In the present study, participants were 127 3rd-grade students, to 64 of whom (33 boys, 31 girls) the authors taught a general strategy and a genre-specific strategy for planning and writing stories; procedures for regulating the use of these strategies, the writing process, and their writing behaviors; and knowledge about the basic purpose and…

In this article, we propose to link the study of writing-to-learn to the theory of aptitude-treatment interaction (ATI). In an experimental study we examined the effects of a course on ''Writing-to-learn about literary stories'' consisting of writing tasks adapted to either a planning or a revising writing strategy. We hypothesized that the…

Toward the end of his life, Donald Murray felt that his approach to writing instruction was no longer appreciated by journals in his field. Nevertheless, his emphasis on encouraging students to surprise themselves through informal writing still has considerable value. (Contains 1 note.)

The way people write and communicate has changed both inside and outside the university, and because of this writing instructors are professionally responsible for addressing these changes in the classroom. Technologies have affected writing for thousands of years. From the invention of the printing press to the Internet, challenges to writing…

The facilitation of peer feedback on academic writing is often lauded for its myriad cognitive, affective, social, and linguistic benefits. However, educators face conflicting research results when seeking empirical guidance on efficient methods to support peer feedback, particularly for their English language learners. This study contributes to…

Reflecting on the influence of English nursery rhyme poems on one individual Asian child's language development, the paper reviews current studies on the socio-cultural dynamics of creativity, to examine how these theoretical and empirical investigations may help shape specific pedagogical practices in the expressive language arts in a Hong Kong…

For their 56th annual meeting, the Association of Educators and Researchers (ALER) met in Grand Rapids, Michigan at the Amway Grand Hotel. This year's conference theme was Literacy Is Transformative, which was also used as the title for this year's Yearbook, Volume 35. Included are double-peer reviewed papers, the presidential address,…

This newsletter of best practices in implementing the High Schools That Work (HSTW), Making Middle Grades Work (MMGW) and Technology Centers That Work (TCTW) school improvement models is based on presentations at the 27th Annual HSTW Staff Development Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the summer of 2013. The newsletter is divided up into…

It is hypothesized in the present study that when learners are tasked to write a composition in a second language (such as English language for Filipinos), they use specific approaches to learning and eventually undergo self-regulatory processes. The present study tested a model showing the shift from process to outcome in writing (Zimmerman &…

As schools and teachers strive to align instruction with state and national standards, teachers often struggle with developing students' abilities to think for themselves. As a result, students may find analyzing a piece of literature and writing proficiently about it to be a daunting task. For some students, particularly those with disabilities,…

This study compared two techniques for teaching middle school students to compose from expository text sources, a common but difficult academic writing task. Classroom social studies content was used. Text structure instruction (TSI), which focused on text characteristics using graphic organizers, was compared with PLAN & WRITE for Summarization…

This paper presents a concise model of literacy assessment based on the "simple view of reading" and the "simple view of writing". The approach targets directly the key skills and knowledge involved in reading, writing and spelling. It stands in contrast to the less precise and potentially more subjective "always-in-context" and "always-authentic"…

Traditionally, assessing student writing ability has often been product-focused. Advocates of child-centered process-oriented classrooms, however, suggest that teachers should also focus on understanding children's writing behaviors in the context of meaningful communicative tasks. In such an approach, writing conferences are one way in which…

Many undergraduate chemistry curricula are devoting increasing amounts of time to teaching technical writing skills. Significantly less attention, however, is given toward training students in nontechnical writing strategies. The ability of chemistry students to communicate effectively in writing to a wide variety of audiences is an essential (and…

There is a seductive "commonsense" logic to two opinion pieces that have appeared over the last two years in the "Speaking My Mind" section of "English Journal": (1) Byung-In Seo's "Defending the Five-Paragraph Essay," which appeared in the November 2007 issue; and (2) Kerri Smith's "In Defense of the Five-Paragraph Essay," which appeared in March…