Purpose: Many students' writing skills are below grade-level expectations, and students with oral language difficulties are at particular risk for writing difficulties. Speech-language pathologists' (SLPs') expertise in language applies to both the oral and written modalities, yet evidence suggests that SLPs' confidence regarding writing…

There is increasing expectation that schools should be able to use tablets for a range of instructional and assessment purposes. This article considers the comparability of student writing on tablets and laptops to ensure that writing assessment is conducted in a way that is fair to all students. Data were collected from a sample of 826 students…

Each fall the author assigns undergraduate teacher education students to design rubrics that they can use to evaluate auditions for reality television shows like "American Idol." The point is to draw students into a critical reflection on assessment literature and practices they have been studying. Through these reflections, the author…

The present study seeks to investigate the role of portfolios in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) writers' metacognition as well as their writing skill. Therefore, the participants were assigned to two groups (experimental and control). The students in both groups received a writing test, a researcher-made Metacognitive Writing Questionnaire…

This study examines the use of metadiscourse markers among 50 Malaysian and 50 Arab Pre-University students. The findings of this study indicated that there was a significant difference in the use of metadiscourse markers between Malaysian and Arab Pre-University students {?[superscript 2] (1, n = 100) = 7.17, p-value is 0.007} where the use of…

This paper describes college students' writing development process during their foreign language classes throughout a semester. Self and peer correction were implemented to promote error awareness along with the use of an error code and error log in a fifth semester class. The results show that both strategies benefited students' writing skills…

Automated written corrective feedback (AWCF) has qualities that distinguish it from teacher-provided WCF and potentially undermine claims about its value for L2 student writers, including disparities in the amounts of useful information it provides across error types and the fact that inaccuracies in error-flagging must be anticipated. It remains…

The think-aloud approach to classroom writing assessment is designed to expand teachers' perspectives on adolescent students as writers and help them integrate instruction and assessment in a timely way. Emphasizing learning over evaluation, it is especially well-suited to revealing students' strengths and helping them overcome common challenges…

This small scale, quantitatively based, research study aimed at exploring one of the most debated areas in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL); and that is, the perceptions and attitudes of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers as well as EFL learners at an English Language Institute (ELI) at a major…

This paper reports on a 3-year study utilizing a novel approach to providing students in an introductory engineering course with feedback on drafts of course writing projects. In the Volunteer Expert Reader (VER) approach, students are matched with university alumni or employees who have the background to give feedback from the perspective of the…

Communication is widely recognised as an important capability for university graduates [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2013). "OECD skills outlook 2013: First results from the survey of adult skills." Author. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264204256-en]. Yet, research suggests that it is often not…

This study aimed to explore EFL students' use of writing strategies and their attitudes towards reading-to-write and writing-only tasks. The primary purpose of this study was to see whether there was any significant difference between the writing performance of reading-to-write and writing-only task groups of Iranian EFL learners. Also, this study…

Who is the most preferred and deemed the most helpful reviewer in improving student writing? This study exercised a blended teaching method which consists of three currently prevailing reviewers: the automated grading system (AGS, a web-based method), the peer review (a process-oriented approach), and the teacher grading technique (the…

Using generalizability (G-) theory and rater interviews as both quantitative and qualitative approaches, this study examined the impact of scoring methods (i.e., holistic versus analytic scoring) on the scoring variability and reliability of an EFL institutional writing assessment at a Turkish university. Ten raters were invited to rate 36…

In EFL composition courses, teaching and learning normally orbit around norms of unity, coherence, support, and sentence skills that L2 learners are expected to comply with, at the expense of opportunities to develop voice. Against this backdrop, we resolved to examine the extent to which students' exposure to and practice with lexical bundles,…