This study reports on how the supplementation of online resources, informed by systemic functional linguistics (SFL), impacted English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) student writers' development of critical thinking skills. Through qualitative analyses of student-teacher interactions, interviews with students, and students' written documents, the…

Improving the information literacy and writing skills of undergraduate social work students continues to be an issue for social work educators. In spite of the persistent concern, only a few studies examine the factors influencing these skills and interventions to strengthen them. This article details a faculty-librarian collaborative teaching…

Literature from education, educational psychology and second language acquisition has consistently found that self-efficacy is a key factor leading to increased language learning success. Students with more self-efficacy are claimed to have higher motivation and to expend more effort in the learning process. On the other hand, those with less…

This study investigated the influence of first language (L1) writing proficiency on second language (L2) writing ability among Saudi college students. The research was built on Cummins' common underlying proficiency theory and linguistic interdependence hypothesis, which advocate the L1's effect on L2 learning. Participants consisted of 38…

Writing in English has been so long becoming a required skill for EFL learners to master. However, being well-qualified in this skill is not easy since students should undergo systematic processes by learning and internalizing every single aspect of the language and the usage. Thus, students certainly have needs to be considered by English…

Using sociologist C. Wright Mill's analogy of the trap, this piece invites readers to think about the Common Core State Standards beyond the classroom, outward toward its historical and political context. The traps describe the connection between larger social issues related to the implementation of the Common Core and changes at the classroom…

This paper describes the implementation of a poster assignment in a writing and information literacy course required for undergraduate Life Sciences and Environmental Biology majors with the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at McGill University. The assignment was introduced in response to weaknesses identified through course…

A detailed rubric initially designed as a scoring instrument for grading APA-style empirical research reports was tested for its ability to help students improve their scientific writing skills. Students who used the rubric while preparing their reports wrote a higher quality report than did students who did not. Students also improved the quality…

The primary goal of the present study was to examine the relations of kindergarten transcription, oral language, word reading, and attention skills to writing skills in third grade. Children (N=157) were assessed on their letter writing automaticity, spelling, oral language, word reading, and attention in kindergarten. Then, they were assessed on…

In this article, the author discusses how difficult it is for psychology college students to learn to write multiple disciplines of references. It is hard for students to understand why all details have to be written in the right order and the right type-style--depending upon which reference system is used. In this article, the author proposes…

"Let's keep this in perspective," writes Jeff Anderson." The Common Core State Standards are a guiding document." Anderson cautions readers to look beyond such artificial boundaries and dive into pedagogy, process, content knowledge, and research that reveals best practices for teaching writing. Educators, he notes, need…

Purpose: Written English is a morphophonemic language. Researchers have documented that a conscious awareness of the morphological structure of English morphology is predictive of students' written language skills and that morphological awareness instruction leads to improvements in morphological awareness and in other written language…

Writing is one of the primary skills that children learn in school. Interventions that address performance deficits and skill deficits have been shown to improve aspects of elementary school children's writing. This study demonstrates performance-based interventions (goal setting, feedback, and contingent reward) and a skill-based intervention…

Despite the need for writing competence in and out of school, writing has been deemed the neglected "R" in educational practice. Moreover, many students do not meet expected standards of writing performance. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), adopted by 45 states, provides an opportunity to change the state of writing instruction on…

An integrated science curriculum assists pupils to retain learnings better than to separate academic disciplines. Too frequently, science teachers teach each academic discipline as separate entities. However, there is much correlating of science with language, for example which might well be implemented in teaching and learning situations. Thus,…