Concern about the research and writing abilities of undergraduate students led to the development, implementation and enhancement of four sequential writing assignments in an introductory course. These writing assignments--which included a report on an interview of a professional in the field, a research paper on an aspirational career, a research…

Poor quality writing skills among undergraduate geography students is a significant concern among university instructors. This article reports on a multipronged strategy aimed at improving student writing in a large, first-year human geography course. The strategy emphasized ways to provide effective feedback through teaching assistant training,…

This paper reports on a writing program to support academic staff to publish in peer-refereed journals. Nine participants completed a 12-week program, which involved regular meetings, set writing tasks, and peer feedback on drafts. A pre- and post-survey and follow-up interviews were used to gather feedback. Participants especially valued the…

Google Docs, a free web-based version of Microsoft Word, offers collaborative features which can be used to facilitate collaborative writing in a foreign language classroom. The current study compared writing abilities of students who collaborated on writing assignments using Google Docs with those working in groups in a face-to-face classroom.…

Freud asking whether psychoanalysis could be taught in the university, and then whether it could be learned, provides an occasion for asking about the emotional uses of theory. The paper draws from literature, clinical writing and pedagogy to build a psychoanalytic discussion of teaching and learning that takes seriously phantasies of knowledge…

This study examined L2 (German) awareness in intermediate American college learners of German through their judgments of 15 texts that had been authored by either native speakers (NS) or non-native speakers (NNS) or had been created through Web-Based Machine Translation (WBMT). The specific objectives sought to investigate: (a) how learners…

The Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT) is a test jointly administrated by the College Board and National Merit Scholarship Corporation, which is used to prepare high school students for the SAT, and as initial screening for numerous scholarships (Marini, Mattern, & Shaw, 2011). Previous research has…

Using a social cognitive theory framework, this single-subject, correlational study examined to what extent writing self-regulation, writing efficacy, hope, and writing hope predicted first-year college students' writing abilities. Past research reveals that a large part of teaching students to be successful in completing writing tasks is related…

Drawing on the marketing literature, as well as the views of both marketing educators and current marketers in Canada, a survey was conducted of marketing practitioners to determine their top priorities for improvement in marketing education, as well as the key challenges in need of attention. An importance-performance analysis was carried out on…

The paper takes 414 graduates from ZJU in 2011 and 2012, NIT as a case, analyzing the status of their writing of graduation thesis. It is found that a considerable number of students have problems in selection and report of topics, writing of each part and debating in the whole process of graduation thesis. In view of the situation, based on the…

This study aimed to assess the pre-service teachers' knowledge of and ability to use text messaging, and assist their use of this technology in the classroom teaching context. Data were gathered by means of a questionnaire and text message exercises. Fifty-three pre-service teachers participated in the study. It was found that although different…

The purposes of this research were to: 1) to compare the effects of different sequences of feedback types on the students' writing ability and their effect size; 2) to compare the effects of the levels of general English proficiency (high, moderate, and low) on the students' writing ability and their effect size; 3) to investigate the interaction…

A much under-researched issue in higher education is the extent to which English-medium university courses help students improve their English proficiency in an ESL context. Adopting a longitudinal, mixed methods design in which quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed, the current study tracked English language improvement,…

A US sample (N = 360) of psychology educators assessed 73 writing skills and competencies with regard to (a) the importance of each and (b) the typical performance of the top half of local psychology majors. An analysis of gap scores yielded results showing that specific skills, such as supporting claims with citations and proofreading ability,…

Wikis, as one of the Web 2.0 social networking tools, have been increasingly integrated into second language (L2) instruction to promote collaborative writing. The current study examined and compared summary writing abilities between students learning by wiki-based collaboration and students learning by traditional face-to-face collaboration.…