Large corpora such as the British National Corpus and the COBUILD Corpus and Collocations Sampler are now accessible, free of charge, online and can be usefully incorporated into a process writing approach to help develop students' writing skills. This article aims to familiarize readers with these resources and to show how they can be usefully…

This article presents practical suggestions and tasks to make it easier to teach second language academic writing at the college level. It discusses the necessity of a warm-up period in which learners produce first drafts in pairs or small groups and do peer error correction. The article offers tasks such as reacting to an academic review,…

Argues that comparing developments in the process approach to writing and the design methods movement sheds light on the evolution and future direction of the writing paradigm. Argues that sensitivity to the variety of writing tasks and social contexts is more effective than a single amorphous model. (RS)

Explores different modes of responding to student papers in two sections of an Introduction to Writing Process class for native and non-native speakers. Finds no significant differences in performance of the two sections, although students who received only positive comments frequently initiated their own corrections and seemed to gain greater…

Newspaper journalists have difficulty experiencing much writing apprehension since fast deadlines makes these writers become comfortable with their raw copy. Such a sense of comfort and confidence are necessary for survival and success in the newspaper business. Writing research shows that writers produce better writing if the topic interests…

A study compared the effectiveness of two antithetical approaches to teaching writing (formal grammar instruction and the process approach) on students' knowledge of grammar and writing improvement. Subjects, 70 college students randomly assigned to four sections of a first-year writing course, were divided into treatment and control groups. The…

Contrasts a recent collection of "best" student essays with a report reviewing a 1929 test in English that was used for making college admissions decisions. Concludes that writing teachers have been as much or more interested in who they want their students to be as in what they want their students to write. (RS)

Studies the effects of word processing on the composing processes of six basic writers. Concludes that quantity and quality of revisions are not likely to increase, that word processing initially causes many interventions in composing, and that better writers are more likely to use word processing programs in advantageous ways. (RS)

This comparative study evaluated the writing growth of 97 college freshman before and after instruction to determine if a process-centered mode of teaching had a more significant impact than a traditional form-centered mode of instruction on discourse coherence in composition. The study used a pretest/posttest, quasi-experimental design with both…

The controversy over two approaches to writing instruction in English as a Second Language (ESL), product and process orientations, is reviewed based on articles appearing in the Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages' quarterly professional journal from 1982-1991. In the process-oriented approach, instructional practices emphasize the…

A study at Hong Kong University explored the use of the word processor as a writing tool in enhancing a process approach to writing instruction and the effect it has on writing performance, student attitudes to writing and revising, and the process by which students revise their scripts. A comparative analysis was done on a control group of 13…

This study examines writing apprehension in bilinguals, a common problem among Puerto Rican college students who take composition courses in both their native Spanish and English as a second language. A questionnaire designed to determine the sources of apprehension was administered to three student groups: graduate students of English, freshman…

A study investigated the effectiveness of full dyadic writing as a technique for teaching writing to students of English as a Second Language (ESL). Subjects were 31 college students of diverse cultural backgrounds enrolled in ESL sections of freshman English. Each chose a partner with a different native language with whom to write two essays, the…