Integrated writing tasks have gained considerable attention in ESL and EFL writing assessment and are frequently needed and used in academic settings and daily life. However, they are very rarely practiced and promoted in writing classes. This paper explored the effects of source-based writing practice on EFL learners' composing abilities and…

Writing educators have long sought to disrupt academic convention. However, we currently know little about students' affective experiences when they are asked to compose differently. This article explores the results of a research study to illuminate the feelings and attitudes students experience when convention is disrupted and offers pedagogical…

Most second language researchers agree that there is a role for corrective feedback in second language writing classes. However, many unanswered questions remain concerning the linguistic features to target and the type and amount of feedback to offer. This study examined essays by 151 learners of English as a second language (ESL), in order to…

Undergraduate students' experience of assessment in universities is usually of summative assessment which provides only limited information to help students improve their performance. By contrast, formative assessment is informative and forward-looking, possessing the leverage to inform students of their day-to-day progress and inform teachers of…

This article examines how students develop an effective macrostructure with supporting arguments in academic writing. We base the study on theory developed about macrostructures. The study focuses on components of macrostructure-building through tutor-tutee dialogic communication. We draw from work on the role of speech for and within written…

Although most of the writing in high school English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms is about literature and although there have been incessant calls for changing the practices of teaching and learning literature, only meager amounts of research have been conducted in these interrelated domains of the field. Accordingly, this dissertation seeks to…

Writing has been assumed to be the most problematic language skill for ESL/EFL learners (Ting, 2003; Ong, 2011) and even for native speakers (Norrish, 1983). Apparently, Prommas and Sinwongsuwat (2011:77) stated that writing is more challenging than speaking since in written communication there is no extra means of help in terms of nonverbal…

This study investigates how and whether information about students' writing can be recovered from basic behavioral data extracted during their sessions in an intelligent tutoring system for writing. We calculate basic and time-sensitive keystroke indices based on log files of keys pressed during students' writing sessions. A corpus of prompt-based…

This study brings together three student comments and three theoretical constructs taken from Bakhtin's (1981) collection of essays "The Dialogic Imagination", written in the 1930s. Bakhtin's concepts of the chronotope, interanimation and the monologic provide lenses on a shifting student perspective on authoritative writing in…

This article presents an argument for the "re-turn" of essayist literacy in multimedia and multiliteracy contexts. For its democratic, pedagogical, and intellectual potential, essayist literacy is too important to be removed from composition curriculum, but it needs to be re-imagined within a diversity of essay traditions, including the…

There is a large population of students who enter postsecondary institutions underprepared in the area of writing, which can negatively affect their academic success in various disciplines. Lack of alignment between secondary and postsecondary education writing curricula is a common cause of why students are underprepared in writing. Identifying…

The paper examines the connection between discursive and non-discursive features and the construction of writer identity. In particular, the paper compares and contrasts the writer identity development of two groups of undergraduate students of applied linguistics in the Mexican context, one made up of locally educated ones and the other composed…

The present quasi-experimental study aimed at investigating the impact of trained and untrained peer feedback on students' written comment types and writing quality. Significant differences were found in terms of comment types provided: trained students provided a significantly higher number of comments focused on organization and content (global…

In an age when students are increasingly expected to demonstrate technology-based writing proficiency, fluency challenges with word processing programs can pose a barrier to successful writing when students are asked to compose using these tools. The current study was designed to determine whether differences existed in typing fluency and digital…

Nurturing critical thinking (CT) has been acknowledged as a core objective of tertiary education, and drawn attention from academia of teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in China. The thrust of the present study was to determine the association between CT and EFL argumentative writing among Chinese undergraduates. To this end, 110…