Writing instruction in schools tends to be limited in time and focused on preparing students to perform well on tests. Teachers do not feel prepared to teach writing and too often lack the confidence to stray from the packaged curriculum. This is even more of a concern in low performing schools where less skilled and less prepared teachers are not…

There now exists an established body of work outlining the challenges international students can face as part of the acculturation process, including a range of academic and non-academic pressures to overcome. For many students, writing essays in academic English for the first time is problematic. This article considers pedagogical approaches for…

This qualitative descriptive case study delves into the effectiveness of academic support programs (ASPs) for students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) law schools, focusing on enhancing academic performance and passing the bar exam. The underrepresentation of minority lawyers in the United States, which is attributed partly…

The much-criticized Reading Instruction Competence Assessment (RICA) is not aligned with current Common Core literacy standards, is expensive, has a low pass rate on the first try of 66%, and keeps People of Color from joining the profession (California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, 2019). The test maybe replaced with coursework. Critics…

This study explores the impact of sociocultural theory-based instruction on enhancing L2 learners' writing skills including grammatical accuracy, coherence, cohesion, task response, and lexical resources for the IELTS. To this end, a cohort of 40 participants, spanning intermediate and advanced proficiency levels, was divided into experimental and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of a year-long writing intervention located in an urban high school in partnership with a university teacher education professor and the students. The goals were as follows: to increase student self-efficacy about writing overall; to increase the number of students who successfully…

In 2012, head teachers responded to the proposed new Year 6 Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling test (commonly known as the SPaG or GPS test) with warnings of curriculum narrowing, teaching to tests, and misery for pupils and families. Despite head teachers' opposition to the test, seven cohorts of Year 6 pupils have now taken it. This article…

Until 2014, admission requirements for the educator preparation program at a university in the north central United States included a minimum competency level on the Praxis I basic skills writing test and completion of one general education writing course. However, evidence from the university's ETS reports showed that less than 60% of students as…

The writing module of the IELTS has proven to be a challenging section for test takers. Part of this difficulty may stem from the divergence between what test takers expect to learn in such courses and what is delivered by instructors. To address this issue, a 24-item questionnaire (Student Questionnaire A) relating to IELTS writing preparation…

Composition researchers have become increasingly concerned with the issue of knowledge transfer: the use of knowledge and skills learned in one setting to complete tasks in a different setting. In terms of writing-related knowledge transfer, research suggests that rigid rules and formulas for writing do not transfer as successfully as flexible…

In second language teaching and learning, making errors is inevitable as language learning requires a lot of cognitive effort and concentration on the part of learners. Understanding the types and frequencies of student errors is, therefore, an important issue for ESL and EFL teachers to determine how students can be helped to improve their skills…

This essay draws from the experience of observing writing practices in English lessons from 2010-2019, to suggest that the influence of education policy during this phase prioritises preparation for examination questions above the imperatives of learner creativity or volition. Through discussion of ways in which the 'high stakes' examination…

The instruction of metadiscourse markers to L2 writers has been recommended by some scholars to assist them in employing a certain tone in persuading readers. Nonetheless, there is a dearth of research investigating the effect of process-based instruction on hedging and boosting devices to L2 learners. To fill this gap, the present study aimed at…

The notion of "textuality" encouraged Halliday and Hasan in 1976 to present their model of discourse analysis through raising questions about whether "cohesion" was a semantic concept or a structural relation, whether a text was a structural unit or not or even if there were semantic or structural relationships within a text.…

This case study investigates writing feedback practices and their relationship to the grammar, punctuation and spelling (GPS) objectives in the 2014 National Curriculum for England, with a particular focus on grammatical metalanguage. Our data is composed of authentic examples of children's writing in three classes at one primary school in the…