While adult literacy programs have historically been marginalized within the US educational system, there is growing interest in making these programs more academically effective. Because of this, the General Education Development (GED) exam was recently revised to be more rigorous, especially in its assessment of writing. Although these changes…

This study investigated and analyzed the prevalence and presence of indirectness markers in Korean and Persian English Essays. The researchers analyzed the prevalence of the indirectness markers as a set of politeness strategies employed by the Korean and Persian university bound students in their English compositions. Furthermore, the researchers…

This article focuses on how adolescent writers took up an invitation to write and share a piece of work in school that wasn't tied to a grade. Students' responses to this invitation are examined in an effort to revise some of the typical approaches to teaching writing.

Learning to teach writing is a complex process influenced by many factors. Formative assessment holds promise as a place for preservice teachers to gain a better understanding of students' unique struggles as writers and of writing as a complex, challenging skill. The authors of this article describe how working with a dialogic method of formative…

During the 2016-2017 academic year, a collaborative of university faculty and high school teachers piloted an innovative approach to professional development, focusing on secondary level literacy in a diverse suburban district. The approach included innovations in both process and content compared to professional development (PD) and instructional…

Epideictic rhetoric reifies and reshapes the shared values of a community, and in this article, I reread William E. Coles Jr.'s "The Plural I" as showing forth a classroom built upon epideictic rhetoric, his own epideictic pedagogy asking that teachers of writing engage student work not expecting to be persuaded but as observers of…

A writing invitation the author has found useful is to ask students to identify indelible educational moments. They all have them, some positive, some damaging. The moments don't need to have taken place in school. They could involve outdoor as well as indoor schooling: a moment when they realized betrayal for example; a moment when they knew they…

English Language Learners (ELLs) often face challenges when participating in peer review activities in writers' workshops. This article identifies some of the potential difficulties that ELL writers may experience, and provides teachers with strategies to address these problems. The author describes a simple three-step peer review training model…

A novel instrument, the Features of Excellent Arguments task (FEXA), was developed to elicit adolescents' judgments about argumentative essays displaying to varying degrees features characteristic of strong persuasive writing: academic language, rich evidence, multiple perspectives, and rhetorical appeal. We collected students' categorical choices…

Errors in writing are unavoidable while students are trying to develop their writing skills. There have been several studies on identifying writing problems or errors in students' writing. It is believed that identifying students' written tasks is an effective tool to explore the difficulties involved in learning language. This helps teachers'…

This paper presents the comparison between English writing skills on narrative and persuasive writing of students of Secondary School Certificate (SSC) and Ordinary level (O level). In this quantitative study, we selected private schools of Lahore that offered both streams simultaneously. We developed the Essay type test with the help of English…

English language writing is seen as one of the most difficult skills for undergraduate students. When composing a piece of writing, students usually face various problems ranging from grammatical aspects to expressing ideas and opinions. To answer the research questions, this study employed a mixed method of both qualitative and quantitative…

Tensions between high school writing curricula and students' lived literacies persist in spite of burgeoning research in multimodal composition. Drawn from the second iteration of a multi-year formative experiment, this narrative explores the dissonance stemming from the meeting of these two worlds in a project titled Digital Self Portrait. This…

Embracing a lot of functions, metadiscourse markers are among the most significant factors which affect L2 writing quality. In the present study, whether explicit teaching of metadiscourse markers has any effect on EFL students' writing proficiency was investigated. The participants (N: 21) of the study included freshman students majoring in…

Nonnative speakers of a language are often at a disadvantage in producing extended speech, as they have differing native (L1) phonological systems and rhetorical traditions or little experience in giving talks. Prosody in the form of stress, rhythm, and intonation is a difficult but crucial area needed to master extended speech because prosody…