One promising intervention to support the writing skills of students with and at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders is self-regulated strategy development (SRSD). The purpose of this study was to extend this line of inquiry to a residential setting with teachers serving as interventionists and determine the effects of the SRSD using the…

Since high school students are failing to master writing proficiency, developmental writing programs at the college level have become increasingly necessary. This article explains the lack of readiness with which students are entering college and the workplace, examines the reasons students are having trouble writing, and describes elements of…

The four-week university-sponsored summer Computer-based Writing (CBW) Program directed by the head of a special education initial teacher licensure program gave teaching interns opportunities to work with young struggling writers in a supervised clinical setting to address keyboarding skills, writing conventions and knowledge and application of…

A quasi-experimental study examined some effects of cross-age tutoring on fourth grade tutors' and second grade tutees' ability to spell accurately and correct errors on their own rough drafts. Half of the participating tutors were trained in tutoring skills; half were not. All participants were given pre- and post-assessments. On dictated writing…

This dissertation is a qualitative study of a curriculum I designed for composition students in the Fall of 2012. The curriculum I created is informed by the Freirean edict that a self-generated desire to "create knowledge" is far more likely to result in meaningful, holistic learning than simply "banking" information. In the…

Metadiscourse is a prevalent linguistic resource that helps writers to manage the flow of the propositional contents and to direct their stance towards their contents and readers. Its dominance in persuasive writings has motivated this study which is to examine the occurrences and forms of metadiscourse use in the writing of both the high (HEP)…

Students with disabilities trail behind their peers without disabilities while in school, as well as in post-secondary outcome areas. Given that self-determination and enhanced academic skills are associated with improved post-school outcomes, one possible solution is to identify interventions that teach self-determination and academic skills…

In his foundational work, "English Composition and Rhetoric," Alexander Bain set forth the framework for what students and teachers now routinely refer to as the five-paragraph essay. Teachers were so inculcated with Bain's paradigm for the "perfect" essay format, they in turn have inculcated their students, and they just say now, "Write an…

This article examines the influential Chinese science book "Brush Talks from Dream Brook," written by Shen Kuo in the 11th century. I suggest that "Brush Talks" reveals a tension between institutionalized science and science in the public, and a gap between the making of scientific knowledge and the communication of such…

This design research project developed and evaluated curriculum for developmental writing classes in community colleges. The core of the curriculum was self-regulated strategy instruction, which has been shown to be effective with adolescents who are struggling as writers. In the curriculum, students learned strategies for planning, drafting, and…

This paper describes a specially developed online peer-review system, the Peer Portal, and the first results of its use for quality enhancement of bachelor's and master's thesis manuscripts. The peer-review system is completely student driven and therefore saves time for supervisors and creates a direct interaction between students without…

This article identifies and examines a digital arm of creative writing studies and organizes that proposal into four categories through which to theorize the "craft" of creative production, each borrowed from Tim Mayers's "(Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies": process, genre, author, and…

For many writing teachers, helping students discover, explore, refine and, most importantly, inhabit their "voices" is both the teachers' greatest challenge and pleasure. Voice, they tell them, is what their writing "sounds" like when someone reads it; it is their personality on the page; it is the writer "speaking" to the reader. But what happens…

In the L2 writing literature, there has been a rich history of scholarship in theory, research and practice since the 1960s. Two of the most prominent L2 writing approaches are process and portfolio pedagogy. The former approach promotes the use of diverse writing strategies (e.g. pre-writing) to enhance student writers' expression and fluency.…

Over the last decades the nature and form of what children can choose to read has changed radically, partly as a consequence of rapid technological advances and the increasing dominance of the image. The research questions were: (1) "How do children learn to read and write by computer?"; (2) "How can one support children's learning…