The past four decades have seen dramatic developments in the study and teaching of writing. The result is a body of knowledge about writing that has profound practical and pedagogical implications for teaching, thinking, and learning across the curriculum. This article discusses five things about writing that can have an effect across the…

This dissertation, as a theoretical study, focused on how Web 2.0 technology potentially helps students gain power, knowledge, and agency in the networked learning environment and how feminist pedagogy conceivably facilitates the implementation of Web 2.0 technology to produce an opportune learning environment. Primarily, this study used feminist…

This study used a grounded theory methodology to examine the experiences of deaf middle school students attending a program for deaf children in a public school to answer the following question: How do deaf children in middle school construct meaningful texts? The students were in one of two self-contained classes taught by a teacher of the deaf.…

Effective composition of academic and/or professional texts is a complex task that requires the use of regulation processes. In recent years these processes have been studied from four research approaches: cognitive, sociocognitive, sociocultural and socially shared. This study analyzes their principal theoretical premises as well as the empirical…

This article discusses a case study on an item writing process that reflects on our practical experience in an item development project. The purpose of the article is to share our lessons from the experience aiming to demystify item writing process. The study investigated three issues that naturally emerged during the project: how item writers use…

The concept of "college readiness" is increasingly important in discussions about students' preparation for postsecondary education. This Framework describes the rhetorical and twenty-first-century skills as well as habits of mind and experiences that are critical for college success. Based in current research in writing and writing pedagogy, the…

Adolescent writing proficiency is widely considered to be in a state of crisis nationally, and new instructional approaches are needed to raise writing proficiency among all adolescents, with special attention to those students who struggle most (Graham & Perin, 2007). The affordances of digital communication media, such as online discussion…

A year-long exploratory project examined how well students could effectively respond to a piece of first-year writing using an articulated framework--Assignment, Focus, Organization, Support, and Proofreading (AFOSP). The students in these small-group writing tutorials received peer-facilitated support while they were enrolled in first-year…

Concept papers and quality circles help future dissertation advisors improve doctoral student success in the completion of the Ph.D. and increase retention. Through these tools, students navigate the conceptual development of a topic and evaluate final drafts of chapters. Implementation of these innovations indicates positive trends in the…

Students with writing difficulties often struggle with the planning, composing, and revising skills required for effective writing. Fortunately, researchers have documented that explicit, interactive, scaffolded development of powerful composing strategies and strategies for self-regulating the writing process, as in Self-Regulated Strategy…

The authors are faculty in history and English, respectively, at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, New York. What their students want and need, and what the institution's role in the community should be, remain open questions, with policy implications at the departmental, college, city, and even national level. Indeed, President Obama…

This article shares strategies that educators can use to assist students in meeting the challenges of academic writing more effectively. In order to foreground an understanding of struggling writers, the text begins with a brief review of composition theory and history related to basic writers and identity. It goes on to examine classroom…

Reflecting on the implementation of a pre-study may be decisive for the design of a following main study. This text consists of a reflective process where the researcher's different choices are examined and problematised. The reflections take place within the framework of a pre-study and in relation to the aim of that study. They also take place…

This literature review serves to inform the reader on current literature on Contrastive Rhetoric (CR), with specific reference to teaching writing to Japanese students of English. It will examine the historical developments of CR and its present significance before then looking at possible reasons for unique characteristics of Japanese L2 writers…

This paper surveys some of the changes in teaching the four language skills in the past 15 years. It focuses on two main changes for each skill: understanding spoken language and willingness to communicate for speaking; product, process, and genre approaches and a focus on feedback for writing; extensive reading and literature for reading; and…