This article presents the results of a study where business students' writing skills were assessed using an external objective measure in a business communication course. The student performance was disappointing before instructor intervention. After the intervention, student performance improved noticeably. The implications of the study are…

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…

This article explores commonalties between literacy instruction and learning to understand the symbolic languages of the visual and performing arts. A detailed case study of an urban professional development program for secondary arts teachers looks at the learning initiated by writing assignments that prompted students to reflect on arts…

This article explores the motives and evolving identities of one group of graduate students enrolled in a teacher education program at an Ivy League university, who made the choice to teach in urban classrooms. The authors examine the perspectives these candidates give to the process of learning to teach and how their identities are tempered,…

This paper evaluates the effect of Chinese non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) on Chinese ESL students' struggles with English syntax. The paper first classifies Chinese learners' syntactic errors into 10 common types. It demonstrates how each type of error results from an internal attempt to translate a common Chinese construction into…

Background: Singapore launched the first Masterplan in 1997 to guide the integration of ICT (information and communication technology) in education. Since then many schools have started to explore using ICT in their curricula. The school reported in this paper developed a web-based learning environment to assist students in the use of ICT.…

Despite the important role the personal statement plays in the graduate school application processes, little research has been done on its functional features and little instruction has been given about it in academic writing courses. The author conducted a multi-level discourse analysis on a corpus of 30 medical/dental school application letters,…

In this study we argue that narrative storytelling and expository discussion, as 2 distinct discourse genres, differ both in linguistic expression and in their underlying principles of organization--schema-based in narratives and category-based in exposition. Innovative analyses applied to 160 personal-experience narratives and expository essays…

A theoretical model of nonscience majors' motivation to learn science was tested by surveying 369 students in a large-enrollment college science course that satisfies a core curriculum requirement. Based on a social-cognitive framework, motivation to learn science was conceptualized as having both cognitive and affective influences that foster…

The authors investigated what and how instructional practices are related to students' motivation and performance in writing. The participants were 6 teacher interns and their (N = 209) secondary-school students in Hong Kong. In a 3-session instruction unit, the teacher interns taught their students how to write an expository essay. The students…

In response to that fact that, since 1991, almost 60% of students had received failing grades on midterm exams in a general psychology course, the instructor undertook a project to apply principles of total quality management (TQM) to identify the causes of poor achievement. Efforts ware made to help students discover their mistakes, and thus…

This paper proposes that a metaphor of linguistic levels, similar to that used in general linguistic theory, be applied to the study of levels within an essay. The linguistic conception of levels in a piece of writing is not sentence-paragraph-essay (which might be characterized as a rhetorical division) but rather (or in addition to)…

Recent trends in the teaching of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) or English as a Second Language (ESL) have emphasized the importance of promoting thinking as an integral part of English language pedagogy; however, empirical research has not established that training in thinking skills can be combined effectively with EFL/ESL instruction. In…

Designed primarily with the student in mind, this guide focuses on what the student needs to know about essay writing to survive in college. It details a proven, consistent, and effective method for the preparation of undergraduate essays across the disciplines. Not intended as a textbook, the guide speaks directly to the student, providing…

Stories have always been the means of making a message, of exploring the relationship between past and present, and of giving significance to events. A noted native artist and writer described the "talking stick" of his tribe as a talisman which gives the person who possesses it the right to speak and hold the attention of the tribe. A…