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…

In the January-February 2009 issue of "Academe," Jennifer I. Friend and Juan Carlos Gonzales suggested that first-year tenure-track faculty "form a writing group," but they described a process of merely helping each other on individual projects instead of writing a common piece together. In this article, the authors suggest that faculty should…

The principle that emergent writing is supported by talk, and that an appropriate pedagogy for writing should include planned opportunities for talk is well researched and well understood. However, the process by which talk becomes text is less clear. The term "oral rehearsal" is now commonplace in English classrooms and curriculum policy…

This article presents the findings of an action research project conducted with a group of pre-service teachers of a program in modern languages at a Colombian university. The study intended to go beyond an emphasis on linguistic and textual features in English as a foreign language argumentative essays by using a set of genre-based activities and…

The purpose of this theoretical essay is to encourage critical reflection of the relationship of specific reading events to traditional conceptualizations of reader stance. While conventional models of reader stance are useful for considering many aspects of reading, there are reading events that engender stances that appear to lie outside of the…