anxiety for some people. This questionnaire has been used extensively in related research since its introduction. Subsequent studies, which have shown writing apprehension to be…

Meditation is the practice of becoming still--training the mind to slow down. Researchers have acknowledged the "technical" relationship between meditation and writing. Meditation can become part of the writing process, particularly for those who experience writing apprehension, often expressed as procrastination or writer's block.…

A study investigated the influence of communication apprehension on preference for channel of communication: face-to-face meeting, telephone call, or written note. Subjects, 68 college and vocational-technical school faculty, were interviewed on a variety of topics, including telephone apprehension (TA); and completed written tests for speech…

Writing exercises are games that can lead to success in the classroom because they are artificial and have arbitrary rules defined by the instructor. By giving students a starting point, a limited task, and the assurance that the writing is, after all, "just a game," exercises can circumvent students' initial anxieties about self-presentation and…

Research into writing anxiety is an off-shoot of research into oral communication anxiety. At first, researchers thought that people with high oral communication anxiety tended to compensate by writing. However, when the Daly-Miller Writing Apprehension Test was used, it was found that the link between oral and written anxiety did not exist. The…

A program evaluation was undertaken at Southern Illinois University (Carbondale) to assess the broad, measurable effects of using computers to teach introductory college composition. Twenty-four classes were studied--twelve control classes and twelve experimental--with the experimental computer classes meeting in the lab for half of their…

While the roots of students' fear of writing go deep, students fear most the surface of writing. They fear that a person's language indicates the state not only of the mind but of the soul--thus their writing can make them look stupid and morally depraved. This fear of error and lack of confidence prevent students from developing a command of the…

A recent trend in composition studies has been a call for the "feminization" of composition pedagogy. Collaborative learning pedagogues have sought to reconstruct the classroom as a site of social cooperation, connectedness, and nurturance and have re-envisioned composition as an act of understanding rather than of agonistics.…

The rhetorical cycle is a step-by-step approach that provides classroom experience before students actually write, thereby making the writing process less frustrating for them. This approach consists of six sequential steps: reading, thinking, speaking, listening, discussing, and finally writing. Readings serve not only as models of rhetorical…