Throughout its history, the ecology of the picturebook has been impacted by various social and cultural changes. Postmodernism is one perspective, among other conceptual and theoretical frameworks, that has been proposed to explain some of the fundamental changes evident in many contemporary picturebooks. A review of the literature (Pantaleo &…

The youth slam poetry movement is growing in Houston. Writers in the Schools (WITS) is helping youth explore their truths through performance poetry and the renowned Meta-Four Houston program. Spoken word, slam competitions, and performance poetry bring people together to share stories and listen to our tomorrows. Performance poetry encourages…

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…

The low success rate of students in community college developmental education classes has caused not only institutions and their instructors but also those outside of the classroom to search for alternative programs and delivery methods to improve student outcomes. As college completion rates become increasingly tied to state funding, many…

The author created a month-long APA course as a Local Open Online Module because there was demand for such a course among faculty and students across the college and so that all faculty and students could have access to it. This LOOM is fully customizable, can be used in full or in part, and resources can be added to the LOOM or downloaded. The…

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…

This article attempts to add to the literature supporting Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) by proposing the use of Cooperative Learning (CL), specifically focusing on the enactment of a key principle of CL, i.e., individual accountability. It illustrates how to train students on CL and its individual accountability work and demonstrates how…

This article reports a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies that use regression discontinuity to examine the effects of placement into developmental education. Results suggest that placement into developmental education is associated with effects that are negative, statistically significant, and substantively large for three outcomes:…

In the present study I examine meaning-making as an integral aspect of successful writing assignments in political science. Results of a semester-long quasi-experimental pilot study show that meaning-making writing tasks help students in Introduction to American Politics courses become more politically engaged through the inculcation of civic…

This article aims to show how the findings from written corrective feedback (WCF) research can be applied in practice. One particular kind of WCF--focused WCF--is brought into the spotlight. The article first summarizes major findings from focused WCF research to reveal the potential advantages of correcting a few preselected language items…

Informed by Vygotsky's conceptualization of the Zone of Proximal Development, this case study investigated the benefits of peer feedback on second language (L2) writing for students with high L2 proficiency and the factors that may influence their learning in peer feedback in the Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language context. Specifically, the…

This study compared 70 English learners (ELs) and English-only (EO) second-grade students' writing samples before and after a yearlong writing program. The school utilized Write From the Beginning (J. Buckner, 2006) and focused on personal narratives. A subgroup of students also participated in an intervention supporting expository writing on…

This article reports partial results of a qualitative study which explored the gains and challenges encountered by two groups of English as a foreign language pre-service teachers from a public university in Medellin, Colombia, in developing a situated view of academic writing through a systemic functional genre-based instructional unit. The unit…

In this multiple-case study, the author investigated fully online students' perceptions of and experiences with asynchronous and synchronous writing support options of an institutional writing center and a commercial tutoring service. This dissertation used a multiple-case study design (Merriam, 1998, 2009; Yin, 2009) to ascertain which features…

Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) in writing classes is fundamental to interactions between teachers and students about students' writing and to help students further improve their writing. As one of the main feedback sources, teachers' cognition (e.g., teachers' thoughts, knowledge, and beliefs) needs to be probed to properly understand teachers…