This book highlights the importance of English academic vocabulary for success at university and explores written tasks as effective pedagogical tools to promote the acquisition of academic words. The book reviews germane and recent SLA, psycholinguistic, corpus linguistics, and L2 writing research to underscore the challenges associated with the…

This article makes the case for using translanguaging in developing the academic writing of bilinguals. It reviews the emerging literature on learning and teaching theories of translanguaging and presents theoretical understandings of biliteracy development and specifically on the teaching of writing to bilingual learners. The article analyzes…

We report a classroom experiment directed at increasing lexical fluency in writing. Participants were 107 Dutch students in bilingual (EFL) education (Grades 10 and 11). According to current theories of writing such fluency allows writers to devote more attention to higher order aspects of text production, such as idea generation, selection and…

Building on Sheen's (2007) study of the effects of written corrective feedback (CF) on the acquisition of English articles, this article investigated whether direct focused CF, direct unfocused CF and writing practice alone produced differential effects on the accurate use of grammatical forms by adult ESL learners. Using six intact adult ESL…

The relation between reading and writing is important because tacit and possibly unwarranted assumptions underlie the theories and pedagogies which govern these processes. These assumptions are challenged by the claims that: (1) reading and writing are related in neurolinguistically specifiable ways; (2) they do not seem to be simple inverses of…

Observation and interviews of the children in two third grade classrooms--one in which children write frequently and learn punctuation skills in context, and one in which children learn punctuation in isolation--suggest that punctuation skills are learned more effectively in context. In interviews the "writers" could explain an average of 8.66…

Sentence combining--a technique of putting strings of sentence kernels together in a variety of ways so that completed sentences possess greater syntactic maturity--is a method offering much promise in the teaching of writing and composition. The purpose of this document is to provide a literature review of this procedure. After defining the term…

The best way to teach writing is to make it the way to learn something else. Instructors need to look at written communication as it is used in real life. When students take pains with their writing, it is because what they have to say is important to them. The students' need to communicate a particular meaning for a particular purpose guides them…

Examines whether targeting instruction to students' weak points has an effect on their writing quality. Upper intermediate students in an English for academic purposes course were asked to write a composition before and after the instructional treatment. Comparison of results from the two tasks shows a significant increase in scores on both…

This study investigates the effects of receptive and productive vocabulary learning on word knowledge. Japanese students studying English as a foreign language learned target words in three glossed sentences and in a sentence production task in two experiments. Five aspects of vocabulary knowledge--orthography, syntax, association, grammatical…