Students learned a strategy for planning, writing, and evaluating compare-contrast essays. Instruction followed the principles of self-regulated strategy development, which aims to improve knowledge about writing, strategic writing processes, self-regulation, and motivation. Six adolescent students, 3 with learning disabilities in writing and 3…

Student-written cases are powerful pedagogical tools that can lead to improved understanding of business situations, more informed analysis, emphasis on reflection, and clearer expository writing, all of which are critical skills for business students. Cases provide an opportunity for students to enjoy an active learning experience and derive the…

Protocol analyses in research on writing reveal that throughout the composing process talented writers direct a tremendous amount of mental effort toward integrating and pursuing complex goals such as developing and following overriding themes, elaborating main points, clarifying content for a particular audience, and integrating genre features.…

There is a seductive "commonsense" logic to two opinion pieces that have appeared over the last two years in the "Speaking My Mind" section of "English Journal": (1) Byung-In Seo's "Defending the Five-Paragraph Essay," which appeared in the November 2007 issue; and (2) Kerri Smith's "In Defense of the Five-Paragraph Essay," which appeared in March…

Sarah Irwin and Cyndi Knodle believe that by replacing the confines of content and form in writing instruction and assignments with ample "time and space for invention and arrangement, writing teachers can help to inspire student thinking rather than chopping it off to fit a required format." They elaborate on students' eagerness to be guided by a…

Most of the previous research on aphasia and writing ability concentrates on the production of words in isolation. The purpose of the current study was to examine the process of producing written texts by clients with aphasia. By using keystroke logging, it was possible to analyse the participants' ongoing work during text writing. Results showed…

Many forms of technological communication exist in non-linear environments and there is potential for new approaches to learning and teaching which may more closely approximate naturalistic and authentic approaches to learning. The following study examined the ways in which high school students were influenced by technology as they wrote and how…

The purpose of this study was to examine within- and across-language relationships between lexical and grammatical domains by focusing on measures of lexical diversity and grammatical complexity in Spanish and English. One hundred ninety-six preschool and school-aged Latino children with different levels of English and Spanish proficiencies and…

This article presents a conceptual framework for the writing process to facilitate motivation, learning, retention, and knowledge transfer in readers of expository material. Drawing from four well-developed bodies of knowledge--cognitive science, learning theory, technical communication, and creative writing--the author creates a model that allows…

Teaching is emotional, especially when teachers must change their practices. Past research on emotions and change in the general population has been predominately quantitative. Research about teachers' emotions, however, has been predominately qualitative. To draw on both these approaches, this mixed methods study examined 50 elementary teachers'…

This is Part 1 of a three part series of articles summarizing selected articles from the journals of the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) over a period of thirty-five years from 1972 to 2007. Part 1 traces the evolution of the library media specialist to emphasize a greater student-centered approach to teaching and learning.…

Second language (L2) learners notoriously have trouble using articles in their target languages (e.g., "a", "an", "the" in English). However, researchers disagree about the patterns and causes of these errors. Past studies have found that L2 English learners: (1) Predominantly omit articles (White 2003, Robertson 2000), (2) Overuse "the" (Huebner…

The field of English language education has seen developments in writing pedagogy, moving from product-based to process-based and then to genre-based approaches. In Vietnam, teaching secondary school students how to write in English is still lagging behind these growing developments. Product-based approach is commonly seen in English writing…

The trends and findings from a descriptive analysis of 25 years of research studies examining the effectiveness of technology to support the compositional writing of students with learning and academic disabilities are presented. A corpus of 85 applied research studies of writing technology effectiveness was identified from among 249 items in the…

For an inquiry-based alternative to lectures and recall tests, I encouraged learners to become "geotourists"; that is, learners researched and developed a geologic guidebook to a United States National Park of their choice. Over the course of a semester, students wrote chapters on plate tectonics, the rock cycle, geologic history,…