Caribbean students are repeatedly engaged in rigid forms of writing to meet the requirements of external exams, which often leads to negative attitudes to writing. With current shifts to multimodal and multi-literate texts to engage students' multiple literacies in learning, students' creation of graphic novels in Caribbean English classrooms can…

This study presents the results of an experiment designed to determine whether knowledge building can facilitate foreign language acquisition. We examined how groups of Catalan students in secondary schools worked together on collaborative writing tasks in English, their foreign language. The students were participating in the Knowledge Building…

An approach is described that gradually transitions second-year organic chemistry students to writing full "The Journal of Organic Chemistry" ("JOC") style lab reports. The primary goal was to introduce students to and build rhetorical skills in scientific and technical writing. This was accomplished by focusing on four main…

This study investigated the effect of wiki-mediated collaborative writing on the development of learners' individual writing in a second language (L2). Participants were 52 learners of English as a foreign language enrolled in two intact junior writing classes at a Taiwanese university. One class was assigned to be a wiki-collaborative writing…

Prior research has shown that EFL learners who wrote collaboratively with partners using wikis improved the content quality and language accuracy of their L2 individual writing more than students who wrote individually. Drawing on the dataset from Hsu and Lo's study, the current study explores the nature of the students' collaborative dialogue…

The study reported in this article investigated the processes and the effects of collaborative writing on 64 students' writing skills in two Arabic as a second language (ASL) teachers' classrooms. The authors employed a mixed methods approach that integrated a qualitative case study and a quasi-experimental design. The data collected included…

The pedagogical potentials and challenges experienced when trying to incorporate the use of a wiki social media site with undergraduate childhood study students are reported. The wiki was introduced to inspire students to engage in student peer-learning, develop their writing skills, and facilitate a PhD student's developmental teaching beyond the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate and compare the effects of group-to-whole student-led oral discussion and small-group collaborative drafting as pre-writing tasks on Iranian intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' writing performance. Additionally, the difference between the writing components was examined.…

Writing is an ever-creative artifice, elaborated in many different ways and used for many different purposes in different situations throughout history. From this perspective, each writer, embedded within a perceived sociohistoric moment, poses problems to solve, makes choices, and creates solutions from locally available resources and practices…

This study examined struggling and skilled writers' narrative writing performances when revising stories in pairs online as compared to students working independently. In the experimental group, 5 mixed-ability pairs of upper-elementary struggling writers and skilled writers engaged in online collaborative revision. In the control group, 5…

This study examined the impact of storyboarding-based collaborative narrative writing using Google Docs on EFL learners' writing fluency, syntactic complexity, and overall performance. For this purpose, a cohort of 30 EFL college learners was selected and exposed to a nine-week intervention where they collaboratively wrote storyboarding-based…

This chapter describes the process of developing an English for tourism studies course at a trilingual university across five academic years. The process involved four phases. During the 2011-2012 academic year, I gained a grounded understanding of the needs of the learners from the standpoint of a "reflective practitioner" (see Farrell,…

This paper reports on an action research study aimed at implementing "Plotagon" to enhance English writing skill. The study involved 18 students from 10th grade of a public secondary school in Colombia. The findings showed that the use of "Plotagon" promoted students' motivation to write through an interactive and attractive…

This article explores the effects of collaborative reverse subtitling as an activity for the promotion of writing skills in English as a second language. An initial analysis is undertaken of the pros and cons of the role of translation in second language learning historically and the role of information and communication technology in this…

Organizing writing instruction around genres rather than rhetorical modes can be a highly effective and engaging preparation for students' academic and professional writing needs. The teaching/learning cycle (TLC) is a highly scaffolded curriculum model for teaching target written genres. In the TLC, the organization of and linguistic choices in a…