Memoir covers narrative, informative, and persuasive writing, which are described in the Common Core State Standards: College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Writing (CCRA.W). Memoirs are narrative memories told through rich description, dialogue, setting, and characters; and they are based on true stories (CCSS. ELA-Literacy.CCRA.W.3).…

The issue of voice has received considerable critical attention in second language writing (SLW) in the past decades. This study intends to enrich the research of voice in the Chinese context, which may mirror some issues in EFL environments. The short story writing process of an English-major undergraduate was particularly analyzed in this study,…

In China, developing students' overall communicative competence was set as the central goal of the current college English curriculum requirements since 2004. However, this goal has remained largely unfulfilled, particularly with regard to writing competence. This study proposes that the genre-based pedagogy in systemic functional linguistics may…

The present study compared the efficacy of computer-mediated peer corrective feedback (CF) among two groups of high-proficiency (n=11) and low-proficiency (n=19) postsecondary Japanese EFL students. They completed a 10-week process writing composition, during which the students were given explicit instruction in metalinguistic peer CF. They then…

The purpose of this study was to design and evaluate an instructional approach that combined strategy instruction with principles of dialogic pedagogy to improve the story writing of students in grades K-2 (n = 219). Specifically, drama, dialogic interactions, and oral retellings assisted learners with ideation, while strategies guided their…

The role of literature as a teaching and learning tool in English as a Foreign Language has long been acknowledged. Literary texts offer teachers opportunities to provide students with authentic materials to heighten their motivation by involving them in challenging Task-Based activities in which they interact with authors and learn about features…

Within English for Academic Purposes (EAP), writing instruction has often been of primary interest with a focus on curricula design and implementation. This especially holds true in East Asia where many universities operate EAP writing programmes. This study is located within this region, taking an inquiry stance in a small-scale case study of…

We propose ways of incorporating Google Translate into the teaching of Finnish and Hungarian in a higher education setting at different skill levels. The task types tested in our study were: analytical tasks (dictionary-like exercise, word-building, part-of-word identification), discovery method tasks (elicitation, problem solving), and awareness…

Cognitive complexity is traditionally used for describing human cognition along a simplicity-complexity axis in tests like TOFEL IBT and GRE where text creation and rhetorical organization are quintessentially important. Accordingly, this study sought to investigate the impact of mentor text modelling on cognitive complexity of academic writing…

Only 25% to 38% of secondary education graduates in the United States are proficient readers or writers but many continue to postsecondary education, where they take developmental education courses designed to help them improve their basic academic skills. However, outcomes are poor for this population, and one problem may be that approaches to…

The authors investigated the impact of explicit instruction and peer-assisted writing on students' writing motivation and self-efficacy for writing. Eleven teachers and their 206 fifth- and sixth-grade students participated in a 2 (explicit instruction vs. writing opportunities without explicit instruction) × 2 (peer-assisted writing vs. writing…

The chapters in this volume build on a growing body of ethnomethodological conversation analytic research on teaching in order to enhance our empirical understandings of teaching as embodied, contingent and jointly achieved with students in the complex management of various courses of action and larger instructional projects. Together, the…

The great number of refugees in the U.S. creates challenges for educators to determine the best ways to embrace refugee children and incorporate culturally and linguistically appropriate classroom practices to successfully meet their educational and emotional needs (Prior & Niesz, 2013). This article aims to contribute to English teachers'…

Taking a dispositional view of transfer and applying Joanne Lobato's "actor-oriented transfer perspective," we analyze student perceptions of writing center visits at three very different institutions. We find that, as a nonevaluative space where university students can develop metacognitive awareness across disciplines and over time,…

The aims of the present study were to explore the effects of two different types of task conditions (topic choice vs. no choice) on the quality of written production in a second language (lexical complexity, syntactic complexity, and cohesion) and to investigate the effects of these two different task conditions on task motivation. This research…