This Educational Leadership Portfolio (ELP) sought to address the challenge of optimizing handwriting instructional practices and assessment methods for teaching Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) at St. Andrew's School (SAS). SAS is an Episcopal, co-educational boarding school in Middletown, Delaware. With 18 years of experience as the primary…

Writing in a language different from one's mother tongue is a daunting task. The same challenge may apply to languages that have diglossic features whose spoken form differs from the written form. This article investigates Arab students' writing behaviors (fluency, pauses, and revision) in response to an argumentative composition in their L1…

Numerous studies of written language development have shown minimal improvement over the course of an instructional period, yet these solely text-based studies offer little explanation for the lack of changes in writers' language because little is reported about the classroom and the participants. The purpose of this study is to use goal theory to…

The research literature on L2 writing processes contains a multitude of insights that could inform writing instruction, but writing teachers are constrained in their capacity to make use of these insights insofar as they lack detailed information about how their students actually engage in the processes of writing. At the same time,…

This study aimed to describe the writing activities that test takers engage in when responding to the writing tasks in the "TOEFL iBT"[superscript R] test and to examine the effects of task type and test-taker English language proficiency (ELP) and keyboarding skills on the frequency and distribution of these activities. Each of 22 test…