This study investigates the approaches adopted by students to a university writing programme designed to help them learn first-year undergraduate science. The research design includes phenomenographic analyses of 19 interviews and 50 open-ended questionnaires, as well as quantitative analyses of the qualitative data. The main results of the study…

A faculty member at the University of Toronto (Ontario) developed an informal survey designed to assess her undergraduate students' views of the writing they did during the course of their university studies. The survey consisted of a 2-page questionnaire that could be completed in 5 to 10 minutes; it was administered to 722 students during the…

This study examined the writing profiles of three Japanese writers with distinctly different writing experiences, investigating participants' school writing experiences and attitudes toward writing, characteristics of the composing process, and teaching implications. The three Japanese participants included an experienced writer in both Japanese…

Investigates cross-cultural tensions in Western writing pedagogy as reflected in Turkish teachers' oppositional and accommodative attitudes and how those attitudes played out in classroom interactions. Discusses teachers' perceptions concerning the effects of Western rhetorical styles on Turkish students' thinking and identity, assumptions…

Children's drawings about reading and writing have unrealized potential for helping uncover the literacy narratives students bring to school and use to make sense of reading and writing. In this article, we highlight how one boy's drawing about literacy revealed his interpretation of his school's policy on violence as a topic of writing, which…

A study assessed the impact of word processing on the writing of junior high school students, experienced in working with computers, for a number of tasks, including writing. Subjects, 111 eighth grade students in four communications arts classes at a Canadian middle-class suburban school, who had been using computers for writing for a year and a…

"Wahkohtowin," a Cree word meaning kinship or the state of being related, is a fundamental concept for understanding Indigenous culture and traditional beliefs (Ermine 2001). This article describes how three researchers in western Canada incorporated this concept into a research project that compared Indigenous and non-Indigenous…

An 18-month study examined the impact of word processors on the teaching and learning of writing in an area school on the South Island of New Zealand, with a special focus upon the writing development of 9 primary school children ranging in age from 8 years 11 months to 11 years 8 months. A wide range of data was collected on each pupil, including…

This paper considers the relationship between the "context of a situation" and the "metaphorically construed" reality within the transitivity paradigm of Systemic Functional Grammar. The research employed the transitivity model advanced by K. Davidse (1992) to examine the discourse of Japanese wartime (World War II) reporting…

A crossnational study compared secondary school boys' and girls' social (individual attitudinal, and family) and linguistics (type/frequency of oral conversations and test related activities) experience, and their relation to differential writing performance. Subjects included more than 1000 secondary students in their final year of compulsory…

This paper presents a case study of a young writer, a girl aged between 9 and 10 over the 6-month period analyzed. The writer accessed KidPub, a World Wide Web site that accepts stories submitted by or on behalf of children and young people under the age of 16 and publishes them, giving each story its own Web page. With the help of a mentor, the…

The Education Watch initiative is being implemented in the Solomon Islands by the Coalition on Education Solomon Islands (COESI) in partnership with Asian South Pacific Bureau of Adult Education (ASPBAE). COESI aims to generate a reliable body of information that will: (1) Accurately explain how much the national government has done and can do to…

This dissertation presents the construction and development of a thesis that investigates links between discourses of gender and the production of writing by girls at primary school. The research took place over three years in a one-teacher rural school in country Victoria (Australia). The girls were aged from four to twelve. The research…

Studied discrepancies between Canadian first-graders' home and school literacy contexts regarding the contexts' potential to promote self-regulated approaches to reading and writing. Examined the extent to which differences were reflected in the children's attitudes toward and engagement in reading and writing at school. Found some discontinuity…

Investigated Israeli Jewish and Arab fifth- and sixth-grade student perceptions of and attitudes to writing in three learning environments: cooperative learning, computer-mediated communication (CMC), and a combination of the two. Concludes that the power of peer interaction in cooperative learning with CMC was greater than each learning…