Writing achievement is crucial for English as a foreign language (EFL) learners due to its impact on language skills, overall proficiency, academic success, creativity, and critical thinking. However, the teacher feedback may be problematic due to timing, subjectivity, overemphasis, and alignment with learning goals. Automated feedback, on the…

Automated Writing Evaluation systems have been developed to help students improve their writing skills through the automated delivery of both summative and formative feedback. These systems have demonstrated strong potential in a variety of educational contexts; however, they remain limited in their personalization and scope. The purpose of the…

This work aims to characterize students' writing processes using keystroke logs and understand how the extracted characteristics influence the text quality at specific moments of writing. Earlier works have proposed predictive models characterizing students' writing processes and mainly rely on distribution-based measures of pauses obtained from…

This study investigates how and whether information about students' writing can be recovered from basic behavioral data extracted during their sessions in an intelligent tutoring system for writing. We calculate basic and time-sensitive keystroke indices based on log files of keys pressed during students' writing sessions. A corpus of prompt-based…

The general purpose of this study is to increase, in a classroom environment, formal communication by using reading and writing. Our research focuses on reading as a means to develop the writing of a good précis, which in its turn contributes to improve: 1) memory, vocabulary and grammatical-syntactical structures, in brief, the organization of a…

Writing training systems have been developed to provide students with instruction and deliberate practice on their writing. Although generally successful in providing accurate scores, a common criticism of these systems is their lack of personalization and adaptive instruction. In particular, these systems tend to place the strongest emphasis on…

This paper presents the prototype of a foreign language learning space, based on the construction of an integrated formal/informal learning environment. Before the background of the continued innovation of information technology that places conventional learning styles and educational methods into new contexts based on new value-standards,…

In the county schools, students are assessed every nine weeks based on a writing prompt using a rubric supplied by the county, but the students are often taught using Writer's Workshop. This action research attempted to determine if Writer's Workshop and the use of writing prompts have different effects on first graders' writing ability and…

This examination of an evaluation of writing based on process rather than on product argues that one of the primary functions of evaluation as a part of teaching should be to diagnose the writing strategies that underlie a writer's current performance, not just textual problems. The first half of the paper discusses the various ways teachers use…

A study was conducted of 4 university instructors teaching a first-year composition class and of 16 of their students (4 for each instructor) randomly selected. Parts of the interviews, parts of the think-aloud protocols, and parts of the instructors' written comments are examined--the focus is on the way that students and teachers approach…

"Purpose" is an important term in rhetorical theory and writing pedagogy. An analysis of the presentation of "purpose" in three well-regarded, theory-based textbooks ("Writing in the Liberal Arts Tradition: A Rhetoric with Readings,""Writing with a Purpose," and "Form and Surprise in Composition")…

A study to determine the effect of audience on student writers' revision strategies involved 13 college students, seven reasonably competent upper-level writers and six basic writers, who were assigned to write for an hour on a uniform essay topic, composing aloud into a tape recorder as they did so. Six of the upper level students and five of the…

A text's meaning is, in part, independent of its form. Reading, most of the time, is taking meaning--not words--from the printed page, while proofreading requires attention to form rather than meaning. The author notes that: (1) a meaningful passage is easier to read than one with less meaning; (2) errors in oral reading usually do not obscure a…

In this paper William Stafford's varied descriptions and occasional judgments as to what it means to write a poem are gathered by prospecting through his essays, published lectures, and transcribed interviews. The paper describes Stafford's perspective on (1) the powerful language of poetry; (2) finding each poem's unique form; (3) practicing the…

The underlying structure of meaning in a text is to a certain extent belied by the surface structure, or sequential organization, of the text. The underlying information structures (IS) organize information according to cognitive and cultural factors. It may be demonstrated that just three major IS with various subvarieties can describe any text:…