Instructors of first-year students must understand that many of the frustrations they encounter with this demographic are a normal part of a transition process. Not only are first-year students asked to adjust to new academic demands, they also must learn how to live independently in a new environment. An effective way to facilitate academic…

Learning to write in a composition culinary course is very challenging for L2 learners. The main barrier in writing proficiency within this discipline is the lack of vocabulary, specifically the lack of exposure towards specialized vocabulary. This study aims to provide a corpus of specialized vocabulary within a food writing course. By providing…

Corrective feedback (CF), the implicit or explicit information learners receive indicating a gap between their current, compared to the desired, performance, has been an area of interest for EFL researchers during the last few decades. This study, conducted on 139 English-major prospective EFL teachers, assessed the impact of two CF types…

Eight eighth-grade students identified as having emotional and/or behavioral disabilities participated in a multiple-baseline design study to assess the effects of teaching persuasive writing and applying writing in the civics content area. After baseline data were collected, two intervention phases were implemented. An instructional phase on…

More and more Americans are recognizing just how inadequate their system of higher education is, in large part because the ever-increasing costs of attending a college or university are accompanied by an ever-decreasing value in the education they purport to give the student. At the venture capital firm, PEI, founded by Chuck Stetson, the author…

This study investigates the effects of strategy-based instruction (SBI) on the promotion of learner autonomy (LA). LA was conceptualized and operationally defined as learner self-initiation and learner self-regulation. An intervention study was conducted with the participation of 37 students in an experimental group, and 54 students in two control…

Employers consistently rank "writing skills" as a desired quality of college graduates; however studies show that students' writing skills often fall short of the mark (AAC& U, 2008; Charting the Future, 2006). Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiatives are one way universities attempt to improve student writing and promote…

In an urban K-8 school, standardized assessment scores in writing declined 27% from the year 2007 to the year 2010. The scores indicated that the percentage of students scoring proficient or above in writing declined, while the population demographics remained stable. The purpose of this study was to examine elementary writing teachers'…

This dissertation examines how nomenclature and the act of naming shapes disciplinary identities for scholars and teachers of rhetoric and composition. The discipline is named differently by many of its members, sometimes called "composition studies," "writing studies," "composition and rhetoric," "rhetorical…

Graduate-level ESL students in Education are future multicultural educators and promising role models for our diverse K-12 students. However, many of these students struggle with academic English and, in particular, writing. Yet little research or program development addresses the specific writing-support needs of this group. This article shares…

Synchronous technologies, particularly interactive video conferencing (IVC), are becoming common modes of teaching and delivering college courses. The increasing popularity of IVC in the U.S. and abroad calls for more pedagogically effective practices for instructors using this technology. This volume focuses on innovative and proven approaches to…

Despite the growing interest in examining the link between peer-peer collaborative dialogue and second language (L2) development in recent years (Swain, Brooks, & Tocalli-Beller, 2002), much of the empirical work in this regard focused on face-to-face communication, leaving the operationalization of collaborative dialogue in text-based…

Since 2010, annually updated data on instruction time has been available on the Eurydice website. Given the great similarities between the two data collections, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Eurydice networks have decided to produce one single data collection tool and conjointly manage the data collection on…

A scoring rubric acts as a useful guide for evaluating the quality of students' written responses. In second language writing, scoring rubrics can be used to measure a variety of discourse and linguistic features. However, certain advantages and disadvantages are associated with particular rubrics (see Hamp-Lyons, 2003; Weigle, 2002). Therefore,…

Traditional grammar instruction is a challenging element of the English curriculum; both students and teachers struggle with the rules and dull nature of grammar. However, understanding grammar is important because students need to understand the language they speak in order to be effective communicators, and teachers provide grammar instruction…