Özge Yol is a former composition instructor and ESL/EFL teacher. Currently a doctoral candidate in the Educational Theory and Practice program at Binghamton University, she describes a "write a letter to your friend" activity she designed using peer-feedback to facilitate student engagement through the use of guiding questions. The task…

Using Biber's (1988) multidimensional analysis, this study investigates textual variation in second language (L2) learners' writing at different proficiency levels, and attempts to identify any developmental progression. The study used a corpus of 5200 argumentative essays written by 2600 students learning English as an L2. The results indicate…

Elementary students are expected to engage in written expression that is handwritten and typed. One critical skill of written expression is sentence construction: the composition of multiple words that follow rules of semantics and syntax. Unfortunately, many students with disabilities struggle to successfully handwrite or type complete sentences.…

This article introduces Peer Review Circles (PRC), a classroom task that fully engages learners in the peer review process. The authors had observed their undergraduate students were reluctant to do peer review and even more reluctant to use the comments received. To improve the peer review process, the authors decided to change it into a…

Inspired from problematic nature of writing, this study adopted an action research through peer editing as a way of developing writing skills of students at an ELT department. This study was designed through the specific stages of an action research which are planning, action, observation and reflection. In planning and action stages, the…

This study tested whether writing skills, knowledge, motivation, and strategic behaviors (within the context of robust writing instruction) each made a statistically unique contribution to predicting fifth-grade students' (123 girls, 104 boys) composition quality and length on a persuasive writing task involving source material, after variance due…

Writing analytically about text is a valued skill reflected in current academic standards. The quality of text-based writing opportunities in U.S. elementary schools, however, is generally weak, with variation in the rigor of the writing tasks teachers assign. Previous research suggests that teachers' beliefs about instruction significantly…

Along with digital development, new possibilities for communicating have emerged. The younger generation has adopted these new possibilities to a great extent. In order to be able to utilise the opportunities offered by digital tools when writing, access to digital tools is essential. Schools need to develop a writing education that meets…

The teaching of writing is at the core of the secondary English teacher's work. There have long been contrasting ideas about the most effective approaches to supporting students as writers, and in recent years in England the evidence--from Ofsted, for example--would suggest that it is common for teachers to offer structures to scaffold students'…

The study aimed to scrutinise how incorporating Facebook into a conventional writing class might impact on students' intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy and writing performance, and to uncover how best to provide corrective feedback on students' writing posted on Facebook. Sixty-four subjects from an intact group were recruited by means of…

One of the many types of texts that can be used in writing education is the diary. In this study, the opinions of the Turkish language teacher candidates about diary keeping and their diaries kept for two months in which they could freely express their thoughts were analyzed. It is a qualitative study in which thirty-four participants' diaries…

In surveys and semi-structured interviews, Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) discussed the role of reading in their first-year composition (FYC) courses infused with 'writing about writing' and 'teaching for transfer' perspectives. Three transformative reading lenses played a pivotal role in instructors' pedagogies -- deconstructing genres,…

This study provides an in depth look at how middle school English language learners (ELLs) negotiate their identity as readers and writers as they engage in an identity-oriented unit of instruction. Drawing on theories of identity, identity negotiation, and transformative pedagogy, this study contributes to the field by exploring how a teacher can…

This paper reviews research on outcomes of writing programmes for students in Years 3 to 13 in England, or grades 2 to 12 in the US. Studies had to meet rigorous standards of research including use of randomised or well-matched control groups, measures independent of the programme developers, researchers, and teachers, and adequate sample size and…

Students often fail to write effective synthesis essays that compare multiple sources across common intersecting categories. Instead, they compose flawed essays that focus primarily on one source and then add a few ideas from other sources (patchwriting); report ideas from all sources in a disjointed fashion (tag-all writing); or draw from one…