This research compares the relative effectiveness and efficiency of personalised feedback versus annotated exemplars as two approaches to providing high school students with formative feedback in the development of their writing skills. The study was a randomised experiment conducted "in situ" in two English classes in one high school in…

In this dissertation, the author aims at gaining a better understanding of how taking an Environmental Literature and Writing course affects student writing while exploring how writing students view their own roles within their natural environments following the completion of the described course. Through the collecting and assessing of student…

In Bloom's Taxonomy, cognitive domain is one of the three domains that were established by Benjamin Bloom in 1956. This domain was intended to verify a student's cognitive excellence during written assessment. The purpose of the study was to analyze the assessment levels of students' learning according to cognitive domain of Blooms' Taxonomy. The…

Automatic essay scoring (AES) refers to the process of scoring free text responses to given prompts, considering human grader scores as the gold standard. Writing such essays is an essential component of many language and aptitude exams. Hence, AES became an active and established area of research, and there are many proprietary systems used in…

Individual differences in motivational beliefs, such as writing efficacy and attitudes toward writing in different contexts (academic, recreational, print or digital), are hypothesised to account for variability in writing performance. This study tested this proposition with 185 middle school students (58% were male), examining if writing…

First year undergraduate design students have found difficulties in realising the standards expected for academic writing at university level. An assessment initiative was used to engage students with criteria and standards for a core interdisciplinary design subject notable for its demanding assessment of academic writing. The same graduate…

The purpose of this review paper is to identify the core spelling errors in Arabic and Non Arabic Contexts. The most common difficulty that Arab learners may face during their English writing is correct spelling, for many different reasons such as the interference between English and Arabic language and the irregularity of the English language…

In response to global assessment reforms, using assessment for learning (AfL) in various education jurisdictions is on the rise. However, using assessment as learning (AaL) appears to enjoy a low profile in language learning in general and in L2 writing in particular. To this end, the paper intends to describe what AaL is in relation to AfL, argue…

In this chapter, we describe an approach to professional development grounded in a model of PCK that centers around a teacher's knowledge of how to elicit and respond to student thinking, to engage students in the practices of science, and to develop coherent and effective learning experiences. This approach has been shown to be effective in…

Learning to teach writing is a complex process influenced by many factors. Formative assessment holds promise as a place for preservice teachers to gain a better understanding of students' unique struggles as writers and of writing as a complex, challenging skill. The authors of this article describe how working with a dialogic method of formative…

A novel instrument, the Features of Excellent Arguments task (FEXA), was developed to elicit adolescents' judgments about argumentative essays displaying to varying degrees features characteristic of strong persuasive writing: academic language, rich evidence, multiple perspectives, and rhetorical appeal. We collected students' categorical choices…

This paper presents the comparison between English writing skills on narrative and persuasive writing of students of Secondary School Certificate (SSC) and Ordinary level (O level). In this quantitative study, we selected private schools of Lahore that offered both streams simultaneously. We developed the Essay type test with the help of English…

Bilingual students are underrepresented in gifted and talented (GT) programs, and language/literacy research on these students is scarce. This study examined academic language in expository writing of 65 GT students, including 32 bilinguals, in Grades 4-8. Outcomes at the word, phrase, sentence, and text levels were compared for bilinguals' versus…

Research into the potential of collaborative writing is relatively new. Similarly, task repetition (TR), which has been claimed to be a valuable tool for language learning, has been rarely explored in the context of writing. Therefore, little is known about the potential of combining TR and collaborative writing, and even less if we focus on young…

Research has shown that collaboratively produced texts are better in quality compared with individually written texts. However, no study has considered the role of collaboration in authorial voice, which is an essential element in current writing curricula. This study analyzes the effects of collaborative task performance in the quality of L2…