While it is argued that use of rubrics and exemplars has the potential to develop students' ability to distinguish quality, make evaluative judgments and take productive action, few studies have directly investigated the latter. To address this gap the current study employed classroom observations, eight focus groups interviews with 18 students…

While teacher assessment and student engagement are emerging topics in the field of second language (L2) writing, little is known about the possible correlations between the two important constructs. This mixed-methods study first surveyed the perceived teacher assessment approaches among L2 learners whose majors are English, Japanese and French…

The author invited two teachers affiliated with their graduate program in literacy to explore how children's social identities impacted students' reading process. The teachers, Taylor and Dana, worked in urban elementary charter schools in New York City, at the time. The participants agreed to share samples from their classrooms to illustrate how…

This paper discusses the development and implementation of a locally-sourced corpus to address the specific needs of an ESL writing program. The paper begins with a description of the motivation and development of the "Corpus of Ohio Learner and Teacher English" (COLTE), a large in-house corpus consisting of assessed ESL student writing…

As an important instructional affordance, teacher written feedback is widely used in second language (L2) writing contexts. While copious evidence has shown that such a pedagogical practice can facilitate L2 learners' writing performance, especially their writing accuracy, little is known about how novice writing teachers conceptualize and enact…

A limited mixed-method study revealed that students could alter written style after direct style instruction, but the effect faded quickly. Instead, students reverted to culturally structured intuition to make conscious, contrary choices. Thus, direct instruction in precise forms of style should probably yield to methods that build culturally…

What started as a mission to help the author's journalism students develop employability skills, opened up their practice to the area of 'mindful play'. From this, the author started to develop a creative, holistic and student-centred teaching and learning strategy, using simple, workable interventions to stimulate dialogic learning, strengthen…

One task of Feiman-Nemser's teacher learning model--develop tools and dispositions to study teaching--frames how we organized learning opportunities during teacher preparation. We explored how and to what degree preservice teachers used teacher inquiry to analyze linguistically diverse students' work through an asset-based lens, beyond deficit…

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…

Research on peer assessment in higher education has been conducted for decades. However, ways to improve the quality of peer feedback and optimise student' benefits through peer assessment remain a puzzle. The present study aimed to examine the impacts of synchronous discussion between assessors and assessees on writing performance, qualitative…

This study identified and analyzed the common linguistic errors encountered by Linguistics, Literature, and Advertising Arts majors in their Thesis Proposal classes in the First Semester 2016-2017. The data were the drafts of the thesis proposals of the students from the three different programs. A total of 32 manuscripts were analyzed which was…

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…

Creative thinking is sometimes neglected by schools. Introducing philosophy in schools represents a commitment to balancing the development of logical and creative thinking, currently exercised only orally. In the present study, the focus is on writing. Firstly, the value of authentic pupil writings is underscored. The pupils and students studied…

Motivated by a fear that she may have plagiarized, the author considers the possibility that plagiarism might be understood as a transgression against reading as well as against writing. Drawing on Philip Eubanks's work in "Metaphor and Writing," the article proposes that one reason for composition studies' ambivalent relationship to…

Students in upper-level courses are expected to observe disciplinary conventions in writing assignments. Common recommendations for teaching conventions require substantial time for instructor feedback and in-class instruction. As an alternative, we tested the effectiveness of a checklist in improving students' performance of these conventions.…