Inspired by Rebecca Oxford's thought-provoking reflections on language learning strategies, and particularly her orchestra metaphor on how the strategies work together, I conducted a study that seeks to understand how non-native writers employ, configure, sequence and combine individual writing strategies when creating a text in the target…

In this article, we share what we learned about undergraduates' struggles in writing quality summaries, comparison texts, and argumentative essays that were components of a unique course, Learning How to Learn. This course was designed to address core psychological issues that impede optimal learning for students from all majors, many of whom are…

Writing academic arguments is a complex and demanding task, even for proficient tertiary students. At the same time, providing prompt support for individual students working on discipline-specific arguments is often challenging for instructors. Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques enable automated and adaptive educational scaffolding. In this…

The aim of this study was to investigate pre-service science teachers' development of the quality of written arguments using science writing heuristic approach and pre-service science teachers' views about the science writing heuristic and its argument components in a General Biology Laboratory Course II. The study was carried out with 21…

Although many studies modelled writing quality by analysing basic skills (spelling, grammar, etc.), few focused on top-down compositional strategies at the discourse level. We propose that using both narrative and argument discourse modes in an argumentative essay (a multi-discourse mode [MDM] strategy) capitalizes on their complementary…

In this study, we focused on one particular challenge in argumentative writing based on multiple texts: evidence use. Specifically, we first examined undergraduate students' strategy reports when processing evidence presented in conflicting and comparably trustworthy texts. Both surface-level (i.e., restating) and deep-level (e.g., evaluation,…

This study investigates persuasive strategies used in the writings of Iranian university students in the field of teaching English as foreign language (TEFL). The study utilized the 7 principles of persuasive strategies presented by Cialdini (The psychology of persuasion, Quill William Morrow, New York 1984; Pre-suasion: A revolutionary way to…

Designed to gauge the actions, skills, and strategies that students use to identify, extract, and synthesize information from multiple source materials, integrated writing tasks are particularly challenging for ESL writers. Previous research tended to focus on a limited number of integrated tasks, mostly summaries of one or two sources, thus…

Argumentative writing is a fundamental aspect of undergraduate students' academic and scientific writing related to critical thinking and problem-solving skills. However, previous studies have shown that students face various difficulties with argumentative writing, such as unclear and illogical ideas, less-structured arguments, and unbalanced…

Past research of rhetoric has relied on simple binary comparisons between groups that either do, or do not, possess a cultural trait. While countries like Korea and the UAE may share cultural values such as an acceptance of unequal power relationships (power distance) and a preference for group action (collectivism), these traits vary in degrees…

The stagnation of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Writing scores demonstrates the need for research-based instruction that improves writing for all students, especially English learners. In this article, we synthesize the literature on effective instructional practices for this diverse group of learners and describe how these…

The present study aims to evaluate the effects of an argumentative writing strategy (POW+TREE) on four struggling ninth graders' ability to produce persuasive texts regarding their point of view on different questions. I applied a multiple-baseline design to evaluate outcomes across participants. The results indicate the intervention helped…

This article will discuss ways to use self-regulated strategy development for argumentative writing across content areas. The goal of self-regulated strategy development is for students to generalize the use of the strategy across settings, allowing them to become fluent and proficient writers in all areas. In addition, the generalization of the…

The present study explores the status of argumentative essay writing strategy use and identifies the problems a convenient sample of Iranian EFL learners face while writing argumentative essays in English. Adopting a complementary process-genre approach and a mixed-methods research design, the researcher designed a genre-specific argumentative…

Writing can be a challenging task for many students. This study offered 10 ninth-grade students (8 females, 2 males) with visual impairments located in the Western United States the opportunity to learn a mnemonic strategy for argumentative-essay writing called ARGUE: Analyze data; Review keywords and create sentences; Generate a plan; Use your…