Engaging college students in purposeful academic tasks designed to foster both reading and writing competencies requires calculated decision-making regarding the goals and benefits of the literacy tasks used in college courses. Consequently, we explore text reformulation as a literacy strategy that aims to enrich students' reading and writing…

Two hundred ninety-eight primary teachers (88% female) from across all Australian states and territories reported on the frequency with which they implemented instructional adaptations for struggling writers in their classrooms. They also rated their preparation and self-efficacy for teaching writing. The majority of participating teachers…

The purpose of this study was to explore the nature of interactions among second/foreign language (L2) writing subskills. Two types of relationships were investigated: subskill-item and subskill-subskill relationships. To achieve the first purpose, using writing data obtained from the writing essays of 500 English as a foreign language (EFL)…

Choosing a writing topic poses a particularly serious challenge for young learners. Topic selection affects all other steps of the writing process. Therefore, the writing topic should be related to a subject that the student knows about, is interested in, and can produce content on. Basing writing on students' immediate environment and experiences…

English is a demanding language for EFL students especially ones without access to additional support like tutorials, extra classes, and opportunities to use English in their daily lives. Scaffolding the writing process for students and making automatic use of genre knowledge would help them improve their English writing performance. Little is…

Recount text is included within the curriculum of English subjects in the Indonesian context, where students are expected to be well-informed and be able to compose a good recount text to express themselves. The current study aimed at analyzing the recount text written by an advanced (C1 level of English) student based on the concept of Systemic…

The Institute for Education Sciences identifies main idea and summarization instruction as effective practices for improving adolescent students' reading comprehension. Main idea generation is a higher-level comprehension skill that requires students to read the text, connect information across the paragraph or section, determine the most…

Background: Writing is an important and complex skill, which could be enhanced by teaching students effective writing strategies such as outlining. Electronic outlining - integrated feature in Microsoft® Word -- has been shown to enhance students' writing performance. However, little is known about the optimal didactic approach for electronic…

The purpose of the study was to examine how disciplinary literacy instruction influenced the quality of science informational text produced by second-grade students (N = 45) using the compare/contrast and the sequence text structures. The instruction took place over eight weeks with two four-week units, and with three 30-minute lessons provided…

The present study examines the ways Chinese high school EFL learners organize information in their writing. A class of 50 students at grade 9 from a local high school in Guangzhou, China, were recruited as participants. The students' writing at grade 9 was collected as a corpus, comprising ten writing tasks from different text types. In order to…

Informational text writing is a complex task requiring multiple literacy skills, such as reading and comprehending source material, identifying important information, and transforming ideas to meet the goals for the new writing task. The "Structures Writing" intervention was developed to improve the informational text writing skills of…

Informational text writing is a complex task requiring multiple literacy skills, such as reading and comprehending source material, identifying important information, and transforming ideas to meet the goals for the new writing task. The "Structures Writing" intervention was developed to improve the informational text writing skills of…

Mastering analytical writing involves the proficient use of varied later-acquired grammatical, lexical and discourse forms and functions. Developmental studies have identified specific linguistic features as diagnostic of increasing proficiency. This study examines how these features change throughout educational levels and before and after the…

Writing skills are essential for success in the 21st-century school and workplace, but most classrooms devote far more time to reading instruction, with writing often addressed in isolation or excluded. In this insightful professional development resource and text, leading researchers discuss why and how to integrate writing and reading…

A novel instrument, the Features of Excellent Arguments task (FEXA), was developed to elicit adolescents' judgments about argumentative essays displaying to varying degrees features characteristic of strong persuasive writing: academic language, rich evidence, multiple perspectives, and rhetorical appeal. We collected students' categorical choices…