Teachers of young writers often feel pressure to focus on narrow, tested conventions, forms and processes of writing. These pressures can contribute to instruction that does not consider students' interests, experiences, language or cultures, but rather can further deficit views of students whose backgrounds do not closely align with those making…

The current two studies examined the effects of an instructional unit on synthesis writing for 9th grade students on holistic text quality. Because students' writing routines have been shown to affect the effectiveness of writing instruction, we designed a unit that aimed to be equally effective for all writers, regardless of their routines. On…

Revisions in writing aim at text improvement. Literature has shown that revision activity differs between novice and experienced writers. Our ultimate goal is to understand how children and adolescents develop the capacity to shift perspectives from language producer to language recipient -- a prerequisite ability to successful revision. In this…

The aim of this study was to investigate whether high school students' writing self-efficacy perceptions differ based on their gender, grade level, type of high school and the number of books they read annually. A total of 585 students (Females = 270; and Males = 315) studying in the ninth and tenth grade classes from high schools of different…

Music is often regarded as a thing of the creative realm, something that sits to the side of the main core subjects, but music in the classroom shows music can be much more than a complement to a poetry unit. The author's journey through the Country Music Hall of Fame's Words & Music program revealed that delving into the world of songwriting…

The authors of this article describe their inquiry into implementation of the writing-focused Common Core State Standards in a co-taught English 9 class in an urban school. They describe instructional moves designed to increase student success with an assignment called the Gift Essay, with particular focus on planning and other organizational…

In Section 1 of this article, the author discusses the succession of models of adult writing that he and his colleagues have proposed from 1980 to the present. He notes the most important changes that differentiate earlier and later models and discusses reasons for the changes. In Section 2, he describes his recent efforts to model young…

Structured opportunities for reflective writing allow students to polish their writings and to reflect actively on their written creations, while encouraging clearer and more honest writing products. In addition, the use of reflective writing can transform students as they begin to incorporate metacognition, or thinking about their thinking, into…

The famed playwright Harold Pinter, having just been introduced as a very good writer, was once asked by a six-year-old boy if he could do a "w." The author suspects that "w" was a difficult letter for this young man, and he judged the writing capability of others accordingly. This student's assumption--that being a "good…

In this paper, the role of computers in writing process was investigated. Last 25 years of journals were searched to find related articles. Articles and books were classified under prewriting, composing, and revising and editing headings. The review results showed that computers can make writers' job easy in the writing process. In addition,…