Writing practices are seen to be essential for professional engineers, yet many engineering students and academics struggle with written communication, despite years of interventions to improve student writing. Much has been written about the importance of getting engineering students to write, but there has been a little investigation of…

Effective feedback is an essential tool for making learning explicit and an essential feature of classroom practice that promotes learner autonomy. Yet, it remains a pressing challenge for teachers to scaffold the active involvement of students as critical, reflective and autonomous learners who use feedback constructively. This paper seeks to…

Writing is a complex and learned activity in that it requires us to shape our thoughts into words and texts that are appropriate for the purpose, audience and medium of a variety of communicative forms. Writers must constantly make decisions about how to represent their subject matter and themselves through language. In this way, writing can be…

Presents an instructional unit, "Literary Lifeboat," a purposeful writing exercise in which students write character justifications for familiar stories. Describes the unit's implementation in a Year 5 class, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the exercise. (MM)

In this paper, we analyse teachers' judgments of students' written texts. We document how teachers use evidence in ways that depend both on their knowledge of the students and on the assessment framework they need to use. We analyse teachers' judgments by contrasting the structures of assessments made using teachers' normal classroom judgment…

This paper investigates the approaches taken to essay writing by five Asian international students at an Australian university. Analysis of their in-depth interviews reveals links between their perceptions of learning, their perceptions of essay writing, their motivation for completing the task, and their awareness of the structural conventions of…

A publication of the Primary English Teaching Association of Australia, this book argues that children should be taught how to write in the various genres or kinds of writing that are needed for different purposes. The contributors draw on their own experiences to show how teachers can develop their teaching of writing to realize the full…

A unit used in an Australian school to teach English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students how to write a discussion is described. The 3-week unit was planned and implemented jointly by an ESL resource teacher, class teacher, and teacher librarian. The class was divided into three heterogeneous groups, two of which were observed for this study and…

Specifically intended to address the teaching of spelling, this description of an elementary school program in Australia deals with many of the pedagogical problems that arise in whole language classrooms, and suggests ways for teachers to integrate a process approach to spelling with process writing to create a total language program. Following…

This text tries to explain what students need to learn to read and write in tertiary academic settings in Australia and to suggest some ways of teaching them. An introduction maps out what this text contains and summarizes the main features of the approach used to teach adults how to read and write academic discourse. The next section describes…

Exploring questions about how the classroom environment affects young learners, this book describes how young children from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds have coped with the conditions surrounding them in process oriented writing classrooms. Chapter 1 describes the kinds of activities in which children engage in seemingly chaotic…