Examines the role of noticing in the second language writing process. A case study was conducted with two Mandarin background adult learners of English as a Second Language. The study documents the relationship of noticing, both in the composing stage and in the reformulation stage, to the improvement of the written product in the posttest of a…

Discussion of elementary school children who have a preferred visual learning style focuses on a study that investigated the impact of the use of computers and a visually rich software program in a constructivist classroom environment on their writing. Results show an increase in volume and linguistic complexity in their writing skills. (LRW)

This article describes the experiences of a sixth-grade language arts class that participated in a research and portfolio-writing exercise using the school library media center. Students in this class learned that organization and process are central to the completion of a successful research project. After learning various note-taking strategies…

This case study looks at teacher candidates who were enrolled in a content-area literacy course and used online technologies and literacy strategies to promote meaningful learning among students at a remote elementary school some 45 miles away from the university campus. As they worked under the guidance of a classroom teacher, a professor and a…

The paper presents findings from a school-based collaborative research project, the InterActive Education Project, which linked teachers, teacher educators and university researchers in English secondary schools (see Sutherland et al., 2004). It centres on a case study from one school where students used a simple yet highly effective electronic…

Introduction: Academic writing for publication is competitive and demanding for researchers. For the novice English-as-a-second-language (ESL) researcher, the pressure to publish compounds the difficulties of mastering the English language. Very few studies have used ESL graduate and post-graduate students as academic writing research subjects.…

The paper argues that the term "literacy" has become attached to too many disparate practices, and that renewed attention needs to be paid to how the acquisition and use of skills of written communication are conditioned by the core structures of the home, the classroom, and the state. It reviews the current usages of literacy and…

The purpose of this article is to help determine whether the use of emoticons in computer mediated communication (CMC) are truly nonverbal cues. A review of the literature revealed that the traditional nonverbal theorists failed to predict the future employment of nonverbal cues in electronic CMC. A variety of emoticons are then described…

This article presents case studies of three tutor/tutee dyads, focusing on the negotiation of tutor roles over a semester as part of a course requirement for MATESOL candidates. Tutors were enrolled in the course "Issues in Second Language Writing," and tutees were ESL student volunteers. Data came from on-line discussions from the course,…

Teachers and students agree that despite the time-consuming nature of providing written commentary and revising using this commentary, teacher feedback is both desirable and helpful. Nonetheless, teachers express concerns about how to provide commentary in ways that their students can effectively use to revise their texts and to learn for future…

Contrastive rhetoric provides tools that community college teachers need in order to understand the rhetorical forms that students from other cultures employ. Greater understanding of contrastive rhetoric can change the way that teachers interpret the difficulty linguistically different students may have in using conventional American academic…

Because the writing-process movement has been deemed our field's founding "paradigm"--at least since Hairston's 1982 essay declared it so--"process" has remained stuck in the philosophical and historical assumptions of a "paradigm." The paradigm theory, has, from its first associations with composition, offered a view of change wholly unsuited to…

This article reports on how Quebec Francophone high school students, enrolled in a program which featured an environment rich in information and communication technologies (ICTs), appropriated the writing process over a four-year period (Grades 7-10) in the context of their ESL language arts courses. Data for the study were obtained using…

This article relates case histories of basic writing programs at regional campuses in Florida, and the perceived need to incorporate concerns of social class into basic writing curriculum. Attention to class helps scholars identify institutional patterns that distance basic writing from the university's mainstream business. This author describes a…

The Internet as a worldwide literacy practice environment has created a new situation in communication, providing a new dynamic field for research. On the basis of the two articles under discussion, this commentary develops three main aspects of the Internet: as an informal learning environment for English as a second/foreign language; as a…