The initial composition course in the community college has the potential to be a transformative space for the identity formation of adult learners towards the linguistic signifier of "scholar." Freshman students of variable ages enter a new culture which demands the negotiation of an alternative academic language, an adaptation to the…

Dysgraphia, a specific learning disability, impairs legible and automatic letter production by hand, which can interfere with written composing. The goal of the current study was not to investigate effective methods for teaching self-regulated writing to students with dysgraphia, but rather to investigate their self that is involved in their…

Dysgraphia, a specific learning disability, impairs legible and automatic letter production by hand, which can interfere with written composing. The goal of the current study was not to investigate effective methods for teaching self-regulated writing to students with dysgraphia, but rather to investigate their self that is involved in their…

Utility-value (UV) writing interventions help students find the personal relevance of course material to promote interest and performance. However, little is known about how best to frame the intervention, particularly in the 2-year college context where students have more varied backgrounds than the samples previously studied. Using a randomized…

This article describes an innovative approach to introducing translanguaging in an English for academic purposes (EAP) course at a young Sino-US joint-venture university in China. To promote the use of Chinese students' full linguistic and communicative repertoires in an English-medium-of-instruction university, I intentionally incorporated…

This paper reported on a study of using blogs as out-of-class assignments for the development of learners' writing competence. There were 36 students of English majors from an intact second language (L2) writing class participating in this study. A mixed method design was employed to obtain both quantitative and qualitative data. The results…

Becoming a successful writer is an important skill for the young because it predicts academic success, supports and extends learning, provides opportunities to participate in civic and community life and fulfils expectations of the workforce to create clear and concise documents. Many secondary students in the US, however, struggle to gain basic…

This article enters an ongoing discussion about the usefulness of different theories and different research designs in the analysis of classroom writing. Starting with questions about how students interpret the norms of writing and their own selves in school writing, it demonstrates the relevance of an ecological theory of writing,…