Toward the end of his life, Donald Murray felt that his approach to writing instruction was no longer appreciated by journals in his field. Nevertheless, his emphasis on encouraging students to surprise themselves through informal writing still has considerable value. (Contains 1 note.)

Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) is an online tool being used to integrate a writing component in classrooms. In an introductory zoology lecture class, the authors found that CPR-assigned scores were significantly higher than instructor-assigned scores on two of three essay assignments. They also found that neither students' technical-writing skills…

A primary goal of most introductory business and technical communication courses is to introduce students to the idea that the professional communication most of them will engage in is different from the writing they do for academic purposes. This overall idea covers several principles concerning professional writing. However, implementing active…

This paper investigates the development of writing initiatives in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, an area where prior to 1989, writing in universities played a very minor role. Using data gathered from eight institutions that currently have writing programs of some sort, I identify three typical paths writing initiatives…

The way people write and communicate has changed both inside and outside the university, and because of this writing instructors are professionally responsible for addressing these changes in the classroom. Technologies have affected writing for thousands of years. From the invention of the printing press to the Internet, challenges to writing…

One of the greatest challenges facing U.S. middle and high school teachers is the need to improve academic success among English language learner (ELL) students. Both the high school dropout rate and the college-enrollment rate provide compelling evidence of this need. This report documents one attempt to meet this challenge, a National Writing…

This cutting-edge guide presents multiple approaches to teaching poetry at the middle and high school levels. The author provides field-tested activities with detailed how-to instructions, as well as advice for how educators can "justify" their teaching within a high-stakes curriculum environment. "Let's Poem" will show pre- and inservice teachers…

The purpose of this study is to explore the nature of feedback that English as a Second Language (ESL) students received on their writings either from an automated essay scoring (AES) system or from the teacher. The participants were 12 adult ESL students who were attending an intensive English center at a university in Florida. The drafts of the…

This article describes the use of African American English (AAE) in the written and oral language of African American adolescents who struggle with writing. Written and oral language samples of 22 African American 10th-grade students were transcribed, analyzed, and coded for AAE, grammatical errors, spelling errors, and punctuation errors. Four…

Framed in a cognitively-oriented strand of research on corrective feedback (CF) in SLA, the controlled three-stage (composition/comparison-noticing/revision) study reported in this paper investigated the effects of two forms of direct CF (error correction and reformulation) on noticing and uptake, as evidenced in the written output produced by a…

A weblog (blog or Web log) has recently become one of the most widely used Internet applications. The current study concerns developing a blog specifically designed for learners learning English as a foreign language. The study investigated the effects of extensive writing by comparing the writing performance in the first three and the last three…

This study examined the effectiveness of reformulation and model text in a three-stage writing task (composing-comparison-revising) in an EFL writing class in a Beijing university. The study documented 10 university students' writing performance from the composing (Stage 1) and comparing (Stage 2, where students compare their own text to a…

When writers write, how do they decide to whom they are speaking? How does this decision affect writers' cognition about writing? Their motivation to write? In this article, I review literature on cognitive and social processes of writing, conceptualizations of audience, writing across distinct learning environments, and writers' motivations. I…

Students learned a strategy for planning, writing, and evaluating compare-contrast essays. Instruction followed the principles of self-regulated strategy development, which aims to improve knowledge about writing, strategic writing processes, self-regulation, and motivation. Six adolescent students, 3 with learning disabilities in writing and 3…

Includes "A Comment on Mervyn Nicholson's 'Reading Stevens' Riddles'", by Alberta C. Labriola; a response by Mervyn Nicholson; "A Comment on Marjorie Godlin Roemer's 'Which Reader's Response?'"; and a response by Marjorie Godlin Roemer. (JAD)