This article describes a writing workshop that took place with 41 low-income, multi-ethnic 12th-grade students who received instruction on specific genre features for writing college admission essays. As a result, students improved the quality of their college admission essays and demonstrated greater confidence with this writing task. This…

This study was designed to enhance our understanding of the changing relationship between low- and high-level writing processes in the course of development. A dual description of writing processes was undertaken, based on (a) the respective time courses of these processes, as assessed by an analysis of eye and pen movements, and (b) the semantic…

In this article, the author describes how she used a commonplace book assignment to help students expand their background knowledge and as a means to formulate mature, informed perspectives regarding issues of importance. In the assignment, the author wanted the students to: (1) investigate issues of the day; (2) develop multiple perspectives…

This article presents a written version of the address the author gave at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) meeting in San Francisco on March 12, 2009. In this address, the author talks about the wonder of writing and discusses how writing has been considered sacred. Reading and writing are associated with inwardness…

That our writing can be misunderstood by our readers is a conceptual difficulty for developing writers. This paper outlines a perspective-taking process that assists elementary students in composing referentially detailed descriptions. Through a procedural sequence that includes drafting, feedback, readers' perspective task, revision and drafting…

A recent review of handwriting research in "Literacy" concluded that current curricula of handwriting education focus too much on writing style and neatness and neglect the aspect of handwriting automaticity. This conclusion is supported by evidence in the field of graphonomic research, where a range of experiments have been used to investigate…

It is no doubt that teacher written feedback plays an essential role in teaching writing skill. The present study, by use of questionnaire, investigates Saudi EFL students' and teachers' preferences and attitudes towards written error corrections. The study also aims at identifying the difficulties encountered by teachers and students during the…

This paper presents a socio-cognitive framework for connecting writing pedagogy and writing assessment with modern social and cognitive theories of writing. It focuses on providing a general framework that highlights the connections between writing competency and other literacy skills; identifies key connections between literacy instruction,…

Argument has been referred to as the umbrella under which all reasoning lies--"the more general human process of which more specific forms of reasoning are a part". In this paper, the authors present an evidence that argumentive reasoning skills can be assessed and developed in facilitative settings. They focus on middle school as an optimal…

Instructors in community college developmental education programs are constantly seeking new ways to improve outcomes for their students, but, to date, there has been a shortage of empirical studies on the effectiveness of such efforts. The current study provides evidence on the potential efficacy of an approach to helping students develop an…

Although the four-day school week originated in 1936, it was not widely implemented until 1973 when there was a need to conserve energy and reduce operating costs. This study investigated how achievement tests scores of schools with a four-day school week compared with schools with a traditional five-day school week. The study focused on student…

This longitudinal study investigates the development of writing proficiency in English as a foreign language (EFL), in contrast to the development of first language (L1) writing proficiency in Dutch L1, in a sample of almost 400 secondary school students in the Netherlands. Students performed several writing tasks in both languages in three…

This article describes the phonological awareness and English writing skills among a sample of 297 Singaporean kindergarten children, stratified by ethnicity (Chinese, Malay, and Indian), and examines the relationship between oral language and writing skills in this multilingual population. Overall, Singaporean kindergartners, nearly all of whom…

One of the best opportunities that undergraduates have to learn to write like a scientist is to write a thesis after participating in faculty-mentored undergraduate research. But developing writing skills doesn't happen automatically, and there are significant challenges associated with offering writing courses and with individualized mentoring.…

The goal of this study was to investigate the effect of integrating "Facebook" and peer assessment with college English writing class instruction through a blended teaching approach. This blended approach consisted of one-third of a semester of classroom instruction and two-thirds of a semester combining "Facebook", peer…