There has been little research into 'language play', the manipulation of language for enjoyment, in children's narrative writing. The unprompted language play of 36 children was investigated in their writing of an imaginative story. The sample comprised three attainment sub-groups from a larger repeat-design quantitative study of writing…

Research into the teaching and assessment of student writing shows that many students find academic writing a challenge to learn, with legal writing no exception. Improving the availability and quality of timely formative feedback is an important aim. However, the time-consuming nature of assessing writing makes it impractical for instructors to…

Aim/Purpose: The aim of the present study was to examine peer interactions and the instructor's facilitation of online asynchronous group discussions on free writing among 20 learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) joining one Saudi university over one academic semester. The study also attempted to explore the views of the learners on the…

In this article, we discuss what it means to learn troublesome "threshold concepts" about writing that cannot be adequately grappled with in a single course or assignment. Here, two faculty members and a graduate of a writing major reflect on elements of the writing curriculum, the writing center practicum, and the learning dispositions…

Writing assessment becomes an interesting issue lately since it is not a simple task for the teachers and English intructors. There are some important considerations for the teachers in conducting writing assessment such as time limitation for the students to write, and how to give a score. Previous research had discussed the issue of validity and…

This article offers a survey of three reliability theories in writing assessment: positivist, hermeneutic, and rhetorical. Drawing on an interdisciplinary investigation of the notion of "witnessing," this survey emphasizes the kinds of readers and readings each theory of reliability produces and the epistemological grounds on which it…

The present study investigated the effects of group set-up in a semester-long telecollaborative discussion forum project in second-semester German. In order to explore whether group set-up affects learning in discussion forums, small groups of non-native speakers (NNS) of German were partnered either with native speakers (NS), other NNS with the…

Background: College- and career-ready standards cite the "special place of argument writing" in preparing students to be college students, professionals, and engaged citizens in an information-rich society (NGA, 2010). To support these critical skills, the National Writing Project (NWP) developed the College, Career, and Community…

Rapid advancements in computing have enabled automatic analyses of written texts created in educational settings. The purpose of this symposium is to survey several applications of computerized text analyses used in the research and development of productive learning environments. Four featured research projects have developed or been working on:…

Although the Toulmin model (1958) has dominated argumentation research, it does not provide many tools for evaluating argument quality. Towards that end, we draw on work in philosophy on argument schemes, and critical questions for evaluating those schemes. In our approach, we integrate the teaching of critical questions with argumentation vee…

The aim of this study was to test whether Cummins' Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis (LIH) might also apply to writing, by determining to what extent writers' text quality, source use and argumentation behavior are related in L1 and L2, how effective writers' behavior is and whether their L2 proficiency influenced the relations between them.…

This study attempts to determine whether the students who receive explicit instruction make more gains in their abilities to use topic-induced phrases in their writing than those who do not. Additionally, through interviews with a selected group of students from the treatment group, the study attempts to glean insights into the approaches learners…

When viewed through a generic, one-size-fits-all perspective, use of input enhancement does not appear effective. Through analysis of individual grammatical features and different learner proficiency levels, a significant impact may be revealed. To study the impact of input enhancement on diverse grammatical features, 16 short reading texts and…

Although Genre-Based Instruction (GBI) was proposed as a solution to L2 writing-related problems many years ago, its contribution to writing performance has not been extensively studied and the assessment instruments used in genre studies typically pertain to linguistic theories older than the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Moreover, even…

In response to educational issues at levels from national, institutional, to pedagogical concerns, this study aims to examine the influence and the effectiveness of the review strategies on the writing performance of first-year Thai undergraduates as well as how the perceived strategies are in the students' views. In the mixed-method study, the…