It is important to find the means by which struggling writers can find success in the English Language Arts. For students struggling with reading and writing, the visual arts may be a way of accessing and expressing their ideas and ultimately opening up a world of creative possibilities. This article explores drawing and painting as a pre-writing…

The purpose of this study was to investigate ESL students' performance and strategies when writing direct and translated essays. The study also aimed at exploring students' strategies when writing in L2 (English) and L1 (Arabic). The study used a mixture of quantitative and qualitative procedures for data collection and analysis. Adapted strategy…

This author, a lecturer in the Education Program at the University of Washington (Bothell), relates an experience that dated back to an invitation to give a talk at the Gwangju International Center (GIC) in Korea in the Summer of 2011. Min spoke about culturally-embedded writing practices across nations and presented some practical strategies that…

In this study, 72 secondary English teachers from the Santa Ana Unified School District were randomly assigned to participate in the Pathway Project, a cognitive strategies approach to teaching interpretive reading and analytical writing, or to a control condition involving typical district training focusing on teaching content from the textbook.…

How do you show students that revision is more than a classroom exercise to please the teacher? Take them into the real world of writing for publication. In Real Revision, award-winning author and teacher Kate Messner demystifies the revision process for teachers and students alike and provides tried-and-true revision strategies, field tested by…

Entering a doctoral program can be an important first step in advancing your career. You will create a network of support that will include professors, intern advisors, and others who will have a vested interest in your success. From this support group will emerge one or more mentors who will guide you to successful completion of your program and…

We examined the extent to which strategies instruction, using the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model, would enhance the writing, engagement during writing, and behavior of 44 second-grade students identified as having behavioral and writing difficulties. This study occurred within a comprehensive, integrated, three-tiered model of…

Research was conducted to ascertain if an essay-writing strategy was effective at improving the achievement on essay tests for 7th- and 8th-grade students with reading and writing disabilities. Students were assigned via a stratified random sample to treatment or control group. Student scores were also compared to students without learning…

The wiki is an excellent tool for student collaboration and teacher assessment. Students' comfort with online social networking makes the wiki a perfect forum for students to coauthor works and to respond to each other's writing. In this article, the author discusses how to use a wiki to promote discussion and aid students with writing. He tested…

School districts throughout the country are considering how to best integrate technology into instruction. There has been a movement in many districts toward one-to-one laptop instruction, in which all students are provided a laptop computer, but there is concern that these programs may not yield sufficiently improved learning outcomes to justify…

Within the last 12 years, email has emerged as the most commonly used form of written communication in the corporate workplace. Several factors have contributed to the widespread use of email. This form of communication is generally rapid, is more economical than distributing or mailing printed documents, and permits simultaneous communication…

This mixed-methods study looks at patterns of emoticon usage in adult, ESL student writing. Data are drawn from 13 students and their participation in online discussion forums designed to supplement a traditional ESL writing course. The study conceptualizes computer mediated communication as a hybridized and emergent form which utilizes features…

The authors conducted two studies as part of a federally funded project to improve the writing performance of students identified as at risk for behavioral difficulties and struggling with writing. One study focused on improving persuasive writing abilities, whereas the second study focused on improving story writing abilities. Many of the…

This article addresses the impetus for joining and maintaining writing groups in academe. The authors consider the motivations and purposes for organizing and forming such groups. Revealing the complexities of writing both as profession and in pursuit of the profession, they analyze their experiences as collaborative writers. They examine the…

In this article, modified cognitive strategy instruction in writing (CSIW), a cognitive strategy instructional model is described. Modified CSIW was designed based on two effective instructional models: cognitive strategy instruction in writing (CSIW) and self-regulated strategy development (SRSD). Modified CSIW provides tailored instruction to…