Many students struggle when they are asked to write. They may feel the lack of ideas, or they believe their ideas are not good enough. Prewriting techniques (e.g., brainstorming, clustering, and freewriting) help students develop their ability to think and their confidence in generating ideas. Collaborative prewriting activities expand students'…

Finding free, level-appropriate texts that can be shared with students--and that have no copyright issues--is a challenge. English language teachers often have to build their own collection of paper-based or online texts by purchasing them and making copies or creating texts entirely on their own, which takes time that many teachers do not have.…

As students move from writing personal essays to writing formal academic texts in English, they face several new challenges. Writing tasks in higher education often require students to draw upon outside sources and to adopt the styles and genres of academic discourse. They must conduct research, summarize and paraphrase, cite sources, adopt genre…

Social-interactive Writing for English Language Learners (SWELL) is collaborative writing based on Topping's Paired Writing Method. The method was changed to meet the needs of English language learners. In both methods, pairs are formed according to proficiency, pairing a more advanced student (a Helper) with a less advanced one (a Writer). The…