This study examined the effectiveness of a Question Exploration Routine and associated graphic organizer for enhancing the performance of students of diverse abilities when assessed on knowledge and comprehension of content and quality of written responses. Participants were 36 students with and without learning disabilities (LD) in Grades 9…

The 23rd EUROCALL conference was held in Cyprus from the 24th to the 27th of August 2016. The theme of the conference this year was "CALL Communities and Culture." It offered a unique opportunity to hear from real-world CALL practitioners on how they practice CALL in their communities, and how the CALL culture has developed in local and…

How much do specialized academic discourse communities matter to undergraduate writers? To what degree should theories of specialized discourses influence the design of undergraduate Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs? At the University of Iowa, where an undergraduate Writing Fellows program engages peer tutors in writing-intensive…

This report describes the development of grade norms for timed-writing performance in two modes of writing: persuasive and descriptive. These norms are based on objective and automatically computed measures of writing quality in grammar, usage, mechanics, style, vocabulary, organization, and development. These measures are also used in the…

Approaching reflection from the perspective of a teachable skill set implies that research may inform how to help students reflect. Employing a framework of making connections often used in reading comprehension, this study aimed to characterize how making connections between the service-learning experience (SLE) and prior experiences in similar…

For several years a number of instructors at the University of Cincinnati have experimented with the concept of problem-based learning (PBL) in their composition courses. The concept, rooted as it is in Socratic method and the hands-on problem-solving advocated by John Dewey, is not new, and though some of its applications may call for adjustments…

The teaching of highly valued scientific writing skills in the first year of university is challenging. This report describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel written assignment, "The Personal Response" and accompanying Peer Review, in the course, Human Biology (BIOL1015) at The University of Queensland. These assignments were…

This article presents a written assignment designed to achieve several goals. First, it offers students the chance to identify and examine the "pre-understandings" with which they enter the class, and to consider how these were formed. Once they have been elaborated, these "pre-understandings" inform the instructor and the student about biases and…

This article reports on a study of 23 tenth-grade students who created fiction in digital game and written formats. The researchers observed them at work, analysed their stories in both formats, and interviewed selected students to learn what affordances and constraints they demonstrate and/or articulate in such authoring. The students used…

Imaginative writing is a great vehicle for creative thinking and risk taking as children structure a reality in a story. However, the author believes that American children are untrained for this sort of work and progress. They need connected experiences. This insight intensifies the author's resolution to seek collaboration with artists in other…

In this Voices Inside Schools essay, a veteran teacher shares her reflections on a classroom unit entitled "How Language Reveals Character." The goal of the unit is to help adolescents read and write critically through an exploration of literary characters' language. Beginning by drawing on adolescents' fascination with one another,…

Although reading and writing exist only in relation to each other, writing plays little or no role in the usual instructional approaches to reading. Mostly, reading is taught as a sequence of discrete skills, which is ineffective since it accommodates the analytic reading style to the exclusion of global, kinesthetic, and auditory styles. Reading…

This overview of an English course, "Writing for Government, Business, and Industry" (listed as English 339 at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota), emphasizes the essential elements of audience and voice. Composition theorists' assertion that the absence of voice is symptomatic of a profound developmental deficit (suggesting an…

Generally, students in vocational and technical colleges are in writing classes because they must be, not because they want to be. As a rule, students in basic composition classes have been more or less continually exposed to writing classes since middle school where they been asked to keep journals, read articles and short stories, and write…

The business communications teacher helps the student learn to write the proposal that wins a promotion or the sales letter that wins new customers. Students poised to enter the business world need language theories as much as students studying literature, for the corporate language culture is as unpredictable and ambiguous as any literary text.…