Australian literacy classrooms are shaped by an unprecedented time of national curriculum reform. Australian teachers follow a national English curriculum with the pressures of national standardised assessment, state interpretation (state-based syllabus and support documents) and localised system requirements influencing their pedagogical…

Purpose: In this chapter we describe how a rubric-style observation instrument for observing classroom writing instruction was used to focus and optimize collaborative video analysis sessions among teachers and researchers spread across six states. As part of a 3-year Institute of Education Sciences (IES) development grant, we used videos of…

We implemented an intervention of four lessons and tested the effects of two instructional modes as compared to the regular curriculum practices for completing a synthesis task at the preparatory program of a Turkish university. Participants were 48 upper-intermediate English as a Foreign Language learners (mean age = 18) assigned to three…

Research suggests that student development as writers requires a supportive environment in which they receive sustained opportunities to write. However, writing researchers in general know relatively little about the actual writing opportunities embedded in students' language arts lessons and how students' production of texts in class is framed.…

Considering the importance attached to writing as a life skill, this study investigated the nature and variability of adults' aid to Zambian second graders in the context of shared writing in Bemba (first language), and the relations between this support and students' literacy and cognitive-metalinguistic skills. Fifty-seven children and their…

For second language writing (SLW) instructors, decisions regarding technology-mediated feedback are particularly complex as they must also navigate student language proficiency, which may vary across different areas such as reading or listening. Yet technology-mediated feedback remains an underexplored realm in SLW especially with regard to how…

This study examines the composing process and authorial agency of a college ESL writer as she remediated an argumentative essay into a multimodal digital video. Employing principles of sociosemiotic ethnography, and drawing on the concepts of resemiotization and recontextualization, the study investigated multiple types of data, including an…

Peer feedback plays a pivotal role in stimulating students' participation in L2 writing, which has the potential to develop students' writing skills. The concept of metacognition has also been examined to facilitate learner writers in their learning process. As such, this study drawing upon the concept of metacognition explores the implementation…

The objective of this exploratory investigation was to examine the nature of writing instruction in kindergarten classrooms and to describe student writing outcomes at the end of the school year. Participants for this study included 21 teachers and 238 kindergarten children from nine schools. Classroom teachers were videotaped once each in the…

Educators have been challenged for many years to engage their students, but often students still seem to be disengaged (Klem & Connell, 2004). Research indicates student engagement is critical to student achievement and success in school (Appleton, 2008; Connell, Spencer, & Aber, 1994; Easton, 2008; Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris,…

This study investigates the teacher role in mediating the task and the learner in an advanced academic writing class. Having identified three verbal (non-)participation patterns of students in collaborative tasks (silence, dominance, and off-task talk), I examine how these interactional concerns are understood and addressed by English as a second…

This qualitative study was conducted in the context of a preservice teacher education program with a focus on early literacy. The study focused on the insights preservice teachers gained from working closely beside one emergent writer. The authors report on six focus cases and identify five cross-case themes--describing preservice teachers who (a)…

This paper presents a case study of the multilingual writing practices of a Serbian university student on Facebook, examining how he uses multiple varieties of English and Serbian images and video to shape his online identity and establish membership in local and global communities. Drawing on data from stimulated-recall interviews, online…

A number of studies have suggested the possible benefits of using concordancers in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing. To date, however, there is still limited understanding of how EFL writers may make use of such tools along with dictionaries when engaging in a writing task. To better understand the question, this study investigated a…

Teaching writing has always been a controversial issue in the field of Foreign Language Teaching. And while there are a number of approaches and techniques for teaching writing in an English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign Language (SL/EFL) setting, very few comprehensive frameworks exist for an ESL/EFL writing teacher. The present…