Within a social view of literacy, this paper reports a two-year ethnographic case study of an adolescent multilingual writer, with respect to her transitions across in-school (i.e., Creative Writing class) and out-of-school writing contexts. This study was aimed to address two specific gaps in the fields of second language (L2) writing and…

Small scale studies have shown that peer-editing is beneficial to students as it increases their awareness of the complex process of writing, it improves their knowledge of and skills in writing and helps them become more autonomous in learning. Teachers too may benefit from peer-editing as this practice discloses invaluable information on…

This paper outlines an adaptable collaborative writing approach employing a wiki to address the typical weaknesses of young Singaporean Chinese students learning Chinese as second language (L2) in Chinese writing. These students' problems in writing include limited and incorrect use of vocabulary, English-style grammar, badly structured passages,…

We report a classroom experiment directed at increasing lexical fluency in writing. Participants were 107 Dutch students in bilingual (EFL) education (Grades 10 and 11). According to current theories of writing such fluency allows writers to devote more attention to higher order aspects of text production, such as idea generation, selection and…

Despite a strong intuitive sense held by instructors that feedback practices can help scaffold L2 writers' composition processes a number of questions remain concerning the manner best suited to deliver this feedback and its ultimate impact on literacy development. This paper presents findings from on an eight-month longitudinal ethnographic case…

This study proposes a Wiki-based collaborative writing approach to the writing process for EFL (English as a foreign language) learners. A five-stage computer-mediated collaborative writing project including collaborative planning, partitioned drafting, peer-revising, peer-editing, and individual publishing was blended with on-campus English…

This paper introduces readers to Wordle, a data visualization tool, and describes how word clouds, or wordles generated by Wordle, were used in an action research project designed to facilitate the teaching of foreign language (FL) writing within a dual coding theoretical framework. Over the course of one semester, students in a third-semester…

Recently, the number of English as a second language (ESL) students who study in the United States has rapidly increased. This increase poses serious challenges for the U.S. universities in which the students are enrolled as well as for the students themselves. One of the challenges the students face is a lack of training in one type of writing…

Academic writing, especially the writing of research articles, dissertations and theses, is often viewed in the literature as "writing up". It is as if first comes the research, an active creation of new knowledge, and then comes the writing, a relatively passive assembling of what has already been achieved. It is as if researching and…

In his latest book, Daniel Meier highlights the critical importance of integrating content and mechanics for successful and engaged writing at the K-4 level. Featuring the teaching philosophies and strategies of seven exemplary teachers, and a discussion of relevant research and theory, Meier provides a fresh, practical, and much-needed…

This classroom narrative proposes a process for reinventing academic research and writing in secondary schools for the 21st Century. We build on Macrorie's (1988) I-Search paper, drawing on affordances of Web 2.0 technologies and culture, to initiate the iSearch 2.0 process. iSearch 2.0 consists of four phases: 1) messing about and trying on…

This study was designed to identify, through mediation analysis, potential causal mechanisms by which procedures of self-regulated learning increase the efficaciousness of teaching young students strategies for writing stories. In a randomized controlled trial with 3 measurement points (pretest, posttest, maintenance), 117 fourth graders either…

Implementing process pedagogy in an L2 writing classroom has its own limits for students with low English proficiency. Although L1 writers commonly benefit from writing multiple drafts, most of the low English level Korean college students in my English composition class did not benefit from the revisions. This article introduces an innovative…

The challenges of writing itself and lack of appropriate teaching methodology demotivate EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners in some Chinese universities to write more, especially as the only incentive for students to write is the compulsory tests. The main objectives of this article are: (1) to discuss the background of the EFL learners…

This paper seeks to re-conceptualize the research supervision relationship. The literature has tended to view doctoral study in four ways: (a) as an exercise in self-management, (b) as a research experience, (c) as training for research, or (d) as an instance of student-centred learning. Although each of these approaches has merit, they also…