High school students for whom English is a second language (L2) often struggle with effective text revision because of limited ability to self-regulate their writing, that is, to manage the subprocesses of writing and to use writing-related knowledge and strategies. To help students in China acquire effective text revision skills for English…

This article centers on Faith, a Latinx bilingual student who, because of her failure to pass a standardized exam in English language arts, had to repeat 11th-grade English. Despite this stigma of being a "repeater," during the year-long ethnographic study I conducted in her classroom, Faith proved to be an insightful and critical reader…

In most assessments of students' argumentive writing and in most research on the topic, students write on topics for which they have no specific prior preparation. We examined development in the argumentive writing urban middle school students did as part of a two-year dialogic-based intervention in which students engaged deeply with a series of…

This study investigates the direct and/or indirect effects of some cognitive (working memory capacity) and affective (writing anxiety and writing self-efficacy) variables on the complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) of second language (L2) learners' writings. To achieve this goal, 232 upper-intermediate English learners performed an automated…

Peter, an African American writer from a low-income community, is followed across a 10-year period as he progresses from first grade through high school. Drawing on writing samples and interviews, the author identifies a set of interrelated dispositions that contribute to his development of "habitus" as a writer. This article considers…

Based on eighth-grade writing assessment data from the 1998 (N = 20,586) and 2007 (N = 139,900) National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), this study examines the relationships among students' writing attitudes, learning-related behaviors, and gender in relation to writing performance. Overall, the effects of attitudes were slightly…

Recently, scholars have suggested that "second-language writers" are made up of two distinct groups: Generation 1.5 (long-term U.S.-resident language learners) and more traditional L2 students (e.g., international or recently arrived immigrants). To investigate that claim, this study compares the first-year composition writing of…