Many colleges and universities have created college-sponsored communities on Facebook and Twitter as a means to interact, connect, and build community online (Center for Community College Student Engagement, 2009; Wankel & Wankel, 2011). However, the literature provides no clear picture of how community college students use social network…

Using computer keystroke logs, this study investigated how writing skill affected L2 writers' pausing patterns to gain insights into their management of the cognitive writing processes. The 59 participants, 29 in the more-skilled group and 30 in the less-skilled group, were recruited from a college English course at a key Chinese university. The…

This article focuses on a research study of social studies candidates' self-efficacy beliefs in teaching writing. They coached high school writers online during their content-area literacy course in an effort to assist the high school students in revising their multigenre papers. Over a period of 6 weeks the candidates and the high school students…

Writing plays a significant role in language learning. Previous research has reported on the effectiveness of several approaches to develop writing skills to enhance writing competence, but little attention has been given to the paragraph writing of elementary students. The present qualitative action research study used artifacts, teacher's…

This study of four case studies looks at how secondary math, music, science, and social studies teachers' attitudes and classroom practices were affected by their participation in the Central Utah Writing Project (CUWP) summer institute. Participant interviews, observations, and artifacts were analyzed by looking at themes for effective…

This comparative case study investigated integrated reading-writing instruction (IRWI) as an approach for writing instruction implemented after the adoption of Common Core State Standards (NGA & CCSSO, 2010a). Specifically, I explored the nature of IRWI through video-recorded observations of writing instruction, teachers' perspectives towards…

Understanding the linguistic and rhetorical patterns of an academic discipline strengthens students' abilities to write in professional settings. Data-driven learning and corpus-linguistic methods can increase this understanding and should be considered valuable contributors to any writing curriculum. In this paper, I present a case history on…

Few studies have been conducted to see how blog-based peer response helps students to improve their writing revisions. The present study investigates peer comments made through blogs, the nature of the comments and their areas of focus, and the ratios of students incorporating suggestions made through blog-based comments into revisions of their…

In this study the authors investigated the effects of integrating iPad applications into writing instruction for fifth grade students. By comparing the writing of students taught with paper and pencil methods with that of students utilizing the iPad writing applications, two research questions guided the study: (1) Are there differences in student…

In English as a second language (ESL) writing pedagogy, much attention has been given to electronic portfolio (e-portfolio) assessment via social networking sites. However, little is known about how Facebook can be used as an e-portfolio platform. Hence, this paper describes the impact of Facebook-based e-portfolio on ESL students' writing…

Writing studies has considered college students' literacy development as a chronological progression and as influenced by their off-campus connections to various cultural and professional communities. This project considers students' literacy development across disciplines and university activity systems in which they're simultaneously involved to…

A study was conducted to examine the differences in narrative essays produced by skilled and unskilled EFL student writers. Twenty-six Japanese university students participated in the study. They were told to write a narrative story based on six-frame pictures. The students were classified into two groups, skilled and unskilled, according to the…

This paper reports the design of learning-oriented formative assessments in an EFL writing course that involved learners in regularly responding to teacher feedback. Following major assessment and feedback frameworks developed recently, these formative assessments were explicated in three aspects: the scheduling of learning and assessment…

Almost half of all gifted students do not achieve according to their exceptional potential. Though significant research has investigated identifying characteristics of underachieving gifted students, current research is yet to fully employ the established theoretical knowledge to determine practical strategies for the reversal and remediation of…

This study aimed at exploring the impact of mentor text modelling on Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners' accuracy and fluency in writing tasks with different cognitive complexity in comparison with two conventional approaches to teaching writing; namely, process-based and product-based approaches. To this end, 60 Iranian EFL…