Effective feedback is an essential tool for making learning explicit and an essential feature of classroom practice that promotes learner autonomy. Yet, it remains a pressing challenge for teachers to scaffold the active involvement of students as critical, reflective and autonomous learners who use feedback constructively. This paper seeks to…

Retrospective reports gathered from developmental education students as part of a learning assessment revealed the use of several strategies for writing a summary based on a text. Participants were selected for the study based on the richness and variety of their verbal descriptions of task performance in structured, individualized interviews.…

This study investigates the benefits of collaborative writing tasks. Previous research from the perspective of the sociocultural theory of mind suggests that writing tasks completed in pairs offer learners an opportunity to collaborate in the solution of their language-related problems, co-construct new language knowledge, and produce…

In this paper we report a case study of two first-year students at a university in Hong Kong doing the same writing assignment that required the use of sources. We explore the students' understanding of plagiarism, their strategies for composing, the similarity between their texts and source texts, and the lecturer's assessment of their work. The…

The "Silent Interview" provides an effective ice-breaking exercise for the first day of composition class and also triggers learning strategies toward writing effectively. At the first class meeting, students are asked to work in pairs, exchanging questions and responses in writing until six or eight questions have been asked and…

In a composition course, interview assignments have four key virtues: (1) they are interesting in themselves; (2) they ease students into the demands of working with other people's ideas; (3) they offer a rationale for improving rhetorical skills; and (4) they allow students to experience adult, responsible roles in a social context. In addition,…