Research was conducted to ascertain if an essay-writing strategy was effective at improving the achievement on essay tests for 7th- and 8th-grade students with reading and writing disabilities. Students were assigned via a stratified random sample to treatment or control group. Student scores were also compared to students without learning…

This article addresses the impetus for joining and maintaining writing groups in academe. The authors consider the motivations and purposes for organizing and forming such groups. Revealing the complexities of writing both as profession and in pursuit of the profession, they analyze their experiences as collaborative writers. They examine the…

Metadiscourse is a new and interesting field of inquiry which is believed to play a vital role in organizing and producing persuasive writing, based on the norms and expectations of people involved. Metadiscourse embodies the idea that writing and speaking are more than just the communication of ideas and presentation of ideational meaning. Rather…

The ways in which learning graphical representations can encourage the development of creativities in Chinese young children remain to be fully explored. Previous research on children's writing focused on children's symbolization with syllabic languages, providing little information regarding Chinese young children's symbolization and creative…

The role of a professional and creative writing degree is to provide resources, structured workshops, professional interactions--and the potential for creative risk. Opportunities for risk, within the structured environment of the university, challenge the individual's perspectives and judgements, as well as their ability to analyse and to reflect…

The purpose of this paper is to develop different guided writing strategies based on media richness theory and further evaluate the effects of these writing strategies on younger students' writing attitudes in terms of motivation, enjoyment and anxiety. A total of 66 sixth-grade elementary students with an average age of twelve were invited to…

In this article, we propose to link the study of writing-to-learn to the theory of aptitude-treatment interaction (ATI). In an experimental study we examined the effects of a course on ''Writing-to-learn about literary stories'' consisting of writing tasks adapted to either a planning or a revising writing strategy. We hypothesized that the…

Reflecting on the influence of English nursery rhyme poems on one individual Asian child's language development, the paper reviews current studies on the socio-cultural dynamics of creativity, to examine how these theoretical and empirical investigations may help shape specific pedagogical practices in the expressive language arts in a Hong Kong…

It is hypothesized in the present study that when learners are tasked to write a composition in a second language (such as English language for Filipinos), they use specific approaches to learning and eventually undergo self-regulatory processes. The present study tested a model showing the shift from process to outcome in writing (Zimmerman &…

This study compared two techniques for teaching middle school students to compose from expository text sources, a common but difficult academic writing task. Classroom social studies content was used. Text structure instruction (TSI), which focused on text characteristics using graphic organizers, was compared with PLAN & WRITE for Summarization…

Students at the University of Edinburgh do almost all their work on computers, but at the end of the semester they are examined by handwritten essays. Intuitively it would be appealing to allow students the choice of handwriting or typing, but this raises a concern that perhaps this might not be "fair"--that the choice a student makes,…

Collocations are of great importance for second language learners, and a learner's knowledge of them plays a key role in producing language fluently (Nation, 2001: 323). In this article we describe and evaluate an innovative system that uses a Web-derived corpus and digital library software to produce a vast concordance and present it in a way…

Two studies focusing on the development and validation of the Online Self-Regulated Learning Inventory (OSRLI) were conducted. The OSRLI is a self-report instrument assessing the human interaction dimension of online self-regulated learning. It consists of an affect/motivation scale and an interaction strategies scale. In Study 1, exploratory…

A multiple-probe across-subjects design was used to examine persuasive writing performance of six 2nd- through 5th- grade students with emotional/behavior disorders (EBD). Students' writing was evaluated before and after self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) instruction for the POW (Pick my idea, Organize my notes, Write and say more) + TREE…

Teachers across the country consider the best methods to teach writing in the middle school and high school. They aspire for students to produce writing aimed at real audiences and purposes, writing that follows the author's thinking and leads readers to discoveries about the topic. Many teachers believe that a formula in writing could offer…