Writing is a difficult task for most students. Only 27% of all students in America can write proficiently at or above grade level (U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, 2012). With the recent adoption of rigorous standards (i.e., Common Core State Standards, Next Generation Science Standards), secondary students are…

Blended learning has been talked about a lot in contemporary higher education and seen as the perfect solution for improving the quality of learning. In spite of the widespread support of acceptance this approach has gained, it is admitted that there is no single standard formula for a successful blended learning program, and thus more cases of…

Writing textbooks for English language learners frequently teach a paragraph pattern that is limited to topic sentence, support, and concluding sentence. Although beginning second language (L2) writers benefit from having a structured way to organize their ideas, as they advance, this type of writing can sound trite and uncritical. To provide a…

The five-paragraph essay is a hard genre to love. Its inverted-triangle intro has enlightened us with too many "dawns" of some monolithic "man." It reduces arguments, which tend to be rather subtle creatures, to the confines of a single-sentence thesis. It confects arguments in bland triplicate structure, as if any claim could…

The aim of this study is to investigate issues of Indonesian EFL students' writing skills, covering ability, problem and reason why they got problems in writing comparison and contrast essay. The convergent parallel of mixed methods was used to explore these issues by involving 52 EFL students of IAIN Samarinda who enrolled the academic essay…

In this study, we propose a link between L2 rhetorical concepts and ELF as a way of the analysis of the development of a single concept, of an EFL college student's rhetorical knowledge. Using Vygotskian sociocultural theory as analytical lenses, we examine whether L2 rhetoric can be mastered and internalized as a culturally neutral concept, i.e.,…

Corrective feedback in learning English as a foreign language (EFL), especially in writing skills, has been investigated for years. Feedback is in various modes, including direct, indirect, electronic, and conferencing between teachers and students. The current study attempted to apply teacherstudent conferencing feedback to a class of non-English…

The present study investigated the effects of a multicomponent intervention on the writing behavior of adolescents with writing difficulties. A single-case design consisting of a combination of multiple-probe design across participants and pre-post test was used. Four participants completed two intervention phases: (a) sentence instruction and…

The author, who teaches the English Methods class in the credential program, knew from entries in students' Writer's Reader's Notebooks (Rief) that they were struggling with the articles assigned about a five-paragraph essay. Following a discussion of form-first instruction and CCSS assessments, this article provides concrete suggestions for…

Different approaches have been used to teach EFL students summary writing, including a genre-based approach (Chen & Su, 2012), implementing key words and question generation (Chou, 2012), and automatic scaffolding and concept mapping (Yang, 2015). This study aims to explore the effectiveness of another approach--one that might be more…

The use of writing models with nonnative English speakers has received a certain amount of criticism--especially from teachers whose students copy models in their entirety or follow them too closely. The misuse of models has brought some teachers to the point where they believe that the best kind of pedagogy is to abandon writing models…

This paper reports the findings of an action research that was carried out to measure the effectiveness of integrating a social networking website "Edmodo" in students' writing performance in an EFL classroom at Arab Open University (Oman Branch). The participants were 25 students studying English in the Foundation Programme. Along with…

This quasi-experimental study probed the effects of implementing cooperative learning method (CLM) on paragraph writing in terms of content, vocabulary, layout, grammar, and mechanics. The participants of the study were grade 11 students at Yekatit 12 Preparatory School, Ethiopia. The CLM (experimental) group was taught paragraph writing skills in…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of an intervention in which teacher-led instruction was combined with computerized writing software to improve paragraph writing for three middle school students with intellectual disability. A multiple probe across participants design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the…

This paper reports the findings of an action research that was carried out to measure the effectiveness of integrating a social networking website "Edmodo" in students' writing performance in an EFL classroom at Arab Open University (Oman Branch). The participants were 25 students studying English in the Foundation Programme. Along with…