This report examines the recommended minimum instruction time in full-time compulsory general education in 2016/17 in 42 European education systems. It includes national diagrams illustrating the data by country and by subject. The comparative overview examines the policy changes that have taken place over the last year regarding the recommended…

We investigated the relationship between 28 teachers' theoretical orientations to writing instruction and self-reported instructional practices and student writing performance. First-, second-, and third-grade teachers completed the Teacher Writing Orientation Scale developed by Graham, Harris, MacArthur, and Fink (2002) and reported the frequency…

The Young Writers Program (YWP) is the latest writing workshop to be developed for the classroom. It challenges students to choose a topic and write a novel-length piece based on that topic, without worrying about spelling or grammar. While the foundation of this philosophy is solid, the support and structure of the Young Writers Program website…

In second language writing, not much attention has been given to the English as a foreign language (EFL) primary context. This short research report describes the implementation of a writing curriculum project in a primary school in Hong Kong, where a team of EFL teachers attempted to overhaul the traditional product approach and implemented…

Purpose: Given that there exists in the literature relatively little research into the effectiveness of writing centers at universities, the purpose of this paper is to show the impact of university writing centers on first-year business seminar student writing. Design/methodology/approach: This quantitative study involved 315 first-year…

Writing is central to academic development, permeates content area coursework and serves as both a vehicle for and a display of learning. For English learners (ELs), writing poses challenges, and teachers need preparation in how to understand and respond to these. This study reports 5 teacher inquiry processes that preservice teachers in one…

This longitudinal case study, supplemented by cross-sectional comparisons among five groups of writers with differing backgrounds, investigates how Natsu, a Japanese multilingual writer, developed her L1, L2 (English), and L3 (Chinese) writing competence over two and a half years. To create a comprehensive picture of this multilingual writer, the…

Students with emotional behavioral disorders (EBD) are well known for their challenging, demanding, unpredictable, and difficult behaviors. Many students with EBD exhibit significant academic deficits, especially in writing. Writing instruction is challenging for teachers because they lack knowledge of the writing process, strategies, and…

Despite the efforts of a number of national organizations focused on improving writing literacy, there has been little improvement in student writing skills over the past decade to keep pace with the growing demands of the workplace. Based on constructivist learning theory and the belief that students become better writers through continuous…

By the upper elementary grades, writing becomes an essential tool both for learning and for showing what you know. Students who struggle significantly with writing are at a terrible disadvantage. Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate that only 25% of students can be classified as competent writers; students with…

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Practice Guide, "Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers," offers educators four specific, evidence-based recommendations that address the challenge of teaching writing in elementary school. This summary focuses on the first of the four recommendations: Providing adequate time for…

When being a student in grade school as well as in high school (1934-1946), grammar was heavily emphasized in English/language arts classes, particularly in grades four through the senior year in high school. Evidently, teachers and school administrators then saw a theoretical way to assist pupils in writing achievement. Grammar and writing were…

A yearlong classroom-based intervention was designed to explore the reading-writing connection in second-language literacy by examining whether the development of reading improves writing and vice versa. Middle school learners of English as a foreign language (N = 300) in South Korea were assigned to three treatments that involved extensive…

Mina Shaughnessy continues to exert powerful influences over Basic Writing practices, discourses and pedagogy thirty-five years after her death: Basic Writing remains in some ways trapped by Shaughnessy's legacy in what Min-Zhan Lu labeled as essentialism, accommodationism and linguistic innocence. High-stakes writing tests, a troubling hallmark…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of implementing the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model of instruction (Graham & Harris, 2005; Harris & Graham, 1996) on the writing skills and knowledge of six first grade students. A multiple-baseline design across participants with multiple probes (Kazdin, 2010) was…