The story of Enlightenment literacy is often reconstructed from textbooks and manuals, with the implicit focus being what children were reading. But far less attention has been devoted to how they mastered the scribal techniques that allowed them to manage knowledge on paper. Focusing on Scotland, handwritten manuscripts are used to reveal that…

Revision is a challenging step of the writing process and students often focus their attention to mechanics or grammar instead of making organizational and meaning changes. It is important for students to critically read and independently evaluate their work when revising. This practitioner article discusses the importance of genre-specific…

A growing body of academic literacies research has enhanced our understanding of university writing as contested, institutionally situated practice with important consequences, particularly for students as they learn to negotiate the writing demands of university study. Less empirical attention has been paid to the practices of subject academics…

Historical attitudes to literary creativity often focus on it as a genetic or innate characteristic. Ericsson's notion of 'deliberate practice' and Simon & Chase's 'ten-year rule', however, have shown the importance of sustained practice to achieve high-level performance. The iceberg illusion of elite performance leaves observers marvelling at…

Academically underprepared postsecondary students make up a large proportion of college campuses. Recent estimates indicate that up to 70 percent of incoming students at two-year community colleges and up to 40 percent of incoming students at four-year colleges enroll in developmental courses. There has been some criticism of the effectiveness of…

The paper presents the results of a randomized experimental study of a writing curriculum for college developmental writing courses based on strategy instruction with self-regulation integrated with practices common in college composition. Students in a full semester course learned strategies for planning and revising based on rhetorical analysis…

Courses: Any communication course requiring a literature review, including, but is not limited to, Communication Research Methods and Communication Theory. Objectives: After completing this activity, students should be able to write better literature reviews by (1) locating a range of resources; (2) identifying a variety of relevant information…

Research on academic literacies has predominately focused on writing practices in higher education. To account for writing practices in the digital age, this paper emphasizes the importance of extending the focus of academic literacies beyond writing to include multimodal composition. Drawing on social semiotics, we put forward a framework for…

English writing is one of the four indispensable skills that English learners need to master, but unfortunately, many Chinese college students have much difficulty composing clear, concise and coherent essays although they have studied English for at least over six years. To address the problem, the researchers and teachers in China have tried…

In this three-month qualitative study, 36 pre and in-service teachers were invited to create and write poems from four idea bundles (e.g., the mixed bundle, the verbal bundle, the visual bundle, and the arranged bundle) in response to four picture book read alouds that address themes of abandonment (Wild, 2006), homelessness (Wild, 2007),…

While the concept of reflection is not new to education, researchers suggest that students be given more space to engage in meaning-making activities (Sambrook & Willmott, 2014). In recent years, there has been an increased emphasis placed in education on self-reflection. In part, because of Donald Schon's (1983, 1987) work on…

In the area of written expression, students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) typically perform one to two grades below their same age, non-disabled peers. Unfortunately, there is a lack of research on writing interventions to improve these outcomes. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of a persuasive writing strategy…

This study aimed at applying English reading and writing strategies' training to improve the low English proficiency students' competence of English reading and writing. It was a quasi-experiment design. In total, 70 non-English major undergraduates at a private university in China participated in the research, 35 students in the experimental…

The present study was undertaken to measure the metacognitive writing awareness of university-Flevel learners. The participants of the study are 101 students of English Language and Literature, enrolled at a state university in Turkey. The grade level of the students ranges from the first grade to the fourth grade. In order to collect data, a…

With the adoption of the "Common Core State Standards" many social studies teachers are faced with the task of very intentionally integrating writing instruction into their content curriculum. While this task may be daunting, there are research-based instructional frameworks to help teachers implement strategies to support student…