Recent analyses of wide-scale writing assessment outcomes indicate that English writing achievement for fourth- and fifth-grade emerging bilingual learners continues to be an area of great concern. Utilizing the theory of holistic bilingualism and a mixed methods design, this study examines the writing skills of 44 emerging bilingual fourth and…

This study reports on how students construct new language knowledge by indirect feedback in web-based collaborative writing. Indirect feedback (text organization, reader-based perspectives, and clarity of purpose) encourages students to negotiate meaning instead of merely copying peers' direct feedback on grammatical corrections. According to the…

The general purpose of this study is to increase, in a classroom environment, formal communication by using reading and writing. Our research focuses on reading as a means to develop the writing of a good précis, which in its turn contributes to improve: 1) memory, vocabulary and grammatical-syntactical structures, in brief, the organization of a…

This study assessed the quality of preservice primary teachers' written arguments in a socioscientific argumentation task. Five Australian preservice primary teachers took part in a science content course incorporating explicit argumentation instruction, and numerous opportunities to engage in argumentation. The quality of their written arguments…

Writers usually need iterations of revisions and edits during their writings. To better understand the process of rewriting, we need to know what has changed be-tween the revisions. Prior work mainly focuses on detecting corrections within sentences, which is at the level of words or phrases. This paper proposes to detect revision changes at the…

Two of the largest Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) organizations have chosen different methods for the way they will score and provide feedback on essays students submit. EdX, MIT and Harvard's non-profit MOOC federation, recently announced that they will use a machine-based Automated Essay Scoring (AES) application to assess written work in…

Most studies on task-based language learning focus on the oral performance of advanced level learners of English as a second language (ESL), while little research examines the written performance of beginning language learners in non-ESL contexts. This exploratory study aims to address this gap, by examining the effect of pre-writing tasks on…

Over the past 45 years, the construct of syntactic sophistication has been assessed in L2 writing using what Bulté and Housen (2012) refer to as absolute complexity (Lu, 2011; Ortega, 2003; Wolfe-Quintero, Inagaki, & Kim, 1998). However, it has been argued that making inferences about learners based on absolute complexity indices (e.g., mean…

Using the educational social media platform Edmodo, teachers at multiple sites developed and implemented instruction that gave their high school students a chance to talk to students across the nation about the texts they were reading and to work collaboratively to develop writing related to their understanding.

Two-course writing sequences are valuable because they extend the time that students spend focused on developing as writers and researchers, yet they cannot rely on a "more is better" argument to justify their ongoing implementation, especially when general education curricula are shrinking and one course often looks much the same as the…

Young fanfiction writers use the Internet to build networks of reading, writing and editing--literacy practices that are highly valued in schools, universities and workplaces. While prior research shows that online spaces frame multiple kinds of participation as legitimate, much of this work focuses on the extensive contributions of exceptional…

The effect of using a computer or paper and pencil on student writing scores on a provincial standardized writing assessment was studied. A sample of 302 francophone students wrote a short essay using a computer equipped with Microsoft Word with all of its correction functions enabled. One week later, the same students wrote a second short essay…

Keri Franklin has proposed that creating the appropriate social-emotional environment for peer response (or peer conferencing, as she calls it) is a necessary first step. Within the context of her peer response process, though, are there strategies that can be adopted that would further scaffold students' ability to take each other's work…

Genre serves as a useful lens to investigate the range of evidence derived from automated writing evaluation (AWE). To support construct-relevant systems used for writing instruction and assessment, two investigations were conducted that focused on postsecondary writing requirements and faculty perceptions of student writing proficiency. Survey…

The authors examine the challenges students faced in trying to write organized texts using effective thesis statements and topic sentences by analyzing argumentative history essays written by multilingual students enrolled in an undergraduate history course. They use the notions of macro-Theme (i.e., thesis statement) and hyper-Theme (i.e., topic…