The purpose of the 2011 NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) Writing Framework is to describe how the new NAEP Writing Assessment is designed to measure students' writing at grades 4, 8, and 12. As the ongoing national indicator of the academic achievement of students in the United States, NAEP regularly collects information on…

The value of reflective journaling as an effective strategy to enhance learning has been explored by several writers. Many see it as a way of approaching learning to enhance the understanding of factors influencing or hindering the learning process and the development of meaning through critical thinking skills. The underlying purpose of the study…

The role of a professional and creative writing degree is to provide resources, structured workshops, professional interactions--and the potential for creative risk. Opportunities for risk, within the structured environment of the university, challenge the individual's perspectives and judgements, as well as their ability to analyse and to reflect…

As university students are frequently given the tasks of writing research reports to fulfil their respective programme requirements, teaching novice writers to present the results of their reports understandably constitutes an essential component of English lessons at tertiary level. While past research has shown that results are consistently…

This study investigates Web-based, project oriented, many-to-many collaborative writing for academic purposes. Thirty-eight Fulbright scholars in an orientation program at a large Midwestern university used a Web-based word processing tool to collaboratively plan and report on a research project. The purpose of this study is to explore and…

The goal of this study was to investigate the culturally afforded contradictions that ten advanced English as a Second Language (ESL) learner encountered when they posted their paper topics and exchanged feedback strategies online and contextualized some of these strategies to draft their papers. Using Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT),…

Modeled after the popular teaching technique of book talks, write talks are brief motivational talks designed to engage students in writing. Teachers can invite adults from their communities into their classrooms to give write talks, thereby conveying to students that real people go through different writing processes to write real texts for real…

Maja Wilson and Michael Niemczyk advocate turning away from mandated writing toward learning environments that honor the messy, inner life of the writer. They explain the importance of disorientation in that it unsettles but nurtures the emerging intention of student writers, and they stress the need to return our attention to the heart and center…

This article describes the process used by one high school teacher to incorporate writing into her classroom. The teacher made several modifications to her curriculum to provide her students with opportunities to engage in online research, and produce text for real-world audiences. The students' comments indicate that although they were initially…

The purpose of this paper is to define writing apprehension, describe the writing apprehension of 91 secondary preservice teachers of diverse subject areas, in a required content area literacy course, and explain how their writing apprehension was reduced significantly by authoring a "how-to" book. The "how-to" book assignment is explained and…

This study was conducted in two case-study teachers' public middle school classrooms in south Louisiana and a survey in three public school districts. A qualitative research focus with the research design taken from work of Michael Patton's (2002) "Qualitative Research Evaluation Methods" and James Spradley and David McCurdy's (1975)…

This article describes how one such teacher, Shirley Thacker, developed and implemented a successful writing program in her first grade classroom, which is known as Thackerville. Shirley describes how she motivated a classroom of first-graders to use the writing process in a workshop format and how this approach affected the children's perceptions…

Writing can be viewed as a recursive process involving both cognitive and metacognitive processes. Task, environment, individual cognition and affective processes all impact on producing written text. Recent research on the development of metacognition in young children has highlighted social constructivist and socio-cultural factors.…

This study focuses on an examination of the learning-to-learn strategies of seventh-grade students as they highlight, take notes, plan, organize, and write expository texts. Participants consist of 125 students, 41 with disabilities and 84 without disabilities. The results reveal that the students with disabilities have more difficulties in using…

The purpose of the conference presentation upon which this paper is inspired was to present an innovative approach to motivate students to write in a second language during a first-year Spanish class. Usually, students comply with writing exercises that convey basic thoughts, due to constrained vocabulary and limited knowledge of grammatical…