Discusses assessment of English-as-a-Foreign/Second-Language (EFL/ESL) writing. Suggests there is a considerable gap between current practices in writing assessment and criteria suggested by advances in knowledge of discourse structure. Illustrates this by contrasting current practices in the scoring of two major EFL/ESL writing tests with…

Discusses how current scholarship argues against one-shot, high-stakes writing tasks. Presents work from students that were part of a team-taught curriculum that coordinated writing and reading classes. Designs activities that would provide a core of material for students to draw on in their final testing situations. (SG)

Presents a conversation that is designed to get at the differences in definitions of basic writing across institutional boundaries, divergences in placement procedures and assessment mechanisms, and problems theoretical work has had historically in tackling the issues of central importance to educators and their students. Concludes with…

During a business communication course, 80 composition and technical writing aspects were tracked. Comparison of students' perceived difficulties with these aspects and formal assessments showed that the average convergence increased by 30% between pre- and postassessment. (SK)

Notes how students learn to examine multiple elements of a text with critical perspective making analogies between others' writing and their own. Concludes that students may only have one opportunity to workshop their writing, but that intense learning experience, coupled with critical responses to another 20 or so drafts, coaxes writers into…

Some years ago, Gila Hanna offered the very insightful and useful distinction between mathematical proofs that prove and those that also explain. Proofs that explain not only state the deductive logic that justifies their mathematical claims, they lay bare the mechanisms and structures that underlie that logic, making content and logic more…

The use of unifying themes that span the various branches of science is recommended to enhance curricular coherence in science instruction. Conceptions of spatial scale are one such unifying theme. This research explored the accuracy of spatial scale conceptions of science phenomena across a spectrum of 215 participants: fifth grade, seventh…

This article describes the development and evaluation of a five-item writing assessment for persons with age-related vision loss. It provides a standard for measuring the baseline ability and the effectiveness of interventions to improve the writing ability of this population.

Expository hypertexts may contain specific types of signals such as navigable topical overviews and hyperlinks that map conceptual relationships between text contents. Two experiments with German university students (N = 130, 75% female, mean age 25 years) were conducted to test the hypothesis that hypertext-specific signals particularly support…

Students in a large undergraduate biology course were expected to write a scientific report as a key part of their course design. This study investigates the quality of learning arising from the writing experience and how it relates to the quality of students' preconceptions of learning through writing and their perceptions of their writing…

Educators often have to choose among different types of rating scales to assess second-language (L2) writing performance. There is little research, however, on how different rating scales affect rater performance. This study employed a mixed-method approach to investigate the effects of two different rating scales on EFL essay scores, rating…

The objective of the present investigation was to examine the comparability of writing prompts for different gender groups in the context of the computer-based Test of English as a Foreign Language[TM] (TOEFL[R]-CBT). A total of 87 prompts administered from July 1998 through March 2000 were analyzed. An extended version of logistic regression for…

Responding to student writing is one of the most challenging aspects of the writing instructor's job, and it is certainly the most time-consuming. Preparing future teachers to respond to L2 writing thus becomes an important aspect of any pre-service training course. In this paper, the author describes her own approach to training writing…

The writing performance of 64 elementary school children with a history of specific language impairment was examined to evaluate both the nature of the children's difficulties with writing and the relationship between oral language, reading, and writing. Children were assessed at age 8 on a range of language, literacy, and cognitive measures and…

Adult English as a second language (ESL) students learning English outside of traditional academic settings are an understudied population of second language learners. The purpose of the research reported here is to contribute to meeting the instructional needs of these students more effectively by investigating the relationships between their…