Peer feedback carries a number of potential benefits to students, yet how they learn in the process remains under-researched. Building on ideas of feedback as dialogue, this study aims to unpack the respective perceptions of the provider and the receiver of peer feedback in relation to the benefits and challenges of dialogue about academic…

Scenario-based learning is an approach for student-centered learning used in the medical and legal fields, but is little used in liberal arts. In this study, I examine students' understanding and application of audience-centered writing techniques after a semester of formal scenario-based essays and problem-based activities. Comparing the grades…

Even though there is plenty of published information about the advantages of peer review, little can be found on what the beneficiaries (i.e. the students) feel about this method and what they might expect from it. In this paper, we present an analysis of the perceptions of 44 students at one of the largest universities in Ecuador, who had just…

This study investigated and analyzed the prevalence and presence of indirectness markers in Korean and Persian English Essays. The researchers analyzed the prevalence of the indirectness markers as a set of politeness strategies employed by the Korean and Persian university bound students in their English compositions. Furthermore, the researchers…

Recent analyses of wide-scale writing assessment outcomes indicate that English writing achievement for fourth- and fifth-grade emerging bilingual learners continues to be an area of great concern. Utilizing the theory of holistic bilingualism and a mixed methods design, this study examines the writing skills of 44 emerging bilingual fourth and…

This study reports on how students construct new language knowledge by indirect feedback in web-based collaborative writing. Indirect feedback (text organization, reader-based perspectives, and clarity of purpose) encourages students to negotiate meaning instead of merely copying peers' direct feedback on grammatical corrections. According to the…

The general purpose of this study is to increase, in a classroom environment, formal communication by using reading and writing. Our research focuses on reading as a means to develop the writing of a good précis, which in its turn contributes to improve: 1) memory, vocabulary and grammatical-syntactical structures, in brief, the organization of a…

This study assessed the quality of preservice primary teachers' written arguments in a socioscientific argumentation task. Five Australian preservice primary teachers took part in a science content course incorporating explicit argumentation instruction, and numerous opportunities to engage in argumentation. The quality of their written arguments…

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…

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…

Over the past 45 years, the construct of syntactic sophistication has been assessed in L2 writing using what Bulté and Housen (2012) refer to as absolute complexity (Lu, 2011; Ortega, 2003; Wolfe-Quintero, Inagaki, & Kim, 1998). However, it has been argued that making inferences about learners based on absolute complexity indices (e.g., mean…

Two of the largest Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) organizations have chosen different methods for the way they will score and provide feedback on essays students submit. EdX, MIT and Harvard's non-profit MOOC federation, recently announced that they will use a machine-based Automated Essay Scoring (AES) application to assess written work in…

Using the educational social media platform Edmodo, teachers at multiple sites developed and implemented instruction that gave their high school students a chance to talk to students across the nation about the texts they were reading and to work collaboratively to develop writing related to their understanding.

Two-course writing sequences are valuable because they extend the time that students spend focused on developing as writers and researchers, yet they cannot rely on a "more is better" argument to justify their ongoing implementation, especially when general education curricula are shrinking and one course often looks much the same as the…

Young fanfiction writers use the Internet to build networks of reading, writing and editing--literacy practices that are highly valued in schools, universities and workplaces. While prior research shows that online spaces frame multiple kinds of participation as legitimate, much of this work focuses on the extensive contributions of exceptional…