Standardized testing and accountability are currently unavoidable components of Texas Public Education. Through years of push-back, parents and educators have demanded that Texas consider alternative testing options that would reduce the high-stakes testing burden on students and schools. In 2015, the State of Texas passed legislation requiring…

Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has compelled educational institutions to explore alternatives to face-to-face instruction. The primary objective of this study is to identify the teacher's role in the English argumentative writing performance of low proficiency university students via WhatsApp. In this case study, data were collected from multiple…

This study explored the knowledge elementary teachers need for one core practice: reading and responding to students' writing. Forty-five preservice teachers read and responded to an elementary student's narrative writing sample. Using teacher noticing as a framework, we first decomposed the practice into five components indicative of differences…

Corpora have been used in English as a foreign language materials for decades, and native corpora have been present in the classroom by means of direct approaches such as Data-Driven Learning (Johns, T., and P. King 1991. "'Should you be Persuaded'- Two Samples of Data-Driven Learning Materials." In "Classroom Concordancing,"…

There has been little research into how children use language play in writing. The unprompted language play of 36 children was investigated through their writing of a short advertisement. The sample comprised three attainment sub-groups from a larger repeat-design study of persuasive writing in the 9-11 age-range. The writing was analysed using…

Introduction: Writing is a tool for constructing and modifying knowledge. However, it is not easy to evaluate spontaneous writing tasks. In the present study, we selected and analysed a series of quality indicators to assess spontaneous or productive writing, examining the level of difficulty of the indicators and the relationship between the…

This study investigated the effect of wiki-mediated collaborative writing on the development of learners' individual writing in a second language (L2). Participants were 52 learners of English as a foreign language enrolled in two intact junior writing classes at a Taiwanese university. One class was assigned to be a wiki-collaborative writing…

This study examined the impact of a mobile-based writing intervention with embedded self-regulated learning strategies on the persuasive writing performance and perceived self-efficacy beliefs of fifth-grade struggling writers in five inclusive classrooms. In addition, the study examined the impact of adult feedback on the writing performance and…

Sarah DeBacher and Deborah Harris-Moore offer their experiences with teaching in the aftermath of traumatic situations. DeBacher, who taught at the University of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and Harris-Moore, who taught at UC Santa Barbara following a mass shooting, explore the difficulty of teaching writing in the wake of…

This paper presents a phenomenological diagnosis of the implementation of ProDuct-based Instruction (PDI) in EFL's writing class in Thailand contexts. PDI is a new instructional method for teaching business English writing. Its key is in the products that are tangible and appeal to human senses; the product's tangibility serves as a scaffold to…

Writing in a foreign language is a particularly difficult skill to develop, especially when young learners are concerned because they are parallelly learning to write in their L1 and do not have strong oral foundations in their L2. The issue becomes even more complex when the ways to assess young learners' writing are considered, given that…

Metadiscourse is a tool for writers to guide and interact with readers through texts. Yet in most student texts, one of the points lacking is the interaction between writers and readers. In this study, frequency and type of interactive and interactional metadiscourse features were explored via students' research-based essays based on Hyland's…

Lately, researchers have expressed their concern for EFL students' poor writing performance and exam failure. They have indicated that peer assessment (PA) can be successfully employed to support a better integration of teaching/instruction with assessment of progress in learning. Bearing this in mind, the current study employed a pre-test…

This study aimed to investigate the development of the learners' story writing skills under the implementation of animated video story as innovation. This study provided various evidence on how the said innovation can help develop the learners' story writing skills. the grade three learners as well as the subject teachers and master teacher in the…

Reading critically involves examining the language choices authors make to "get the job done" -- in other words, to communicate effectively in specific ways with particular audiences. Not all students in middle and high school intuit this type of reading and may experience challenges when they go to write for academic purposes. Their…