Argumentation is challenging for young learners. We used design research to develop an intervention that was based on principles of dialogic argumentation and strategy instruction and used genre elements to guide planning and evaluation for revision. Instruction included oral discussion of children's books, written responses to reading, and the…

The use of 'chunks' is not only a common and characteristic feature of first language use, but may also be a distinguishing factor between less and more proficient second language users. The present study aimed at investigating potential correlations between chunk use and holistically rated proficiency scores and development over time in advanced…

This paper tries to shed light on the use and endeavors teachers bear in correcting students writing papers without achieving good results to improve their writing. This theoretical research or reflection of this paper attempts to explore the reasons why some teachers sometimes feel that their teaching of writing is worthless since they spend a…

This study describes the results of a project that focused on developing an assessment rubric to be used as the assessment criteria for the written thesis of accounting majors and the quality of the coursework during the seminar. We used descriptive analysis and the survey method to collect information for the development work and to examine the…

There has been much interest recently in researching the changes editors, supervisors, and other language brokers make to the writing of L2 researchers who are attempting to publish in English. However, studies focused on the presubmission proofreading of students' university essays are rarer. In this study of student proofreading, 14 UK…

National standardized assessment programs have increasingly included extended written performances, amplifying the need for reliable, valid, and efficient methods of assessment. This article examines a two-stage method using comparative judgments and calibrated exemplars as a complement and alternative to existing methods of assessing writing.…

Collection and analysis of students' writing samples on a large scale is a part of the research agenda of the emerging writing analytics community that promises to deliver an unprecedented insight into characteristics of student writing. Yet with a large scale often comes variability of contexts in which the samples were produced--different…

This article reflects on the concept of meaningful literacy. It offers a classroom methodology, posting on a closed Facebook Group, that manifests this approach to English as a second language (ESL) or English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom meaningful literacy instruction. This study aims to produce empirically informed teaching materials…

In this experiment, we contrasted two instructions in which the focus of summary writing was varied. We predicted that students would better understand a scientific text when they learn to focus their summaries on the referential content rather than on the hierarchical structure of the text. In a 2 × 2 factorial experiment, 85 Grade-10 students…

Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) systems have been found to enhance the accuracy, readability, and cohesion of writing responses (Stevenson & Phakiti, 2019). Previous research indicates that individual learners may have difficulty utilizing content-based AWE feedback and collaborative processing of feedback might help to cope with this…

This paper provides a historical analysis of the past century of progressive education, within the general socio-political context of schooling within the US. The purpose of this review is to create a social, historical and philosophical context for understanding the current narrative of progressive education that exists in educational policy…

Research investigating corpora of English learners' language raises new questions about how syntactic complexity is defined theoretically and operationally for second language (L2) writing assessment. I show that syntactic complexity is important in construct definitions and L2 writing rating scales as well as in L2 writing research. I describe…

Previous research has shown the effectiveness of peer reviewing on the improvement of writing quality. However, the fact that students themselves, arguably novices, judged the improvement leads to concerns about the validity of peer reviewing. We measured writing quality before and after peer reviewing using Coh-Metrix, which computationally…

The purpose of this best-evidence synthesis was to identify promising interventions that align with a theoretical model of early writing development, targeting three components of early writing: transcription, text generation, and self-regulation. We determined the extent to which these interventions are "effective" for children who…

This article shares what the author has learned as a high school English teacher and researcher from speaking with teachers and high school and college students over the past five years about what sort of feedback has been most helpful in students' development as writers. When examining the data and looking for overlapping themes in responses, six…