This paper starts by reporting on the design and trialling of an informal, low-stakes test designed to assess the knowledge of grammar terms of pre-service primary school teachers following the UK's National Curriculum, the results of which were used to inform the design of a series of optional grammar classes. The test proved surprisingly…

Nearly all first-year composition learning objectives state that writing instructors will help each student to improve their knowledge of written conventions, like punctuation, spelling, and grammar. Historically, it has been difficult to achieve significant learning gains in writing mechanics. This teaching failure disproportionately damages the…

Following Swales' (1990) influential study on research article (RA) introductions, some attention has increasingly been paid to other rhetorical units of both expert and learners' writing, including titles. A key and effective discursive means through which titles are constructed and presented is the syntactic configuration. The present study,…

This study examines the nature of metalinguistic awareness in first-year college writers enrolled in two-year degree programs, corequisite support courses, or both. Metalinguistic awareness is an ability to systematize knowledge about language and use that knowledge to monitor language as language. Participants in the study completed reading…

The purpose of the study was to examine how disciplinary literacy instruction influenced the quality of science informational text produced by second-grade students (N = 45) using the compare/contrast and the sequence text structures. The instruction took place over eight weeks with two four-week units, and with three 30-minute lessons provided…

We investigated whether readers use the low-level cue of proper noun capitalization in the parafovea to infer syntactic category, and whether this results in an early update of the representation of a sentence's syntactic structure. Participants read sentences containing either a subject relative or object relative clause, in which the relative…

The purpose of this study is to describe the errors made by Turks living in Sydney, Australia in Turkish written texts. The mistakes identified in the texts were handled with the error analysis approach and evaluated according to their linguistic, cognitive processing, communicative, spelling and punctuation characteristics. Content analysis…

The present study was conducted to find out the effect of reconstruction activities on grade XI students' English writing skills which included mechanical accuracy I (punctuations) and mechanical accuracy II (spellings). The study was carried out employing a pre-test post-test experimental control group design. A government degree college for boys…

This study investigated writing errors committed by engineering students at AnNajah National University in Palestine and compared these errors based on school type. It analyzed errors in essays of 54 undergraduate students, 28 attended governmental schools, and 26 attended private schools. Errors were classified based on James's taxonomy. Results…

The development of language skills is important at both the individual and social levels. Writing, which is one of these skills, enables individuals to express themselves both aesthetically and permanently. This importance of writing requires special attention to the training for its development. In this research, screening model which is one of…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a simple contingency contracting intervention on the correct use of punctuation marks in freely produced texts by elementary school children with learning disabilities. This approach can be considered a promising strategy for facilitating the development of academic skills in…

This article examines a manageable approach that provides students with significant opportunities to write and improve their writing over time in an introductory quantitative business course. The study examines six elements of written communication skills, as evidenced by assessment data from memorandum assignments administered following…

Writing proper English sentences poses a significant challenge for Arabic-speaking postsecondary students studying English as a Foreign Language (EFL) due to substantial differences between Arabic and English syntactic structures. This basic qualitative study explored the perceptions of Arabic-speaking EFL learners at an Arabian university…

When judging subject-specific aspects of students' texts, teachers should assess various characteristics, e.g., spelling and content, independently of one another since these characteristics are indicators of different skills. Independent judgments enable teachers to adapt their classroom instruction according to students' skills. It is still…

Many EFL teachers spend a lot of time marking students' written assignments and correcting their spelling, grammatical, punctuation, organization and idea generation errors in detail. The more mistakes students make the more meticulously they mark and correct mistakes. Despite meticulous error correction, students continue to make the same…