Student writers labeled "underprepared" by colleges often have trouble imagining themselves as scholars. Challenges these students routinely encounter include difficulty forming original insights and translating ideas to the page. Although the usage of the term "underprepared" varies across institutional contexts, the…

"Writing, Redefined" gives teachers the power to change what "counts" as writing in schools and classrooms, opening the doorway to students who may not consider themselves to be writers, but should and can. Shawna offers alternative and engaging writing assignments that are visual, aural, and multimodal that will involve all…

Using Mariolina Salvatori's "difficulty paper" assignment to explore student experiences when reading, this paper examines basic writing students' difficulties with reading in the composition classroom. The authors argue that examining difficulty can provide an entry point for understanding how students experience the (dis)connections…

The purpose of this study was to challenge autonomous views of writing and deficit views of students who struggle with school literacy. This study is an exploration of students' use of social, linguistic, and cognitive resources to construct meaning in narrative writing events in school. The following research questions guided this inquiry: What…

Dysgraphia, a specific learning disability, impairs legible and automatic letter production by hand, which can interfere with written composing. The goal of the current study was not to investigate effective methods for teaching self-regulated writing to students with dysgraphia, but rather to investigate their self that is involved in their…

This case study explores the challenges that Master's students encounter when learning to write in academic English as part of a UK postgraduate course, after having achieved the required IELTS entry score. Interviews with six Chinese and Japanese learners at different stages of the Master's study revealed more sophisticated writing difficulties…

The aim of this study is to investigate issues of Indonesian EFL students' writing skills, covering ability, problem and reason why they got problems in writing comparison and contrast essay. The convergent parallel of mixed methods was used to explore these issues by involving 52 EFL students of IAIN Samarinda who enrolled the academic essay…

Dysgraphia, a specific learning disability, impairs legible and automatic letter production by hand, which can interfere with written composing. The goal of the current study was not to investigate effective methods for teaching self-regulated writing to students with dysgraphia, but rather to investigate their self that is involved in their…

The present study aims to explore Turkish EFL students' major writing difficulties by analyzing the frequent writing errors in academic essays. Accordingly, the study examined errors in a corpus of 150 academic essays written by Turkish EFL students studying at the Department of English Language and Literature at a public university in Turkey. The…

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the current research involving composition writing with respect to students experiencing difficulties. It responds to the fact that composition writing is a largely neglected area in education and research. This paper will review the following: (a) the reasons why writing competence is so vitally…

One hundred twenty-five primary-grade teachers randomly selected from across the United States indicated how frequently they made 20 instructional adaptations for the struggling writers in their classroom. The measure of frequency ranged from never, several times a year, monthly, weekly, several times a week, and daily. Using a 6-point Likert-type…

This study qualitatively analyzes the challenges presented by international undergraduate students in a freshman composition course at a large Midwestern university in the US. 15 students were divided into five groups, of three members each, with varying proficiency levels in writing. They were asked to submit reflections as journal/blog posts, on…

An interest in writing practices in the state of Kansas led to a statewide survey of middle school teachers to examine key writing practices and issues. Questions focused on teacher preparation, beliefs, self-efficacy, and sense of responsibility to teach writing; use of evidence-based writing practices; the role of assessment; technology; types…

This exploratory study was designed to assess the experience of preservice teachers when integrating written language technology and their likelihood of applying that technology in their future classrooms. Results suggest that after experiencing technology integration, preservice teachers are more likely to use it in their future teaching.

Many students exhibit a special type of learning disability in writing. Yet, teachers spend relatively little time helping children and youth with severe writing difficulties overcome their struggles or prevent emerging problems from becoming more severe. A major reason for this lack of attention is that many educators feel overburdened by the…