In university-level composition courses, assignment prompts are fundamental in shaping students' understanding of major writing projects. Aiming to be instructive and descriptive while also clear and concise, instructors use a series of moves (Swales, 1990) and modals in writing assignment prompts to express requirements, suggestions, and…

Students as Partners (SaP) approaches have gained more and more traction in higher education in recent years (Dai & Matthews, 2022). Rooted in values such as reciprocity and shared responsibility, SaP can offer opportunities for internationalizing the curriculum and departing from traditional teacher-student hierarchies (Green & Baxter,…

Nationwide, over half of higher education faculty are mid-career. While they play vital roles sustaining their institutions, relatively little systematic attention has been paid to meeting their particular needs. This paper describes a professional renewal retreat program tailored to this "keystone" group of faculty (Chang, 2006). It is…

As demand for English-medium higher education continues to grow internationally and participation in higher education increases, the need for a better understanding of academic writing is pressing. Prior university wide taxonomies of student writing have relied on intuition, the opinions of faculty, or data from course documentation and task…

As the number of publications in the biomedical field continues its exponential increase, techniques for automatically summarizing information from this body of literature have become more diverse. In addition, the targets of summarization have become more subtle; initial work focused on extracting the factual assertions from full-text papers,…

Two experiments examined effects of content and rhetorical prompts on undergraduates' writing processes and the quality of their writing. Found that content prompts extended time spent writing and related to improved text quality. Rhetorical prompts demonstrated some influence on planning and global text quality only when presented during domain…

Cuing, organization, and reduction constraints were systematically manipulated in a descriptive passage presented to 120 undergraduate students. Results showed strong effects for cuing on written summary qualities. Performance across treatment combinations on all four outcome measures was far below ceiling level. (Author/BS)

A study which defines some easily measurable syntactic and semantic cues within student essays that predict and perhaps determine readers' responses. (DD)

Experiments conducted with freshman composition students suggested that (1) the repeated use of a control stimulus passage does not result in increased syntactic complexity; (2) both overt and covert cues elicit more complex writing than do no-cue situations; and (3) the effect of overt cues seems to be retained, at least across a short duration.…

While assessing students' needs for a new approach to the issue of plagiarism, it is interesting to note that historically attitudes towards plagiarism have not always been negative. The problem of plagiarism may really be the problem of finding a proper mix between the ideas of the speaker and the ideas of those that have preceded the speaker.…

This study investigated the preferences of students of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) for the form in which a writing prompt is given. Subjects were 142 college students with intermediate to advanced English language skills. Each student was offered 10 potential essay topics, each containing a prompt in the form of either a…

Investigates the degree to which teacher cues help students correct their own errors in English-as-a-foreign-language written compositions and what kinds of cues are more effective in self-correction. Sixty-two Japanese college students were sampled. (Contains nine references.) (JL)

Presents a four-task typology (concept, relation, process, argumentation) of essay examination prompts, based on study of 284 prompts used in 15 academic departments at Western Illinois University, and shows how it can be used to help foreign students sharpen their English-language essay examination-taking skills. (CB)