In this article, we identify eight common error patterns of nascent writers when they attempt to navigate the pathway to scholarly writing. We illustrate each error pattern via examples and counter-examples (corrections). We also describe how to identify such patterns, why those patterns might occur and persist, and why each pattern is…

An understanding of noun positions in sentences can correct many recurring problems in the writing of English language learners. This article outlines an approach for anticipating and preventing these sorts of errors while providing a framework to explain the errors to students. For this approach to be successful, students need to have an…

Research on the second writing process is not recent. Both first and second writing processes have been in the area of argument among scholars. It has been confirmed that both first and second writers nearly all practice similar physical activities pre-writing, during, and post writing stages; however, they still differ in the inner extra thinking…

We learn best by example--this adage is probably as old as teaching itself. In my own classroom, I have found that very often the students learn best from the "negative" examples. Perhaps, this shouldn't come as a surprise at all. After all, we don't react strongly to the norm--but an obvious deviation from the norm may attract our attention and…

In this essay, the author tries to look forward into the 21st century to divine three things: (i) What skills will researchers in the future need to solve the most pressing problems? (ii) What are some of the most likely candidates to be those problems? and (iii) What are some current areas of research that seem mined out and should not distract…

Large corpora such as the British National Corpus and the COBUILD Corpus and Collocations Sampler are now accessible, free of charge, online and can be usefully incorporated into a process writing approach to help develop students' writing skills. This article aims to familiarize readers with these resources and to show how they can be usefully…

Argues that the context of writing improvement helps explain writing error. Findings imply that undue efforts by teachers to prevent mistakes may hinder improvement. (RAE)

Based on the premise that teaching basic writing involves first understanding what tends to go wrong when students write, a computer assisted system of error prediction and analysis was designed to improve college students' writing skills in both English and French. Students were to complete a sequenced series of writing assignments first in…

Describes three pilot projects carried out with a special version of a computer-assisted language-learning activity, known as SEQUITUR, that seeks to develop awareness of cohesive devices and coherence features by displaying the start of a text and offering possible continuations. Usage logs of responses given by native and nonnative speakers of…