Problems in developing writing often comes from creative processes in developing ideas to write. Outlines are often recommended as a tool to help students organize their thoughts and structure their writing. This study aims to find out students' perceptions and the challenges the students encountered when writing an exposition text using provided…

Helping students recognize the value of humanistic inquiry can be challenging, especially in required courses. This essay presents a solution: an assignment in which students were asked to pitch one of the required readings to Netflix for adaptation. Through close readings of student responses and an analysis of the "so what" component…

Tinkering is a longstanding material practice that has gained popularity in recent years as a learning strategy at numerous schools, camps, and makerspaces. This article seeks to establish in composition pedagogy tinkering's playful, exploratory ethos by introducing a practice called "critical-creative tinkering." In critical-creative…

Providing written commentary on essays to students in English has long been a challenge for instructors. With increasing numbers of students being placed in classrooms, it can be difficult to deliver an adequate amount of feedback without taxing too much of teachers' time. Consequently, the author wanted to know what feedback students valued most…

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…

With the advent of online synopses, e-guides, and Internet study aids, millennial college students have many ways to evade direct interactions with the texts assigned in humanities classes. As a result, fewer and fewer of them are developing the analytical and close reading skills that college instructors value so highly. In this essay, the author…

An adaptation of the traditional literary concept of close reading was developed for use in a largely multilingual classroom in which both first language (L1) and second language (L2) students were struggling to comprehend theoretical, lexically dense texts in English. This simplified method of reading a text iteratively and critically is proving…

This study investigates the use of face-to-face and computer-mediated peer review in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing course to examine how different interaction modes affect comment categories, students' revisions, and their perceptions of peer feedback. The participants were an intact class of 13 students at a Taiwanese university.…

In her recent "Teaching English in the Two-Year College" ("TETYC") article, Denise Marchionda argues for a grading system in her first-year writing course that turns over responsibility to students for earning grades. The approach, which she calls "the point-by-point grading system," is a variation on a contract grading approach in which each…

The third goal of Zen practice, helping others achieve enlightenment, suggests that teachers should help students learn about their own composing practices and histories as part of their instruction, but they cannot help others until they learn to help themselves by reflecting on their own processes and histories, becoming enlightened, and…

English teachers encourage writing that opens college students to transformative learning through soul work as John Dirkx describes and develops the concept of soul work in his theory of transformative learning. This soul work involves the conscious attempt to bring to the surface myths, images, and metaphors from the unconscious through…

Almost all of the author's community college students feel self-conscious about their vocabulary. She thinks that their resistance to expanding their vocabulary has many tangled roots: sometimes the students seem nervous about what they leave behind as they notch their vocabulary up to a more formal, college level. This article discusses how the…

Understanding writing assignments is critical to college students' success as they transition from high school to postsecondary environments, but students with writing difficulties struggle to extrapolate required tasks from assignments presented in narrative form. The researcher examined the ability of students to identify assignment tasks when…

Middle school and high school students have a conception of what the basic demands of logic are, and they draw on this understanding in anticipating certain demands of parents and teachers when the adolescents have to defend positions. At the same time, many adolescents struggle to "write" highly elaborated arguments. Teaching students lessons in…

This essay is about the process of discovering and trying to help an exceptional student who was grappling with issues of real-life violence and incarceration and the desire to articulate their meaning to his life through writing. It describes how this student empowered himself to reflect on and deconstruct the meaning of his incarceration and how…