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…

This study reports 15 types of activities that EFL, linguistics and translation instructors at a sample of Saudi universities used in distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Examples include searching for linguistic and translation key terms and concepts, problem-solving questions, online debates, summarizing a research paper, attending a…

Although writing instructors have a clear picture of how well our students can write by the end of a composition course, very rarely do we learn how well the students carry over the skills and strategies we teach them to the essays they write for other courses. I collected essays from other courses to determine how effectively students transfer…

England's Leslie Stratta shares his views on teaching basic writing and assessing student growth in writing. (AEA)

The process of writing a research paper must be broken into manageable units while at the same time retaining the recursive characteristic of the writing process. One approach does this by means of a series of assignments that also allow students to accumulate and practice the skills needed to write the final paper. These assignments are (1)…

One way to help basic writers become more effective writers is to encourage them to consider and write about what they do in writing--the problems they face and the satisfactions they glean. Using a scheme that involves using a hierarchy of stages of abstraction in discourse, students can be led to development of their writing skills. One such…

One way of giving students a sense of audience in their writing is to combine speech communication and written communication in the classroom. If students can be taught to write as they talk, they can perceive their audience to be real people rather than the amorphous "indefinite other" they typically write for in the traditional writing…

A journal-based college composition program has been developed that links journal writing to the development of competence in more formal writing. Students write both free choice and assigned entries, and their entries become the basis of all the themes they write; in-class assignments focus on the improvement of specific aspects of the journal…

The 9th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2016) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Sheraton Raleigh Hotel, in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, in the USA. The conference, held June 29-July 2, 2016, follows the eight previous editions (Madrid 2015, London 2014, Memphis…

A set of writing assignments and class activities designed to help students analyze their own writing processes, define their own strengths and weaknesses as writers, set their own goals, devise plans for achieving those goals, and evaluate their own progress is presented in this paper. The assignments are explained in detail, and suggestions for…

Maintains that in order to get quality engaging essays, students must be fully cognizant of what is expected of them. Discusses areas that need to be defined for students. Proposes four C's for designing assignments: clearness, completeness, conciseness, and candidness. (RW)

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 38 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) how writing centers succeed and fail; (2) the effects of scoring method, topic, and mode on grade 12 students' writing scores; (3) analysis of the peer…