This article focuses on the regulation of student writing by exploring a specific form of such writing, "the maturity test." In Finnish universities, the maturity test is a compulsory part of a bachelor's degree in which students demonstrate their familiarity with the topic of their bachelor's thesis, as well as their mother tongue…

While adult literacy programs have historically been marginalized within the US educational system, there is growing interest in making these programs more academically effective. Because of this, the General Education Development (GED) exam was recently revised to be more rigorous, especially in its assessment of writing. Although these changes…

A novel instrument, the Features of Excellent Arguments task (FEXA), was developed to elicit adolescents' judgments about argumentative essays displaying to varying degrees features characteristic of strong persuasive writing: academic language, rich evidence, multiple perspectives, and rhetorical appeal. We collected students' categorical choices…

This study compared the effects of teacher feedback (TF) and online automated feedback (AF) on the quality of revision of English writing. It also examined the strengths and weaknesses of the two types of feedback perceived by English language learners (ELLs) as a foreign language (FL). Sixty-eight Chinese students from two English classes…

The article presents the results of a randomized experimental study of a writing curriculum for college developmental writing courses based on strategy instruction with self-regulation integrated with practices common in college composition. Students in a full semester course learned strategies for planning and revising based on rhetorical…

The main purpose of this study was to analyze how effectively pair/group work writing activities in the currently in-use Grade 11 English textbook were structured or organized to promote CLL. To this end, the pair/group work writing activities were identified and analyzed based on the six basic elements of the CLL. Findings of the study show that…

This classroom-based study examined the effect of collective peer scaffolding activity on self-revised as well as new narrative and descriptive paragraphs developed by 32 EFL university students in a paragraph writing course in Iran. Each genre was discussed and practiced every other week and was followed by a collective peer scaffolding session.…

This study investigated how task complexity influences second language (L2) writing. Specifically, it focused on the possibility that prompts can create different demands at different stages of L2 writing production and on ways that prompts may affect learners' engagement in the revision of their writing. Fifty-one English as a foreign/second…

Recent studies have shown that languaging contributes to second language skill development. Feedback is often used in combination with languaging as a prompt of verbalization during writing revision, and this combination has shown the effect of increasing the quality of writing. The present study tested whether and how indirect feedback helps…

Your students are sitting at their desks, using a checklist to revise their writing. You see that some are consistently checking off the same areas they always do as "needing improvement" and that others are simply marking off a skill as "mastered," scarcely glancing at the piece of writing in front of them. The authors suggest…

Students who receive instruction in discipline-specific communication perform better in introductory and upper-level STEM courses. In this study, researchers investigate how writing center intervention can aid STEM faculty in revising assignment rubrics and conveying to students the discourse conventions and expectations for writing tasks. The…

The writing conference, an opportunity for composition instructors to exchange class time for individual or small-group meetings with students, is a popular tool among writing teachers. However, students who come unprepared for their scheduled meetings--or miss them altogether-- will miss as much as a week's worth of instruction and receive little…

This essay brings to light new evidence about the relationship between revision and reflective writing in the first-year writing classroom. Based on a robust study of student work, we illuminate a variety of complex relationships between the writing knowledge that students articulate in their reflections--including how they narrate their course…

The aim of this study was to explore the potential of Google Docs in facilitating and supporting pedagogical practices in a writing course at a large Saudi university. As a qualitative case study, the study was conducted among 10 EFL learners working in five pairs on article report writing over one academic semester. The instructor's observation…

The assessment of argumentative writing generally includes analyses of the specific linguistic and rhetorical features contained in the individual essays produced by students. However, researchers have recently proposed that an individual's ability to flexibly adapt the linguistic properties of their writing may more accurately capture their…