This paper examines how research in second language acquisition has approached the study of cognitive individual differences in the process and product of L2 writing from a theoretical and empirical perspective, paying special attention to the three empirical studies included in this special issue. The paper is divided into three sections. The…

In language education, the development of writing capability is an important and challenging teaching objective. Writing performance is related not only with students' comprehension and expression of texts, but also their experience and perceptions of the contexts. Descriptive article writing is a basic writing activity; the content includes…

The assessment of argumentative writing generally includes analyses of the specific linguistic and rhetorical features contained in the individual essays produced by students. However, researchers have recently proposed that an individual's ability to flexibly adapt the linguistic properties of their writing may more accurately capture their…

The aim of this research is to search the effect of the cluster method on the creative writing skill of 6th grade students. In this paper, the students of 6-A, studying at Ulas Primary School in 2010-2011 academic year, were divided into two groups as experiment and control. Taking into consideration the various variants, pre-test and last-test…

This review focuses on the development of writing research informed by a Vygotskian perspective. A methodological environment to aid the instruction of writing is presented. The review reveals the need to conduct research in developing students' inner voice, to lower the cognitive drain created during writing, and to understand how helpful the…

To demonstrate how discourse tasks can differ in their cognitive difficulties, students in a graduate course on the teaching of writing participated in a procedure called "invisible writing." The purpose was to show the students that as they took on more cognitively demanding writing tasks, their ability to produce coherent discourse…

Included in these proceedings are 11 essays by 12 specialists in the field of writing center administration. The first essay is the keynote address; the other essays are printed in the order in which they were presented at the conference. The papers discuss the following: (1) the writing center: a vision revisited; (2) from thought to word:…

Examines fifth- and sixth-grade students' metacognitive knowledge about the processes of writing narrative and expository texts. Finds that creating a communicative context enhances students' awareness of audience and purpose, as well as their understanding of different aspects of the writing process. (MG)

Although theories on developmental writing assume that basic writers do not write well because of cognitive deficits, recent research and classroom experience suggest that poor writers lack skill because they have not had sufficient contextually meaningful practice. Writing research indicates that the unskilled writer's tendency to write as if…