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…

This study explores how machine translation (MT) influences the English writing process and performance of 29 9th-grade EFL students with limited English proficiency. Over 10 writing tasks conducted during the semester, participants had varied accessibility to MT. The research compared their performance when MT was permitted versus when it was…

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…

Purpose: This study was conducted in ninth- and tenth-grade classrooms with the goal of studying effective scaffolding for improving argumentative writing, both conventional and digital/multimodal. Design/methodology/approach: The author conducted a formative experiment in two high-school classrooms to study ways teachers integrated forms of…

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…

We investigated changes across grades in the cognitive demands associated with the organizing subprocess of writing. A total of 85 fifth (age M = 10.8), 88 seventh (age M = 12.9), and 79 ninth (age M = 14.6) graders composed either a procedural text or an expository description on a digital tablet, on the basis of a "scrambled ideas"…

In this report, we examine the feasibility of characterizing writing performance using process features derived from a keystroke log. Using data derived from a set of "CBAL"™ writing assessments, we examine the following research questions: (a) How stable are the keystroke timing and process features across testing occasions?; (b) How…

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…

Background: It is well established that the activity of producing a text is a complex one involving three main cognitive processes: Planning, translating, and revising. Although these processes are crucial in skilled writing, beginning and developing writers seem to struggle with them, mainly with planning and revising. Aims: To trace the…

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…

This article presents an authentic writing opportunity to help ninth-grade students use the writing process in a science classroom to write and illustrate picture books for fourth-grade students to demonstrate and share their understanding of a biology unit on cells. By creating a picture book, students experience the writing process, understand…

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…

In this study, a corpus of essays stratified by level (9th grade, 11th grade, and college freshman) are analyzed computationally to discriminate differences between the linguistic features produced in essays by adolescents and young adults. The automated tool Coh-Metrix is used to examine to what degree essays written at various grade levels can…