Write On or Write Off? An Exploration of Asian International Students' Approaches to Essay Writing at an Australian University

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Green, Wendy

2007-01-01

This paper investigates the approaches taken to essay writing by five Asian international students at an Australian university. Analysis of their in-depth interviews reveals links between their perceptions of learning, their perceptions of essay writing, their motivation for completing the task, and their awareness of the structural conventions of…

Teaching Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tomas, Z.; Kostka, I.; Mott-Smith, J. A.

2013-01-01

The authors of "Teaching Writing" draw on their years of teaching and their knowledge of theory and research to present major concepts in teaching L2 writing. These concepts encompass how cultural differences affect the writing class, planning instruction, text-based writing, writing strategies, modeling, and responding to student…

Contributions of Morphological Skill to Children's Essay Writing

PubMed Central

Northey, Mary; McCutchen, Deborah; Sanders, Elizabeth A.

2015-01-01

Morphological skills have previously been found to reliably predict reading skill, including word reading, vocabulary, and comprehension. However, less is known about how morphological skills might contribute to writing skill, aside from its well-documented role in the development of spelling. This correlational study examines whether morphological skill, as measured by a sentence generation task tapping both derivational morphology and meta-syntactic skills, predicts performance on a standardized essay writing task for fifth- and eighth-grade U.S. students (N = 233), after controlling for grade level, comprehension, and writing fluency. Multilevel analyses indicated that morphological skill and writing fluency were each uniquely predictive of essay quality, and this finding was consistent regardless of whether accurate spelling was required in the morphological task. Our results suggest that morphological skills play an important role in writing, as has been previously documented in reading and spelling. PMID:26957783

Analytical Essay Writing: A New Activity Introduced to a Traditional Curriculum

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kommalage, Mahinda

2012-01-01

Medical students following a traditional curriculum get few opportunities to engage in activities such as a literature search, scientific writing, and active and collaborative learning. An analytical essay writing activity (AEWA) in physiology was introduced to first-year students. Each student prepared an essay incorporating new research findings…

Drafting and acting on feedback supports student learning when writing essay assignments.

PubMed

Freestone, Nicholas

2009-06-01

A diverse student population is a relatively recent feature of the higher education system in the United Kingdom. Consequently, it may be thought that more "traditional" types of assessment based around essay writing skills for science undergraduates may be of decreasing value and relevance to contemporary students. This article describes a study in which the process of feedback on, and associated redrafting of, an essay was closely supervised to improve essay writing skills and subsequent exam performance. The results of this study show that students can significantly improve their learning and academic performance, as assessed by final examination mark, by a process that more closely mimics a "real-world" situation of review and redrafting. Additionally, the data show that students benefit from feedback only when this is used appropriately by the student. The article also discusses the continuing importance and relevance of essay writing skills so that writing, and acting upon feedback to do with that writing, remains an integral part of the process of learning.

What Do Education Students Think about Their Ability to Write Essays?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Quintero, Gisela Consolación

2018-01-01

The present study reflects the results obtained from a diagnosis carried out with Education students concerning the writing of academic essays. The objective was to identify the perceptions that Comprehensive Education students have about their ability to write academic essays. A descriptive cross-sectional research study was conducted at a single…

The Student's Only Survival Guide to Essay Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Good, Steve; Jensen, Bill

Designed primarily with the student in mind, this guide focuses on what the student needs to know about essay writing to survive in college. It details a proven, consistent, and effective method for the preparation of undergraduate essays across the disciplines. Not intended as a textbook, the guide speaks directly to the student, providing…

History as a Foreign Language: Can We Teach Year 11 Pupils to Write with Flair?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Simmonds, Claire

2016-01-01

Disappointed that the use of the "PEEL" writing scaffold had led her Year 11 students to write some rather dreary essays, Claire Simmonds reflected that a lack of specific training on historical writing might be to blame. Drawing on genre theory and the work of the history teaching community, Simmonds attempted to theorise the…

Validating Automated Essay Scoring for Online Writing Placement

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ramineni, Chaitanya

2013-01-01

In this paper, I describe the design and evaluation of automated essay scoring (AES) models for an institution's writing placement program. Information was gathered on admitted student writing performance at a science and technology research university in the northeastern United States. Under timed conditions, first-year students (N = 879) were…

Representing the "Other": Basic Writers and the Teaching of Basic Writing. Refiguring English Studies.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Horner, Bruce; Lu, Min-Zhan

Intended for teachers of basic writing, this book contains a collection of new and updated essays addressing issues surrounding underprepared writers. It maps errors and expectations for basic writing and develops teaching approaches that will be effective in a social and political world. The book considers concepts such as the possibility of…

Changing essay writing in undergraduate nursing education through action research: a Swedish example.

PubMed

Friberg, Febe; Lyckhage, Elisabeth Dahlborg

2013-01-01

This article describes the development of literature-based models for bachelor degree essays in Swedish undergraduate nursing education. Students' experiences in a course with literature-based models for bachelor degree essays are discussed. The ever-growing body of nursing research and specialized and complex health care practices make great demands on nursing education in terms of preparing students to be both skilled practitioners and users of research. Teaching to help students understand evidence-based practice is a challenge for nursing education. Action research was used to generate knowledge of and practical solutions to problems in everyday locations. Six models were developed: concept analysis, contributing to evidence-based nursing by means of quantitative research, contributing to evidence-based nursing by means of qualitative research, discourse analysis, analysis of narratives, and literature review. Action research was found to be a relevant procedure for changing ways of working with literature-based, bachelor degree essays. The models that were developed increased students' confidence in writing essays and preparedness for the nursing role.

Expanding the Repertoire: An Anthology of Practical Approaches for the Teaching of Writing (Reading-to-Write Report No. 11). Technical Report No. 30.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McCormick, Kathleen; And Others

This study is the 11th and last report from the Reading-to-Write Project, a collaborative study of students' cognitive processes at one critical point of entry into academic performance. The report consists of an Introduction and seven essays, each of which discusses ways to teach a variety of aspects of reading and writing which have been tried…

Reflecting on 25 Years of Teaching, Researching, and Textbook Writing for Introduction to Management: An Essay with Some Lessons Learned

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dyck, Bruno

2017-01-01

This essay describes innovations made and lessons learned while teaching introduction to management courses during a 25-year career. The essay describes how teaching two approaches to management increases students' critical and ethical thinking, and reverses the tendency for business students to become increasingly materialistic and…

Cognitive Factors Contributing to Chinese EFL Learners' L2 Writing Performance in Timed Essay Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lu, Yanbin

2010-01-01

This study investigated cognitive factors that might influence Chinese EFL learners' argumentative essay writing in English. The factors that were explored included English (L2) language proficiency, Chinese (L1) writing ability, genre knowledge, use of writing strategies, and working memory capacity in L1 and L2. Data were collected from 136…

"Argument!" Helping Students Understand What Essay Writing Is About

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wingate, Ursula

2012-01-01

Argumentation is a key requirement of the essay, which is the most common genre that students have to write. However, how argumentation is realised in disciplinary writing is often poorly understood by academic tutors, and therefore not adequately taught to students. This paper presents research into undergraduate students' concepts of argument…

Improving Undergraduates' Argumentative Group Essay Writing through Self-Assessment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fung, Yong Mei; Mei, Hooi Chee

2015-01-01

When writing an argumentative essay, writers develop and evaluate arguments to embody, initiate, or simulate various kinds of interpersonal and textual interaction for reader consideration (Wu & Allison, 2003). This is quite challenging for English as a second language (ESL) learners. To improve the quality of their writing, students need to…

Academic writing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Eremina, Svetlana V.

2003-10-01

The series of workshops on academic writing have been developed by academic writing instructors from Language Teaching Centre, Central European University and presented at the Samara Academic Writing Workshops in November 2001. This paper presents only the part dealing with strucutre of an argumentative essay.

In Defense of the Formula Essay

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Haluska, Jan Charles

2007-01-01

In 1970, the author learned a simple step in making essays from his advisor. His advisor used a drawing of the Parthenon to illustrate the creation of a five-paragraph essay. It was obvious that his advisor was hesitant on teaching them a very simple concept of essay writing because it was pretty mechanical. Like his advisor, a lot of teachers…

Performance, Feedback, and Revision: Metacognitive Approaches to Undergraduate Essay Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Riddell, Jessica

2015-01-01

This paper explores ways in which frequent feedback and clear assessment criteria can improve students' essay writing performance in a first-year English literature course. Students (n = 68) completed a series of three scaffolded exercises over the course of a semester, where they evaluated undergraduate essays using a predetermined assessment…

EssayCritic: Writing to Learn with a Knowledge-Based Design Critiquing System

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mørch, Anders I.; Engeness, Irina; Cheng, Victor C.; Cheung, William K.; Wong, Kelvin C.

2017-01-01

This article presents a study of EssayCritic, a computer-based writing aid for English as a foreign language (EFL) that provides feedback on the content of English essays. We compared two feedback conditions: automated feedback from EssayCritic (target class) and feedback from collaborating peers (comparison class). We used a mixed methods…

Twenty Years In: An Essay in Two Parts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Heilker, Paul

2006-01-01

Part I of this essay traces the evolution of my understanding of the exploratory essay as a discursive form and a genre for teaching writing. Part II explores my motivations for advocating a polarized definition of the essay and then concludes with a call to expand the purview of composition beyond first-year courses.

Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Campbell, Kimberly Hill

2014-01-01

Although using the five-paragraph formula to teach essay writing is a ubiquitous practice--and many K-12 teachers defend it--Campbell argues that having students write according to this formula does more harm than good. The formula's tight structure stops the very critical thinking students need to do to strengthen their cognition and their…

Learning to care: medical students' reported value and evaluation of palliative care teaching involving meeting patients and reflective writing.

PubMed

Borgstrom, Erica; Morris, Rachel; Wood, Diana; Cohn, Simon; Barclay, Stephen

2016-11-25

Over recent years there has been an increase in teaching of both palliative care and reflective practice in UK medical schools. The palliative care teaching at the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine is multi-faceted and involves students writing reflective essays after individually meeting patients approaching the end of life during their final year general practice and hospital medicine placements. This paper draws on two studies examining this teaching element to analyse what the students found valuable about it and to comment on the practice of meeting patients and subsequent reflective writing. Two studies have explored students' perceptions of these course components. The first was a thematic analysis of 234 reflective essays from 123 students written in 2007-2008, including examining what students wrote about the exercise itself. The second project involved a semi-structured questionnaire that students completed anonymously; this paper reports on the free text elements of that study [sample size =107]. Since similar themes were found in both studies, the coding structures from each project were compared and combined, enabling triangulation of the findings around what the students found valuable from the palliative care teaching involving meeting patients and reflective writing. Overall, students reported that these components of the palliative care teaching are valuable. Four main themes were identified as aspects that students valued: (1) dedicated time with patients, (2) learning about wider elements of treatment and holistic care, (3) practicing communication skills, and (4) learning about themselves through reflective writing. Some students expressed a dislike for having to formally write a reflective essay. It is possible to arrange for all of the medical students to individually meet at least two patients receiving palliative or end of life care. Students found these encounters valuable and many wrote about the benefit of formally

To Compose: Teaching Writing in the High School.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Newkirk, Thomas, Ed.

The twelve essays in this collection, selected by leading teacher educators, explore the composition process and composition instruction. The first essay, "Toward Righting Writing" by Arthur Diagon, serves as a prologue while the second section, "getting started," consists of "A Way of Writing" by William Stafford,…

A Pilot Intervention to Improve the Structural Quality of Exam Essay Writing in UK Undergraduate Psychology Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Connelly, Vincent; Dockrell, Julie E.; Barnett, Jo

2006-01-01

Psychology undergraduates need to produce good quality essays in order to succeed at university. Students find the transition to university writing difficult. Using a rubric, a profile of student weakness in psychology essay writing was described. The students were generally poor at the structural organisation of their essays. A pilot intervention…

Academic Essay Writing as Imitative Problem Solving: Examples from Distance Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Robertson, Sydney Ian

2014-01-01

Students in tertiary education are often faced with the prospect of writing an essay on a topic they know nothing about in advance. In distance learning institutions, essays are a common method of assessment in the UK, and specified course texts remain the main sources of information the students have. How do students use a source text to…

Write Your Ticket to College: A Genre-Based College Admission Essay Workshop for Ethnically Diverse, Underserved Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Early, Jessica Singer; DeCosta-Smith, Meredith; Valdespino, Arturo

2010-01-01

This article describes a writing workshop that took place with 41 low-income, multi-ethnic 12th-grade students who received instruction on specific genre features for writing college admission essays. As a result, students improved the quality of their college admission essays and demonstrated greater confidence with this writing task. This…

A Pedagogical Strategy for Teaching Human Development: Dyadic Essay Confrontations through Writing and Discussion.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sherman, Lawrence W.

This paper integrates several contemporary issues, all of which focus on the teaching of human developmental theories. These issues include postmodern thought, higher level thinking processes, introducting conceptual conflict and arousal, motivation, and integrating the writing process into the psychology curriculum. Each issue is briefly…

Writing Science in Hard Times

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McClellan, Michael; Myelle-Watson, Dawn; Peters, Brad; Spears, Debora; Wellen, David

2012-01-01

To teach science writing effectively, scholars encourage combining writing to learn with applications of the science writing heuristic. How teachers learn to do so remains under-examined. This essay follows a cohort of ninth-grade science teachers who collaborated in a project to develop, test, and revise such a combination of writing prompts for…

The art of scientific writing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gad-El-Hak, Mohamed

2015-11-01

The humanities teach students how to learn and communicate. Science teaches why everything works. Engineering teaches how to make things work. But scientists and engineers need to communicate their ideas amongst themselves as well as to everyone else. A newly developed technical writing course is outlined. In the class, offered to senior undergraduate and beginning graduate students, we read numerous short novels, essays, and op-eds. Some of the reading materials are technical but many are not. The students also have weekly writing assignments. When the first assignment is returned to the students with a grade of 20-30%, their first reaction is, ``how come I did not receive my usual 80-90%?'' I retort, ``you reach that level only when your essay is ready to be published in The New York Times.'' What is emphasized in the class is the process of creating something to write about, researching that something, expressing ideas coherently and comprehensibly, then endlessly editing the essay. The elective class has been offered three times thus far, all of its available seats are always filled, the students' evaluations have been outstanding, and the improvements in the students' ability to write by the end of the semester is quite impressive.

New Students in Two-Year Colleges: Twelve Essays.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gibson, Walker, Ed.

Intended for college English teachers, the essays in this collection represent the scholarship of 12 professors who participated in a year-long seminar on the teaching of reading and writing to the "new" types of students who are presently attending two-year colleges. The first essay offers a profile of the new student as one who is job-oriented…

Writing at Century's End: Essays on Computer-Assisted Composition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gerrard, Lisa, Ed.

Most of the essays in this collection originated as presentations at the University of California, Los Angeles, Conference on Computers and Writing, held in May 1985. Issues addressed in the volume range from concrete, practical considerations (such as designing classroom exercises) to political and theoretical ones (such as the instructor's…

History.edu: Essays on Teaching with Technology.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Trinkle, Dennis A., Ed.; Merriman, Scott A., Ed.

Intended to be equally useful to high school and college instructors, this book contains studies in history pedagogy, among them the first three published essays measuring qualitatively and quantitatively the successes and failures of "e-teaching" and distance learning. Collectively, the essays urge instructors to take the next step with…

Riding Elvis's Motorcycle: Using Self-Regulated Strategy Development To PLAN and WRITE for a State Writing Exam.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

De La Paz, Susan; Owen, Bonnie; Harris, Karen R.; Graham, Steve

2000-01-01

This article describes implementation of the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) approach to help students learn a specific essay writing strategy in preparation for a state writing test. It also reviews the theoretical and research bases for using SRSD to teaching writing strategies. (Contains references.) (DB)

The Impact of Interactive Whiteboard Technology on Medical Students' Achievement in ESL Essay Writing: An Early Study in Egypt

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Albaaly, Emad; Higgins, Steven

2012-01-01

This study investigated the impact of the interactive whiteboard on Egyptian medical students' achievement in essay writing in English as a second language (ESL). First, the writing micro-skills judged essential to help these students improve their essay writing were identified, using a questionnaire which investigated experts' views. This gave…

Students' Approaches to Essay-Writing and the Quality of the Written Product.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Biggs, John B.

Studies of text comprehension have suggested that readers focus on different levels of ideational unit while reading, thereby affecting the quality of their comprehension of the text. A study examined the viability of the deep-surface categorization with regard to essay-writing and the relation of different approaches to writing to the quality of…

Second Language Learners' Performance and Strategies When Writing Direct and Translated Essays

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ismail, Sadiq Abdulwahed Ahmed; Alsheikh, Negmeldin Omer

2012-01-01

The purpose of this study was to investigate ESL students' performance and strategies when writing direct and translated essays. The study also aimed at exploring students' strategies when writing in L2 (English) and L1 (Arabic). The study used a mixture of quantitative and qualitative procedures for data collection and analysis. Adapted strategy…

Essays Grown from a Writing across the Curriculum Institute at Indian Hills Community College: Fostering Cooperation and Cohesion in Writing Instruction.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Copeland, Jeffrey S., Ed.

Written from experiences at the May 1987 Writing across the Curriculum Summer Writing Institute at Indian Hills Community College in Ottumwa, Iowa, this collection of 14 essays describes methods of using writing as a learning tool across various disciplines. The 15 instructors attending the workshop represented the fields of technical…

Using Automated Essay Scores as an Anchor When Equating Constructed Response Writing Tests

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Almond, Russell G.

2014-01-01

Assessments consisting of only a few extended constructed response items (essays) are not typically equated using anchor test designs as there are typically too few essay prompts in each form to allow for meaningful equating. This article explores the idea that output from an automated scoring program designed to measure writing fluency (a common…

The Great Excluded: Critical Essays on Children's Literature. Volume One.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Butler, Francelia, Ed.

This collection of essays is intended to stimulate writing, teaching, and study of children's literature by humanists. Among the essays are: "Aesop as Litmus: The Acid Test of Children's Literature,""Children's Literature in Old English,""Children's Literature in the Middle Ages,""Pilgrim's Progress as Fairy Tale,""Out of the Ordinary Road: Locke…

Writing Essays on a Laptop or a Desktop Computer: Does It Matter?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ling, Guangming; Bridgeman, Brent

2013-01-01

To explore the potential effect of computer type on the Test of English as a Foreign Language-Internet-Based Test (TOEFL iBT) Writing Test, a sample of 444 international students was used. The students were randomly assigned to either a laptop or a desktop computer to write two TOEFL iBT practice essays in a simulated testing environment, followed…

Medical students' essay-writing skills: criteria-based self- and tutor-evaluation and the role of language background.

PubMed

Chur-Hansen, A

2000-03-01

An exercise is described which aimed to make clear to first-year undergraduate medical students the expected writing skills required for an essay examination in one discipline. Many students were from a non-English speaking background and over one-third of students, regardless of language background, had limited experience in this type of essay writing. For this exercise, a practice essay was written by each student for formative assessment. The essay was rated by a tutor and by the student according to well-defined criteria. This allowed for comparisons to be made in a structured and objective way between the judgements of the student and the assessor. Students found the exercise to be very useful, although whether essay writing skills actually improved could not be established. Students from non-English speaking backgrounds tended to be most harsh in their self-evaluations, yet tutor-evaluations generally showed these students to have better writing skills than other students. Indeed, correlations between self- and tutor-evaluations were quite low. It is evident that students and their educators may be unclear about each others' expectations. By making explicit the requirements of an exercise, misunderstandings may be minimized and it is possible that student performance could improve, though further research is required to verify these hypotheses. It is suggested that students should be encouraged to evaluate their own work and should be instructed in writing skills throughout their medical degree education.

Tips on Teaching Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Today's Education, 1982

1982-01-01

Techniques for stirring students' interest in writing include: (1) exposing them to eloquent language use; (2) group poetry-writing (each student writes one line of a class poem); and (3) adapting why-and-because outlines intended for teaching college writing for use by younger students. Suggestions for obtaining writing quantity and quality are…

Intertextual Trips: Teaching the Essay in the Composition Class.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kline, Nancy

1989-01-01

Cites essays by Joan Didion, John Berryman, and Martin Luther King in arguing that the essay, no matter how serious, can be considered as a fiction and a playful, exploratory and deeply interesting rhetorical game. Describes how these works were used to teach students that the essay is a living document calling for interaction. (SG)

State Assessment and Persuasive Writing in the Social Studies Instruction.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hunter, Barbara

1990-01-01

Examines current Illinois statewide assessment of social studies education. Argues conceptual knowledge assessment in the social studies should use essay tests. Includes guidelines and activities for teaching students to write persuasively. Explains various strategies to teach reading, writing, and thinking skills, including the "RAFT"…

Improving Tenth-Grade Students' Five-Paragraph Essay Writing Skills Using Various Writing Strategies, Guided Assignments, and Portfolios for Growth.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hopkins, Carolyn

This project was implemented and developed to assist low-achieving tenth grade students' essay writing skills. According to examinations administered during the first part of the 2002 school term, many tenth-grade students were not performing on their grade level in regards to the writing process. The overall goal was to have students be able to…

Rhetorical, Metacognitive, and Cognitive Strategies in Teacher Candidates' Essay Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Diaz Larenas, Claudio; Ramos Leiva, Lucía; Ortiz Navarrete, Mabel

2017-01-01

This paper reports on a study about the rhetoric, metacognitive, and cognitive strategies pre-service teachers use before and after a process-based writing intervention when completing an argumentative essay. The data were collected through two think-aloud protocols while 21 Chilean English as a foreign language pre-service teachers completed an…

A Case Study: A Teacher's Instruction of Writing in Rural Northeast Mississippi

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Anderson-Crane, Betty

2008-01-01

When writing instructors use form (essay form) based upon state testing standards on the state rubric to guide students in writing, they may be teaching form to limit higher level thinking content (Albertson, 2004). Instructors may not feel confident enough in their teaching of writing for high-stakes' testing; therefore, they may instruct…

Coherence in the Assessment of Writing Skills

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Walker, Robin; Riu, Carmen Perez

2008-01-01

Unhappy with the contradiction of teaching writing skills through a process-genre approach and testing them by means of a timed essay, the authors devised the Extended Writing Project (EWP) as an alternative evaluation mechanism. This requires students to write an extended text in consecutive sections that are drafted and revised with external…

Teaching for a Tolerant World, Grades K-6: Essays and Resources.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Robertson, Judith P., Ed.

This book presents essays and resources that address crucial questions regarding how children should learn about genocide and intolerance and the literature used in teaching these topics. Part 1 (Guidelines on Teaching about Genocide and Intolerance through Language Arts/English Studies Education) includes the following 2 essays: "Editor's…

"Thoughts across My Corpus Callosum": What Lewis Thomas's Essays Can Teach Students about Writing Well.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

White, Fred D.

As Lewis Thomas has maintained, much of today's public anxiety about science is the apprehension that the whole is being overlooked by an endless, obsessive preoccupation with the parts, and this is a suitable analogy for composition teaching. Students and teachers alike tend to fret endlessly over minute details of writing, like grammar,…

Using Creative Writing to Teach Exposition/Artistic/Report Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

West, William W.

Teachers who restrict their teaching of writing to elements of exposition are likely to fail because there is insufficient content, interest, or challenge in learning simple exposition, and the techniques that contribute to polished exposition are more easily accessible when approached through aesthetic writing. A teaching sequence for using…

Teaching for a Tolerant World, Grades 9-12. Essays and Resources.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Danks, Carol, Ed.; Rabinsky, Leatrice B., Ed.

The essays and resources in this book are designed to help high school English teachers adapt their own classroom lessons for teaching about genocide and intolerance. Beginning with guidelines developed by the National Council of teachers of English's Committee on Teaching about Genocide and Intolerance, the 16 essays present approaches to…

Essay writing in biology: An example of effective student learning?

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zeegers, Petrus; Giles, Lynne

1996-12-01

The views of first-year biology students ( N=337) on an essay writing assignment were evaluated by means of a questionnaire. The students were asked to reflect on the strategies they employed, the number and type of resources used, their areas of difficulty and to evaluate their own performance. The data were used to elucidate possible areas of discrepancy between the approach taken by the students and that suggested by the Biology Department via information in student manuals and evaluation criteria. The data were also compared to similar studies on student writing previously reported for students of psychology and history. Finally a series of recommendations is made to help staff to allow their students to develop improved writing strategies, minimise the possible difficulties encountered and allow the writing exercise to fulfil its desired outcome, that of being an integral part of the process of learning.

Evaluation of a computer-based prompting intervention to improve essay writing in undergraduates with cognitive impairment after acquired brain injury.

PubMed

Ledbetter, Alexander K; Sohlberg, McKay Moore; Fickas, Stephen F; Horney, Mark A; McIntosh, Kent

2017-11-06

This study evaluated a computer-based prompting intervention for improving expository essay writing after acquired brain injury (ABI). Four undergraduate participants aged 18-21 with mild-moderate ABI and impaired fluid cognition at least 6 months post-injury reported difficulty with the writing process after injury. The study employed a non-concurrent multiple probe across participants, in a single-case design. Outcome measures included essay quality scores and number of revisions to writing counted then coded by type using a revision taxonomy. An inter-scorer agreement procedure was completed for quality scores for 50% of essays, with data indicating that agreement exceeded a goal of 85%. Visual analysis of results showed increased essay quality for all participants in intervention phase compared with baseline, maintained 1 week after. Statistical analyses showed statistically significant results for two of the four participants. The authors discuss external cuing for self-monitoring and tapping of existing writing knowledge as possible explanations for improvement. The study provides preliminary evidence that computer-based prompting has potential to improve writing quality for undergraduates with ABI.

A Thousand Writers Writing: Seeking Change through the Radical Practice of Writing as a Way of Being

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yagelski, Robert P.

2009-01-01

In this frankly utopian essay, Robert Yagelski's theme is the transformative power of writing as an act in and of itself. He makes us reevaluate our motivation and point for teaching writing in schools and asks us to consider an agenda that will quite frankly scare teachers as he explains why we need an ontology of writing. (Contains 6 notes.)

Teaching the Writing Process

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Keen, John

2017-01-01

This article outlines some cognitive process models of writing composition. Possible reasons why students' writing capabilities do not match their abilities in some other school subjects are explored. Research findings on the efficacy of process approaches to teaching writing are presented and potential shortcomings are discussed. Product-based…

Emphasizing Planning for Essay Writing with a Computer-Based Graphic Organizer

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Evmenova, Anya S.; Regan, Kelley; Boykin, Andrea; Good, Kevin; Hughes, Melissa; MacVittie, Nichole; Sacco, Donna; Ahn, Soo Y.; Chirinos, David

2016-01-01

The authors conducted a multiple-baseline study to investigate the effects of a computer-based graphic organizer (CBGO) with embedded self-regulated learning strategies on the quantity and quality of persuasive essay writing by students with high-incidence disabilities. Ten seventh- and eighth-grade students with learning disabilities, emotional…

Group Writing: How Writing Teaches Reading

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Campbell-Rush, Peggy

2006-01-01

What do Slinky toys, sign language, clipboards, golf pencils, and a house icon have in common? They all are a part of the author's writing and reading program, which teaches children how to write, and then read what they have written. This book includes: effective strategies that address multiple learning styles; a ready-to-use form for ongoing…

"Real Women" Essay Writing Competition Guide. National Women's History Week, March 3-9, 1985.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ruthsdotter, Mary, Ed.

Step-by-step guidelines to help educators and community groups implement a National Women's History Week essay contest, in which elementary and secondary students write about women, are provided. Students are encouraged to write about a woman they personally know so that they can conduct an oral history interview. An alternate approach would be to…

Once More to the Essay: Prose Models, Textbooks, and Teaching.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Root, Robert L., Jr.

1995-01-01

Examines the ways in which composition essay anthologies shape and reflect the beliefs and teaching approaches of composition teachers. Focuses on how anthologies treat a widely reproduced essay, E.B. White's "Once More to the Lake." (TB)

Teaching Argumentative Writing through Film.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fluitt-Dupuy, Jan

2001-01-01

Discusses how watching and discussing feature films and writing reviews of these films in the English-as-a-Second/Foreign-Language classroom can be instrumental in teaching the principles of good argumentative writing within the confines of the simple movie review. Six steps for teaching a film review unit are provided. (Author/VWL)

Writing Together: An Arendtian Framework for Collaboration

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Restaino, Jessica

2014-01-01

This essay considers the long-standing challenges, in both practice and theory, to collaborative writing in the first-year classroom. I argue that Hannah Arendt's concepts of plurality and natality are useful frameworks for thinking constructively and practically about teaching argumentative writing through collaboration. I explore these…

Teaching Math Is All Write

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Staal, Nancy; Wells, Pamela J.

2011-01-01

Both writing and math require purposeful teaching. This article describes how one teacher discovered that she could teach math in a way that paralleled how she taught writing by researching what students know and then nudging them ahead to the next level of understanding. Just as effective writers employ creativity, perseverance, and revising,…

30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Peterson, Art, Comp.

2003-01-01

The National Writing Project's (NWP) "30 Ideas for Teaching Writing" discusses making grammar lessons dynamic, using casual student conversation as a source for writing, home language as an assisting tool to attain standard English and other topics by presenting strategies contributed by experienced writing project teachers. NWP does not promote a…

Using Literature-Based Prompts To Teach Writing Competencies: Directed Reading and Writing Lessons.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gelsinger, Barry D.

Intended to help teachers integrate writing instruction with the study of literature, this teaching guide offers a philosophy of writing instruction, describes a procedure for teaching reading and writing lessons, and provides a sequence of writing skills. For various literature selections, the guide defines vocabulary, provides topic discussion…

Drafting and Acting on Feedback Supports Student Learning when Writing Essay Assignments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Freestone, Nicholas

2009-01-01

A diverse student population is a relatively recent feature of the higher education system in the United Kingdom. Consequently, it may be thought that more "traditional" types of assessment based around essay writing skills for science undergraduates may be of decreasing value and relevance to contemporary students. This article…

The Influence of Process Approach on English as Second Language Students' Performances in Essay Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Akinwamide, Timothy Kolade

2012-01-01

This study examined the influence of Process Approach on English as second language Students' performances in essay writing. The purpose was to determine how far this current global approach could be of assistance to the writing skill development of these bilingual speakers of English language. The study employed the pre-test post-test control…

Professional Writing in the English Classroom: Professional Collaborative Writing--Teaching, Writing, and Learning--Together.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bush, Jonathan; Zuidema, Leah

2013-01-01

In this article, the authors report the importance of teaching students about collaborative writing. When teachers are effective in helping students to learn processes for collaborative writing, everyone involved needs to speak, listen, write, and read about how to write well and what makes writing good. Students are forced to "go meta"…

Pedagogy in the Age of Politics: Writing and Reading (in) the Academy.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sullivan, Patricia A., Ed.; Qualley, Donna J., Ed.

Recognizing that the teaching of writing has always been political, this collection of essays by teachers, scholars, and theorists intends to promote discussion of what it means to study and teach writing and reading at a time when the academy itself is struggling to define the educational needs of an increasingly diverse student population. The…

Teaching Writing Skills with Children's Literature.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dierking, Connie Campbell; Anderson-McElveen, Susan

Intended for teachers, this workbook uses 20 well-known children's books as models to teach expository and narrative writing skills. The workbook teaches students about brainstorming, focus, organization, elaboration, and writing conventions with readily-available quality children's literature, such as "When I Was Young in the…

The Teaching of EFL Writing in Indonesia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ariyanti

2016-01-01

Writing is one of the most important aspects in English language acquisition. Teaching writing has its own challenges since there are some steps and requirements that teachers should prepare to undertake in the classroom. This article is aimed to discuss teaching and learning writing in the classroom based on theoretical conceptualisation. In…

Personal Writing and the ESL Student.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Simmons, Mary Beth

Personal writing is not only valid in such places as the academy, it is vital--even though Daniel Horowitz, in his essay "Process, Not Product: Less Than Meets the Eye," said that "teaching students to write intelligently on topics they do not care about seems to be a more useful goal than having them pick topics which interest them." But…

Teaching Writing in Economics

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schmeiser, Katherine

2017-01-01

In this article, the author provides motivation and a template for integrating and teaching writing in a variety of economics courses: core theory or introductory courses, topic courses, and economic writing/research courses. For each assignment, pedagogical reasoning and syllabus integration are discussed. Additionally, the author shows that…

The Use of a Computer-Based Writing Program: Facilitation or Frustration?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chen, Chi-Fen Emily; Cheng, Wei-Yuan

2006-01-01

The invention of computer-based writing program has revolutionized the way of teaching second language writing. Embedded with artificial intelligence scoring engine, it can provide students with both immediate score and diagnostic feedback on their essays. In addition, some of such programs offer convenient writing and editing tools to facilitate…

Writing and Literature in the Secondary School.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gordon, Edward J., Ed.

The 18 essays in this volume originated as talks given at the Yale Conferences on the Teaching of English. The first nine discuss where and how to begin writing, the subject matter and organization of student compositions, the relation of writing to reading and grammar, methods used to mark papers, and the evaluation and function of both…

Tutor Feedback on Draft Essays: Developing Students' Academic Writing and Subject Knowledge

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Court, Krista

2014-01-01

Providing feedback on draft essays is an accepted means of enacting a social-constructivist approach to assessment, aligning with current views on the value of formative feedback and assessment for learning (AFL). However, the use of this process as a means of improving not only content but also students' academic writing skills has not been…

Autobiographical Writing in the Technical Writing Course

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gellis, Mark

2011-01-01

Professionals in the workplace are rarely asked to write autobiographical essays. Such essays, however, are an excellent tool for helping students explore their growth as professionals. This article explores the use of such essays in a technical writing class.

Creative Writing as a Teaching Tool.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Starkey, David, Ed.; And Others

1995-01-01

Offering the notion of writing pedagogy as a "bazaar with many booths," this collection of articles on teaching creative writing is focused on applicability to all levels of instruction. The 10 articles, after a Foreword by the editor, are, as follows: "Before Writing: Remember What Makes Writing Easy" (Donald M. Murray);…

Associated Effects of Automated Essay Evaluation Software on Growth in Writing Quality for Students with and without Disabilities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wilson, Joshua

2017-01-01

The present study examined growth in writing quality associated with feedback provided by an automated essay evaluation system called PEG Writing. Equal numbers of students with disabilities (SWD) and typically-developing students (TD) matched on prior writing achievement were sampled (n = 1196 total). Data from a subsample of students (n = 655)…

"Come on Guys, What Are We Really Trying to Say Here?" Using Google Docs to Develop Year 9 Pupils' Essay-Writing Skills

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moonen, Lucy

2015-01-01

Lucy Moonen set out to explore whether collaborative writing in small groups, facilitated by the use of Google Docs, would help to sustain students' focus on essay writing as the development of an historical argument. She explains how she set up an essay on the League of Nationals as a collaborative task and demonstrates how the technology enabled…

Teaching Spelling, Writing, and Reading for Writing; Powerful Evidence Based Practices

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Harris, Karen R.; Graham, Steve; Aitken, A. Angelique; Barkel, Ashley; Houston, Julia; Ray, Amber

2017-01-01

Students with disabilities often find writing extremely challenging (Harris & Graham, 2016). Special educators can, however, promote tremendous gains in students' ability to write by understanding common challenges students face and mastering specific teaching techniques. Students' writing success depends on reducing how much attention and…

Once More to the Essay: Prose Models, Textbooks, and Teaching.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Root, Robert L., Jr.

A study of 24 composition anthologies that reprinted E. B. White's "Once More to the Lake" reveals a number of disturbing assumptions among the editors of these anthologies. Four areas of examinations were concentrated on: (1) classifications of White's essay; (2) thematic categories; (3) suggestions for writing; (4) study apparatuses;…

Teaching Writing in High School and College: Conversations and Collaborations.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thompson, Thomas C., Ed.

Addressing what teachers can do to prepare high school students to write effectively in college, this book presents 15 narratives and studies suggesting that secondary-postsecondary partnerships and exchanges can significantly improve students' ability to succeed at college-level writing tasks. Essays in section I, Trading Places, are: (1)…

Teaching Writing for the "Real World": Community and Workplace Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cox, Michelle; Ortmeier-Hooper, Christina; Tirabassi, Katherine E.

2009-01-01

In this article, the authors offer an approach to teaching that can help students prepare to write for the workplace and in the community: a case study of community-based writing. In this case-study project, students work in groups to study the writing needs and practices of a community-based group or organization, such as a local public library,…

Tolstoy, the Writing Teacher.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Blaisdell, Bob

1997-01-01

Discusses the Russian master, Leo Tolstoy, and the fact that he wrote pedagogical treatises besides novels. Talks about his free school for children on his estate and his research on education. Discusses two of Tolstoy's essays which recount interactions with the peasant children. Links this to teaching an adult writing workshop at a soup kitchen.…

Comparability of Essay Question Variants

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bridgeman, Brent; Trapani, Catherine; Bivens-Tatum, Jennifer

2011-01-01

Writing task variants can increase test security in high-stakes essay assessments by substantially increasing the pool of available writing stimuli and by making the specific writing task less predictable. A given prompt (parent) may be used as the basis for one or more different variants. Six variant types based on argument essay prompts from a…

What To Expect When You're Expected To Teach: The Anxious Craft of Teaching Composition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bramblett, Anne, Ed.; Knoblauch, Alison, Ed.

This collection of essays addresses the anxieties and problems of beginning writing teachers and provides a reality check for those who expect success from "day one." Following an Introduction: "Silences in Our Teaching Stories; What Do We Leave Out and Why?" (Thomas Newkirk), essays in the collection are: (1) "Forty-Eight…

Teaching Process Writing in an Online Environment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Carolan, Fergal; Kyppö, Anna

2015-01-01

This reflective practice paper offers some insights into teaching an interdisciplinary academic writing course aimed at promoting process writing. The study reflects on students' acquisition of writing skills and the teacher's support practices in a digital writing environment. It presents writers' experiences related to various stages of process…

Passages to Literature: Essays on Teaching in Australia, Canada, England, the United States, and Wales.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Milner, Joseph O'Beirne, Ed.; Milner, Lucy Floyd Morcock, Ed.

Representing Australia, Canada, England, the United States, and Wales, this collection of essays focuses on ways in which teachers can adapt classroom activities and modify writing assignments to encourage personal response and exploration of texts. Essays, their authors, and nationalities are as follows: (1) "The River and Its Banks:…

Worlds of Writing: Teaching and Learning in Discourse Communities of Work.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Matalene, Carolyn B., Ed.

This collection of essays is intended to increase cultural awareness and provide new information about the nature of writing in a number of the discourse communities central to modern economic life. The book focuses on academe, journalism, industry, computers, finance, and law. Essays and their authors are: "Coming to Terms with Different…

A view of dyslexia in context: implications for understanding differences in essay writing experience amongst higher education students identified as dyslexic.

PubMed

Carter, Christine; Sellman, Edward

2013-08-01

This article applies socio-cultural theories to explore how differences in essay writing experience are constituted for a group of students identified as dyslexic. It reports on a qualitative study with eleven student writers, seven of whom are formally identified as dyslexic, from the schools of archaeology, history and philosophy in a 'traditional' UK university. Semi-structured interviews before, during and after writing a coursework essay revealed well-documented dyslexia-related difficulties and also strong differences in how writing was experienced. The multiple and fluid dimensions that construct these differences suggest the importance of position within the context, previous and developing writing and learning experience, and metacognitive, meta-affective and metalinguistic awareness. They also suggest tensions between specialist and inclusive policies in relation to writing pedagogy for students identified as dyslexic. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Culturally Responsive Writing Instruction for Secondary Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chiu, Calli Lewis; Carrero, Kelly M.; Lusk, Mandy E.

2017-01-01

Research suggests that teachers often do not adequately prepare students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) to utilize organizational structures and basic writing skills that are necessary to produce cohesive essays. Among the challenges of effectively teaching writing to secondary students with EBD is how to deliver culturally…

Teaching Writing: Craft, Art, Genre

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Claggett, Fran

2005-01-01

In today's educational climate, it is more important than ever that teachers prepare their students to be effective and competent writers who can write for a variety of purposes. How can teachers teach their students the skills they need to be successful while also fostering an appreciation for the process, craft, and art of writing? Drawing from…

Teaching Descriptive/Narrative Writing: Strategies for Middle and Secondary Students.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Johannessen, Larry R.

Practical classroom activities for teaching narrative/descriptive writing exist which are based on approaches to teaching writing that research indicates improve the quality of student writing. Teachers need to do less lecturing to students about what they should be doing in their writing and more actively involve their students in the learning of…

Re-Framing Race in Teaching Writing across the Curriculum

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Poe, Mya

2013-01-01

Although faculty across the curriculum are often faced with issues of racial identity in the teaching of writing, WAC has offered little support for addressing race in assignment design, classroom interactions, and assessment. Through examples from teaching workshops, I offer specific ways that we can engage discussions about teaching writing and…

Teaching Adolescent ELs to Write Academic-Style Persuasive Essays

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ramos, Kathleen

2014-01-01

The wide adoption of the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in the U.S. has increased expectations for all teachers to prepare all learners to read and write in academic ways. More knowledge is needed about instructional approaches that may lead adolescent English learners (ELs) to meet this goal. Developing academic literacy practices…

A Teacher Essay as Model for Student Invention.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wess, Robert C.

A teacher-written essay comparing writing to farming served as a process model for analogical student themes. This assignment, given to 39 students in 2 classes of a first course in freshman composition, produced complete analogical essays in all but 4 cases. The essays, questionnaire responses, and retrospective essays on the writing of the…

Exploring Teacher Strategies in Teaching Descriptive Writing in Indonesia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Suriyanti, Sufatmi; Yaacob, Aizan

2016-01-01

Purpose: This paper is the outcome of a study which examined teacher strategies in teaching descriptive writing to junior high school students in Delitua, North Sumatra, Indonesia. The study was based on two questions: 1) What are the teaching strategies used by EFL teachers in teaching descriptive writing? 2) To what extent did the descriptive…

Effects of Teaching Strategies in Annotated Bibliography Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tan-de Ramos, Jennifer

2015-01-01

The study examines the effect of teaching strategies to improved writing of students in the tertiary level. Specifically, three teaching approaches--the use of modelling, grammar-based, and information element-focused--were tested on their effect on the writing of annotated bibliography in three research classes at a university in Manila.…

Articulate--Academic Writing, Refereeing Editing and Publishing Our Work in Learning, Teaching and Educational Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wisker, Gina

2013-01-01

Most work on writing and publication processes focuses on writing support for undergraduates or postgraduates writing in the disciplines, while work on academic identities frequently considers development as a university teacher. This essay consider the reviewing process for academics who write, whether doctoral students, researchers, teachers or…

Intersections: Theory-Practice in the Writing Center.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mullin, Joan A., Ed.; Wallace, Ray, Ed.

The 15 essays in this book reveal the complexity of teaching writing, with some contributors calling into question the gap between classroom theory and classroom practice as seen through students' and tutors' perspectives. The book analyzes the cornerstone of theory and proposes a reexamination of some taken-for-granted composition practices.…

Write Angles: Strategies for Teaching Composition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tompkins, Gail E., Ed.; Goss, Claudette, Ed.

Written by teachers for teachers, this book, the first publication of the Oklahoma Writing Project, contains a collection of articles which describe successful strategies and activities for teaching composition. The articles, which deal with a variety of topics, listed with their authors, are as follows: (1) The Writing Process (Gail E. Tompkins…

Implementing Keyword and Question Generation Approaches in Teaching EFL Summary Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chou, Mu-hsuan

2012-01-01

Summary writing has been considered an important aspect of academic writing. However, writing summaries can be a challenging task for the majority of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Research into teaching summary writing has focused on different processes to teach EFL learners. The present study adopted two methods--keyword and…

Impact of Web Based Learning on EFL: Using On-Line Discussion Forum (ODF) to Enhance Students' Writing Skill

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Akmal

2017-01-01

Web based learning is considered as a breakthrough in the teaching of writing skill to the pre-service teachers at University of PGRI Semarang, Indonesia. The students should write argumentative, persuasive, and descriptive essays. This research offers significant contribution in term of the impact of web based learning on writing skill of English…

Improving Achievement Via Essay Exams.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Milton, Ohmer

1979-01-01

The benefits of using essay tests rather than objective tests in professional education programs are discussed. Essay tests offer practice in writing, creativity and formal communications. Guidelines for using and scoring a sample essay test in biology are presented. (BH)

Teaching Writing through Communicative Approach in Military English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Likaj, Manjola

2015-01-01

The paper speaks about teaching writing through communicative approach in English for Specific Purposes, especially in Military English. There are presented three different approaches regarding writing in ESP: product, process and social-constructionist approach. The recent developments in ESP writing consider the social-constructionist approach…

Writing in Jail: A Chance for Reflection

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cowser, Robert

2003-01-01

The author describes his experience teaching a writing group in Martin Tennessee jail. The faces of most of the inmates showed curiosity. Each was saying not in words, but by gesture, "help make better this boring existence." The first essays the inmates wrote were about themselves and other members of their family. Some have written…

Teaching Writing in the Shadow of Standardized Writing Assessment: An Exploratory Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brimi, Hunter

2012-01-01

This exploratory study results from interviews with five high school English teachers regarding their writing instruction. The researcher sought to answer these questions: (1) How had the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program's (TCAP) Writing Assessment affected their teaching as gauged by the teachers' statements regarding the assessment,…

Teachers' reported practices for teaching writing in England.

PubMed

Dockrell, Julie E; Marshall, Chloë R; Wyse, Dominic

To date there have been no systematic studies examining the ways in which teachers in England focus and adapt their teaching of writing. The current study addresses this gap by investigating the nature and frequency of teachers' approaches to the teaching of writing in a sample of English primary schools, using the 'simple view of writing' as a framework to examine the extent to which different aspects of the writing process are addressed. One hundred and eighty-eight staff from ten different schools responded to an online questionnaire. Only the data from class teachers (n = 88) who responded to all items on the questionnaire were included in the final analyses. Respondents enjoyed teaching writing and felt prepared to teach it. However, despite feeling that they were effective in identifying approaches to support students' writing, nearly half reported that supporting struggling writers was problematic for them. Overall teachers reported more work at word level, occurring several times a week, than with transcription, sentence or text levels, which were reported to occur weekly. Planning, reviewing and revising occurred least often, only monthly. For these variables no differences were found between teachers of younger (age 4-7) and older students (age 8-11). By contrast, an examination of specific aspects of each component revealed differences between the teachers of the two age groups. Teachers of younger students focused more frequently on phonic activities related to spelling, whereas teachers of older students focussed more on word roots, punctuation, word classes and the grammatical function of words, sentence-level work, and paragraph construction.

A Heuristic Tool for Teaching Business Writing: Self-Assessment, Knowledge Transfer, and Writing Exercises

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ortiz, Lorelei A.

2013-01-01

To teach effective business communication, instructors must target students’ current weaknesses in writing. One method for doing so is by assigning writing exercises. When used heuristically, writing exercises encourage students to practice self-assessment, self-evaluation, active learning, and knowledge transfer, all while reinforcing the basics…

Embedding the Teaching of Academic Writing into Anthropology Lectures

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mostert, Linda Ann; Townsend, Rodwell

2018-01-01

This paper lends support to the argument that students require a variety of teaching strategies to help them improve their academic writing. The study described here took place in 2014 in the context of embedding the teaching of academic writing into anthropology modules. The strategies implemented were microthemes, peer feedback, annotated…

Teaching Technical and Business Writing: Strategies and Evaluation.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Alexander, Clara

1985-01-01

Describes a course that gives students the kinds of writing and oral communication experiences they will need on the job. The course gives students information about effective speaking and teaches them how to write business letters, prepare simple visuals for written and oral reports, and write formal proposals. (EL)

The problems inherent in teaching technical writing and report writing to native Americans

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Zukowski/faust, J.

1981-01-01

Teaching technical writing to Native Americans contending with a second language and culture is addressed. Learning difficulties arising from differences between native and acquired language and cultural systems are examined. Compartmentalized teaching, which presents the ideals of technical writing in minimal units, and skills development are considered. Rhetorical problems treated include logic of arrangement, selection of support and scope of detail, and time and space. Specific problems selected include the concept of promptness, the contextualization of purpose, interpersonal relationships, wordiness, mixture of registers, and the problem of abstracting. Four inductive procedures for students having writing and perception problems are included. Four sample exercises and a bibliography of 13 references are also included.

Writing Is the Funnest Thing: Teaching Creative Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Witter, Janet; Emberlin, Don

1973-01-01

This curriculum bulletin discusses a program teaching creative writing to fifth and sixth grade children in an attempt to improve the quality of written English. These children wrote briefly every day throughout the school year. Every area of the written language curriculum was covered. Each student wrote letters, reports, stories, editorial…

The Impact of Blended e-Learning on Undergraduate Academic Essay Writing in English (L2)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ferriman, Nicholas

2013-01-01

This paper describes a quasi-experimental study into the impact of a blended e-learning environment on academic writing assignments in English (L2) at a Thai international college. An experimental group of 15 students used an on-line bulletin board, as well as face-to-face (F2F) communication in class, to share information for essay topics they…

Factors influencing pre-service physics teachers' skills of writing teaching materials

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sinaga, Parlindungan

2016-02-01

Writing teaching materials is one of the generic pedagogical skills. Teachers and pre-service teachers should be trained to have the skills of writing teaching materials. This study examines the factors that influence the skills of writing in the disciplines among pre-service physics teachers. This study in particular aims to contribute to the development of science writing in the disciplines and to the organization of workshops on writing teaching materials for pre-service teachers. The problems of this research are formulated in the question of what are the factors that influence the skills of pre-service physics teachers in writing teaching materials. The research adopted mixed methods with embedded experimental design. The research subjects were 18 students enrolled in the school physics course. The instruments used consisted of conceptual understanding tests, learning strategy questionnaire, tests of the multiple representation skills, and one-on-one semi- structured interview. Results of data analysis show that the ability and skills of writing physics teaching materials of the pre- service physics teachers are determined by the factors of conceptual understanding of the subject matter with a contribution of 20%, the skills of making multiple representations of concepts with a contribution of 9.8% and students' self-regulation and learning strategy with a contribution of 33.5%. There are other factors that have not been investigated in this study; therefore, it is recommended that future research conduct further investigation on other factors that influence pre-service teachers' skills in writing physics teaching materials.

Effects of disfluency in writing.

PubMed

Medimorec, Srdan; Risko, Evan F

2016-11-01

While much previous research has suggested that decreased transcription fluency has a detrimental effect on writing, there is recent evidence that decreased fluency can actually benefit cognitive processing. Across a series of experiments, we manipulated transcription fluency of ostensibly skilled typewriters by asking them to type essays in two conditions: both-handed and one-handed typewriting. We used the Coh-Metrix text analyser to investigate the effects of decreased transcription fluency on various aspects of essay writing, such as lexical sophistication, sentence complexity, and cohesion of essays (important indicators of successful writing). We demonstrate that decreased fluency can benefit certain aspects of writing and discuss potential mechanisms underlying disfluency effects in essay writing. © 2016 The British Psychological Society.

Comprehension and Writing Strategy Training Improves Performance on Content-Specific Source-Based Writing Tasks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Weston-Sementelli, Jennifer L.; Allen, Laura K.; McNamara, Danielle S.

2016-01-01

Source-based essays are evaluated both on the quality of the writing and the content appropriate interpretation and use of source material. Hence, composing a high-quality source-based essay (an essay written based on source material) relies on skills related to both reading (the sources) and writing (the essay) skills. As such, source-based…

Comprehension and Writing Strategy Training Improves Performance on Content-Specific Source-Based Writing Tasks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Weston-Sementelli, Jennifer L.; Allen, Laura K.; McNamara, Danielle S.

2018-01-01

Source-based essays are evaluated both on the quality of the writing and the content appropriate interpretation and use of source material. Hence, composing a high-quality source-based essay (an essay written based on source material) relies on skills related to both reading (the sources) and writing (the essay) skills. As such, source-based…

The Utility of Reflective Writing after a Palliative Care Experience: Can We Assess Medical Students' Professionalism?

PubMed Central

Gill, Anne C.; Teal, Cayla R.; Morrison, Laura J.

2013-01-01

Abstract Background Medical education leaders have called for a curriculum that proactively teaches knowledge, skills, and attitudes required for professional practice and have identified professionalism as a competency domain for medical students. Exposure to palliative care (PC), an often deeply moving clinical experience, is an optimal trigger for rich student reflection, and students' reflective writings can be explored for professional attitudes. Objective Our aim was to evaluate the merit of using student reflective writing about a PC clinical experience to teach and assess professionalism. Methods After a PC patient visit, students wrote a brief reflective essay. We explored qualitatively if/how evidence of students' professionalism was reflected in their writing. Five essays were randomly chosen to develop a preliminary thematic structure, which then guided analysis of 30 additional, randomly chosen essays. Analysts coded transcripts independently, then collaboratively, developed thematic categories, and selected illustrative quotes for each theme and subtheme. Results Essays revealed content reflecting more rich information about students' progress toward achieving two professionalism competencies (demonstrating awareness of one's own perspectives and biases; demonstrating caring, compassion, empathy, and respect) than two others (displaying self-awareness of performance; recognizing and taking actions to correct deficiencies in one's own behavior, knowledge, and skill). Conclusions Professional attitudes were evident in all essays. The essays had limited use for formal summative assessment of professionalism competencies. However, given the increasing presence of PC clinical experiences at medical schools nationwide, we believe this assessment strategy for professionalism has merit and deserves further investigation. PMID:23937062

Brokering Disciplinary Writing: TAs and the Teaching of Writing across the Disciplines

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Winzenried, Misty Anne

2016-01-01

Graduate teaching assistants (TAs) and the general education yet discipline-specific courses they often teach occupy a complex peripheral position in the university. This qualitative comparative case study investigated disciplinary TAs' identities and pedagogical strategies as they taught writing courses linked with disciplinary lecture courses at…

Rhetorical Roulette: Does Writing-Faculty Overload Disable Effective Response to Student Writing?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Melanie

2009-01-01

This article describes a pilot study that suggests writing-faculty workload may affect the pedagogical focus and rhetorical effectiveness of written response to students' essays. To study the relationship between writing-faculty workload and comments that faculty write on students' essays, the author sent an eleven-question survey to 30 English…

5 CFR 7301.102 - Prior approval for outside teaching, speaking and writing.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... 5 Administrative Personnel 3 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Prior approval for outside teaching... approval for outside teaching, speaking and writing. (a) Before engaging in outside teaching, speaking or... that the outside teaching, speaking or writing is not expected to involve conduct prohibited by statute...

What Is Happening in the Teaching of Writing?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Applebee, Arthur N.; Langer, Judith A.

2009-01-01

It has been almost 30 years since the last systematic look at writing instruction in middle schools and high schools in the United States (Applebee, Writing). Since that report, there have been a number of significant changes in the contexts in which teachers teach and in which their students learn to write. Stretching back to the 1969-70 school…

Toulmin and the Ethics of Argument Fields: Teaching Writing and Argument.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stygall, Gail

Writing instructors who teach argument are familiar with the dilemma of conflicting metaphors: those who teach writing with a process approach may structure their teaching through a growth or benevolent nature metaphor, but cannot deny the tenacity of the "argument as war" metaphor. Breaking this war metaphor requires that ethics become…

Experiments with Writing to Teach Microbiology.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cannon, Robert E.

1990-01-01

Described are the experiences of one teacher with the teaching of writing in college level microbiology, virology, and immunology courses. Assignments, methods, evaluation, and student responses are discussed. (CW)

Filtering Essays by Means of a Software Tool: Identifying Poor Essays

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Seifried, Eva; Lenhard, Wolfgang; Spinath, Birgit

2017-01-01

Writing essays and receiving feedback can be useful for fostering students' learning and motivation. When faced with large class sizes, it is desirable to identify students who might particularly benefit from feedback. In this article, we tested the potential of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) for identifying poor essays. A total of 14 teaching…

How Coaching Forensics Made Me a Better Writing Coach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Williamson, Lynette

2007-01-01

The author, a high school teacher and forensics coach, describes ways to teach writing--including on-demand essays--that draw on successful practices she developed in coaching. Students learn the importance of using personal conviction and qualified thesis statements to build arguments, as well as learning "The Debater Four-Step," an effective…

Language style matching in writing: synchrony in essays, correspondence, and poetry.

PubMed

Ireland, Molly E; Pennebaker, James W

2010-09-01

Each relationship has its own personality. Almost immediately after a social interaction begins, verbal and nonverbal behaviors become synchronized. Even in asocial contexts, individuals tend to produce utterances that match the grammatical structure of sentences they have recently heard or read. Three projects explore language style matching (LSM) in everyday writing tasks and professional writing. LSM is the relative use of 9 function word categories (e.g., articles, personal pronouns) between any 2 texts. In the first project, 2 samples totaling 1,744 college students answered 4 essay questions written in very different styles. Students automatically matched the language style of the target questions. Overall, the LSM metric was internally consistent and reliable across writing tasks. Women, participants of higher socioeconomic status, and students who earned higher test grades matched with targets more than others did. In the second project, 74 participants completed cliffhanger excerpts from popular fiction. Judges' ratings of excerpt-response similarity were related to content matching but not function word matching, as indexed by LSM. Further, participants were not able to intentionally increase style or content matching. In the final project, an archival study tracked the professional writing and personal correspondence of 3 pairs of famous writers across their relationships. Language matching in poetry and letters reflected fluctuations in the relationships of 3 couples: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Implications for using LSM as an implicit marker of social engagement and influence are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

Which Factor, Teaching or Writing, Contributes More to Faculty Development?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Boice, Robert

The effect of a highly-structured faculty development program that focused on improving teaching skills and writing productivity through weekly individual sessions was studied with 16 social sciences faculty. Participants were alternatively assigned to one of four groups that emphasized development in teaching skills, writing productivity, or a…

Teaching Writing in the Social Sciences: A Comparison and Critique of Three Models

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hansen, Kristine; Adams, Joyce

2010-01-01

This article describes and evaluates three approaches to teaching writing in the social sciences, particularly psychology: an English department-based course for all social science majors; a team-teaching model that embeds writing in core courses in psychology; and a stand-alone course dedicated to teaching writing in psychology, often taken…

Automated Essay Scoring

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dikli, Semire

2006-01-01

The impacts of computers on writing have been widely studied for three decades. Even basic computers functions, i.e. word processing, have been of great assistance to writers in modifying their essays. The research on Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has revealed that computers have the capacity to function as a more effective cognitive tool (Attali,…

Thematic Progression Analysis in Teaching Explanation Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yang, Xueqian

2008-01-01

Thematic Progression theory explains textual meanings of how experiential and interpersonal meanings are organized in a linear and coherent way. Employing the rationale of T-P theory, this article analyses a lesson plan of teaching Explanation, and shows that T-P analysis can be employed in teaching writing.

Developing Essay Writing Skills: An Evaluation of the Modelling Behaviour Method and the Influence of Student Self-Efficacy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Callinan, Carol J.; van der Zee, Emile; Wilson, Garry

2018-01-01

Social cognitive learning theory has shown that observational learning positively influences essay writing development in high-school students, and that self-efficacy impacts on motivation. This study investigated the relative contribution of model observation, model evaluation, post-submission feedback, and factors relating to self-efficacy, as…

The Student Writing Toolkit: Enhancing Undergraduate Teaching of Scientific Writing in the Biological Sciences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dirrigl, Frank J., Jr.; Noe, Mark

2014-01-01

Teaching scientific writing in biology classes is challenging for both students and instructors. This article offers and reviews several useful "toolkit" items that improve student writing. These include sentence and paper-length templates, funnelling and compartmentalisation, and preparing compendiums of corrections. In addition,…

Self-Efficacy of Teacher Candidates for Teaching First Reading and Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gündogmus, Hatice Degirmenci

2018-01-01

The purpose of this study is to determine by different variables the self-efficacy of a teacher candidate for teaching first reading and writing in their 3rd and 4th year in the department of primary school teaching. In line with the purpose of the study, the self-efficacy levels of teacher candidates for teaching first reading and writing were…

Teaching Students How to Write a Description with Photos

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chong, Ivan

2017-01-01

In writing instruction, teachers often struggle with developing engaging and interactive activities given constraints such as large classes and packed teaching schedules. A purposeful and appealing pre-task can energize the writing process and set the context for the subsequent writing task. With this purpose in mind, the author designed the…

Whose Writing Is it Anyway?: Issues of Control in the Teaching of Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fisher, Ros

2006-01-01

In the UK, teachers have moved from a process approach to the teaching of writing to a more didactic and objectives led programme. This has given rise to concerns about the suppression of creativity and enjoyment. Writing is a convention bound activity where spelling, punctuation and expectations about different text types imply a right and wrong…

From Tyrannosaurus to Pokemon: Autonomy in the Teaching of Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Graham, L.

2001-01-01

Discusses action research case studies of representative children and changes to classroom teaching. Notes that children were given the opportunity to: write about things that mattered to them; write as experts; hear their writing read aloud; and experience genuine response to this writing. Finds boys made most progress when given the opportunity…

Bodies in Composition: Teaching Writing through Kinesthetic Performance

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Butler, Janine

2017-01-01

This article calls on composition instructors to reflect consciously on how we can use our bodies kinesthetically to perform multimodal writing processes through gestural, visual, and spatial modes. Teaching writing through kinesthetic performance can show students that our bodies are being constructed via interaction with audiences, akin to the…

Students' Perceptions of Effective Teaching Strategies in a Developmental Writing Course

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dorsey, Carrie S.

2014-01-01

This dissertation explores student perceptions of effective teaching strategies in a developmental writing course and their perspectives of how well the course prepared them for the freshman college composition course. Three research questions guided the study. Research Question 1 asked which teaching strategies developmental writing students…

Use of the Genre-Based Approach to Teach Expository Essays to English Pedagogy Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gómez Burgos, Eric

2017-01-01

The following article reports the results of an action research project conducted in a public university in Chile. The project consisted of exposing ten undergraduate students from an English pedagogy program to a genre-based approach to writing expository essays. During eight weeks the three stages of the genre-based approach, namely:…

Getting Past "Just Because": Teaching Writing in Science Class

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grymonpre, Kris; Cohn, Allison; Solomon, Stacey

2012-01-01

How many times do teachers assign writing in science class only to be exasperated by their students' lack of writing skills? They often have difficulty making claims and using evidence; instead of explaining their reasoning, they state, "Just because." But teaching writing isn't just for English/language arts (ELA) class. Over the past two years,…

The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since 1880

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Myers, David Gershom

2006-01-01

When Vladimir Nabokov was up for a chair in literature at Harvard, the linguist Roman Jakobson protested: "What's next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?" That anecdote, with which D. G. Myers begins "The Elephants Teach", perfectly frames the issues this book tackles. Myers explores more than a century of debate over how writing should…

The Wheel of Writing: A Model of the Writing Domain for the Teaching and Assessing of Writing as a Key Competency

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Berge, Kjell Lars; Evensen, Lars Sigfred; Thygesen, Ragnar

2016-01-01

The model presented in this article aspires to represent a theoretically valid and coherent definition and description of writing, as a basis for teaching and assessing writing as a key competency in school. It represents a critique as well as an extension of previous alternatives in that it views writing as a culturally and individually…

Teaching Argument Writing to ELLs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ferlazzo, Larry; Hull-Sypnieski, Katie

2014-01-01

"How in the world are we supposed to apply the Common Core writing standards to teaching English language learners?" The authors propose a tentative answer to a question that has been troubling educators of late. Educators, they suggest, need to keep in mind three crucial elements: Students should (1) begin by reading more informational…

Rethinking the Argumentative Essay

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schneer, David

2014-01-01

This article investigates the construction of the argumentative essay as it is commonly presented in academic writing textbooks and classrooms for English language learners. The author first examines the traditional three-stage structure (thesis-argument-conclusion) and then problematizes it within a genre-based approach to academic writing. He…

Scaffolding for Second Language Writers: Producing an Academic Essay.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cotterall, Sara; Cohen, Robin

2003-01-01

Describes how a group of intermediate learners of English were guided through the process of producing their first academic essays in English. The approach applied the concept of scaffolding to the academic writing process by proving flexible support for the learners throughout the writing of their essays. (Author/VWL)

Writing-Based Teaching: Essential Practices and Enduring Questions

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vilardi, Teresa, Ed.; Chang, Mary, Ed.

2009-01-01

Written by the team at Bard College's Institute for Writing and Thinking, this book is designed to provide practical guidance regarding the challenges and potential of writing-based teaching, and suggestions for how to adapt the practices to particular classroom situations. The contributors share candid, first-hand accounts of what it is like to…

Teaching the Proposal in the Professional Writing Course.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wahlstrom, Ralph

2002-01-01

Outlines a professional writing course based on a proposal format that ties the classroom to the student's world. Suggests teaching document forms such as memos, letters, and reports in the context of a comprehensive proposal format. Argues that the proposal can serve as the basis and motivation for an introductory professional writing course. (SG)

Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Composition: Processing, Distancing, and Modeling.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Myers, Miles, Ed.; Gray, James, Ed.

Intended to show teachers how their approaches to the teaching of writing reflect a particular area of research and to show researchers how the intuitions of teachers reflect research findings, the articles in this book are classified according to three approaches to writing: processing, distancing, and modeling. After an introductory essay that…

Teaching the Thesis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Carroll, Joyce Armstrong

2012-01-01

Writing a good thesis provides a successful foundation for composing an essay. Teaching how to do that, however, is quite another matter. Teachers often say to students, "Find a thesis," or "Get a thesis," or "Bring in a thesis statement tomorrow," as if students could order one like a pizza, command it like a pet pooch, or grasp one out of thin…

Teaching Science Writing in an Introductory Lab Course

PubMed Central

Holstein, Sarah E.; Mickley Steinmetz, Katherine R.; Miles, John D.

2015-01-01

One challenge that many neuroscience instructors face is how to teach students to communicate within the field. The goal of this project was to improve students’ scientific writing in an introductory psychology laboratory course that serves as a feeder course into the neuroscience curriculum. This course included a scaffolded approach - breaking assignments into different sections that build upon each other to allow for more direction and feedback on each section. Students were also provided with examples of scientific writing, given direction on finding and reading journal articles, and were taught how to effectively peer review a paper. Research papers were assessed before (Year 1) and after (Year 2) this scaffolded approach was instituted. The assessment included measures of “Genre Knowledge” for each section of a research paper (abstract, introduction, method, results, discussion) as well as measures of “Writing Elements” (grammar, formatting, clarity, transitions, building to the hypothesis, using evidence). The results indicated that there was an improvement for Genre Knowledge scores when comparing Year 1 to Year 2. However, there was no systematic improvement in Writing Elements. This suggests that this teaching technique was most effective in improving students’ ability to write within the scientific genre. The logistics of implementing such an approach are discussed. PMID:25838801

Management Consulting and Teaching: Lessons Learned Teaching Professionals to Control Tone in Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jameson, Daphne A.

2009-01-01

In working with business executives, engineers, and government officials to improve their writing, the author learned that it is much easier to teach clarity than tone. To achieve clarity, writers can follow concrete action steps: (1) organize the ideas; (2) write previews and summaries; (3) insert substantive headings; (4) use active verbs; and…

Using Genre Analysis To Teach Writing in Engineering. Report on a Pilot Video-Teleconference for Engineering Teaching Assistants and Writing Center Consultants.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Alford, Elisabeth; And Others

A pilot project tested and evaluated teleconferencing as a medium for training engineering teaching assistants in technical writing. The teleconference, which linked 15 participants in the engineering departments and writing centers of the University of South Carolina and Ohio State University, also included a training session on the use of genre…

Potential of Mobile Learning in Teaching of ESL Academic Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zaki, Arlina Ahmad; Yunus, Melor Md

2015-01-01

The potentials of mobile learning in teaching academic writing skills for ESL students are explored in this paper. Although there have been studies on MALL to improve writing skills, academic writing was never really touched. Few aspects are covered like the changes in educational technology, defining MALL, identifying issues in academic writing…

Interchanges: Solidarity Forever--Why TA Unions Are Good for Writing Programs

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bernard-Donals, Michael

2009-01-01

In this essay, the author explains how teaching assistant (TA) unions work to the benefit not only of the graduate students who are their members but also of the writing programs that employ them. While university administrations understand unions to be bothersome at best and forces of evil at their worst, unions are essential to the maintenance…

Teaching Chinese College ESL Writing: A Genre-Based Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yang, Yilong

2016-01-01

College students' English writing plays a vital role in their language learning and further education. However, the current college English teaching falls far behind to resolve this issue, which includes insufficient writing ability compared with that of listening and speaking, inadequate teacher instruction and students' exercise, negative…

Conspicuous Strategies in Teaching Expressive Writing: A Quantitative Study Comparing Two Approaches to Process Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fontenot, Jennifer; Carney, Karen J.; Hansen, Kay

2015-01-01

A process-writing approach (BW) with novel concepts was developed by the authors to teach writing to elementary-level students. They believed the BW approach was effective but was particularly effective for special-needs students. Consequently, they decided to quantitatively test these assertions. Instead of testing students taught using the BW…

On Method and Madness: Teaching Writers to Write.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mills, Pat

1994-01-01

Maintains that, in teaching and in teaching writing, methods matter if they are organic methods that grow out of real-life experiences. Notes that in another sense, all that matters is getting both teacher and student to wake up to their own lives and to what they know, absolutely, within themselves. (SR)

Sexuality and Sexual Identity: Critical Possibilities for Teaching Dance Appreciation and Dance History

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dils, Ann

2004-01-01

The intersections of dance and sexuality and sexual identity are part of the critical discourse important to teaching dance appreciation and dance history. This essay presents aspects of my teaching practice, informed by current writings in queer studies, dance studies, education, and sociology. Awareness of potential classroom diversity helps…

Automated Essay Feedback Generation and Its Impact on Revision

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liu, Ming; Li, Yi; Xu, Weiwei; Liu, Li

2017-01-01

Writing an essay is a very important skill for students to master, but a difficult task for them to overcome. It is particularly true for English as Second Language (ESL) students in China. It would be very useful if students could receive timely and effective feedback about their writing. Automatic essay feedback generation is a challenging task,…

Teaching for Joy and Justice: Re-Imagining the Language Arts Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Christensen, Linda

2009-01-01

"Teaching for Joy and Justice" is the much-anticipated sequel to Linda Christensen's bestselling, "Reading, Writing, and Rising Up." Christensen is recognized as one of the country's finest teachers. Her latest book shows why. Through story upon story, Christensen demonstrates how she draws on students' lives and the world to teach poetry, essay,…

The Power of Photography as a Catalyst for Teaching Informational Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lilly, Elizabeth; Fields, Charla

2014-01-01

Writing and photography are composition processes that help develop children's linguistic and visual competencies, respectively. Using photography in teaching writing has been found to enhance students' literacy skills by naturally invoking their interest and motivation, and eventually strengthening the reading-writing relationship. Children can…

Teaching Writing in the Republic of Colombia, 1800-1850

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Clark, Meri L.

2010-01-01

This article examines the enduring importance of handwriting in the early republic of Colombia. Colonial practice informed writing instruction but Colombians re-established it in national terms from the 1820s onward. Teaching writing became a critical tool of state formation: an ideal republic of virtuous functionaries depended on uniform…

The Effectiveness of Scaffolding Design in Training Writing Skills Physics Teaching Materials

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sinaga, Parlindungan; Suhandi, Andi; Liliasari

2015-01-01

Result of field studies showed low writing skill of teachers in teaching material. The root of the problem lies in their inability on translating description of teaching material into writing. This research focused on the effectiveness of scaffolding design. The scaffolding design was tested in the selected topics of physics courses for…

Revisiting LaBrant's "Writing Is More than Structure" ("English Journal", May 1957)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thomas, P. L.

2011-01-01

In this high-accountability era--one in which there is an expanding movement to condemn teachers for the failures of their schools--teachers teach students who believe writing is primarily an act of complying to a prompt, likely for a state accountability assessment or the troubling 25-minute essay that constitutes less than half of the writing…

Teaching Writing Skills: Global Issues. Skills Series, Volume 3.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Benegar, John

Social studies and language arts teachers can use these self-contained activities to teach writing skills to students in grades 6-12. Some of the activities have a global approach requiring students to write about topics such as human rights and cultural differences. Information provided for each activity includes an introduction, objectives, time…

Using Magazine Ads to Teach Sales Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Halper, Cheryl A.

1980-01-01

Notes that using magazine advertisements to teach sales letter writing can help students understand sales techniques they see daily, but do not think much about. Presents a four-point strategy to help them put together effective sales letters. (FL)

Using Simulation to Teach Project Management in the Professional Writing Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Krause, Tim

2010-01-01

It hardly bears noting that when writing instructors teach professional writing they focus on helping students learn to analyze complex communication scenarios, conduct careful research to support their position, and to responsibly and succinctly apply the process of writing any number of supporting documents. Developing these skills are essential…

Sources of Writing Anxiety: A Study on French Language Teaching Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Aslim Yetis, Veda

2017-01-01

Conducted on French Language Teaching students, this research aims to determine the causes of writing anxiety. Designed in accordance with the mixed method, a writing anxiety inventory, a language proficiency exam, a retrospective composing-process questionnaire, a writing attitude scale and semi-structured interviews were used. After identifying…

ESSAYS, ANALYSIS, AND--BETTER WRITING.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

STEWART, DONALD C.

A STUDY OF THE NATURE AND UTILITY OF TYPES OF ESSAY ANTHOLOGIES DESIGNED FOR FRESHMAN COMPOSITION COURSES WAS CONDUCTED IN ORDER TO DETERMINE (1) WHAT ARE THE RATIONALES, ORGANIZATION, CONTENT, AND INSTRUCTIONAL APPARATUS OF THE MOST WIDELY ADOPTED READERS, (2) HAVE THE RATIONALES FOR THEIR USE VARIED SINCE SUCH TEXTS APPEARED, AND (3) IS THE…

A Team of Equals: Teaching Writing in the Sciences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Emerson, Lisa; MacKay, Bruce R.; MacKay, Marion B.; Funnell, Keith A.

2006-01-01

Writing across the curriculum (WAC) is a way of integrating the teaching of writing into specific academic disciplines. A problem faced in the WAC literature is how to develop a process that integrates the skills of multi-disciplinary teams. In this project, action research was used to develop a team comprising faculty from the applied sciences…

What Coaching Football Taught Me aAbout Teaching Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Holt, Dan

2000-01-01

Relates how coaching football is like teaching writing to students. Both groups of students benefit from demonstrations by the teacher or coach and require practice and routine drills. Describes the KISS theory of "Keep it simple, stupid" and how teachers can utilize it as part of their teaching strategy. (VWC)

Teaching Laura Kipnis's "Love's Labors" in "Ways of Reading"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fike, Matthew A.

2013-01-01

This essay describes a method of teaching a very challenging anthology piece: Laura Kipnis's "Love's Labors" (chapter 1 of her 2003 "Against Love: A Polemic"). The method, although designed for a critical thinking course, should also provide resources for those who teach Kipnis's work in writing courses. Using…

Informative, Compare and Contrast, and Persuasive Essay Composing of Fifth and Seventh Graders: Not All Essay Writing Is the Same

PubMed Central

Davidson, Matt; Berninger, Virginia

2015-01-01

Typically developing writers in fifth (n = 110, M = 10 years 8 months) or seventh (n = 97, M = 12 years 7 months) grade wrote informative, compare and contrast, and persuasive essays for which the content was held constant—two mountains with a history of volcanic eruption. Relevant background knowledge was provided by reading text and showing colorful illustrations to the students before writing each genre. Results showed considerable variability between genre pairs within and across individual writers in content quality, organization quality, and length. Results, which support multiple expository genres, are consistent with prior research showing multiple genres (narrative vs. expository or even within narrative). Results are discussed in reference to the importance of assessing multiple genres in inferring composing expertise as emphasized by Olinghouse and colleagues. PMID:27418715

Teaching Children with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders to Write Persuasive Essays

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Asaro-Saddler, Kristie; Bak, Nicole

2012-01-01

In this single-subject design study, we examined the effects of an intervention targeting planning and self-regulation strategy use on the persuasive writing of children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Three 8- to 9-year-old children with ASD in third and fourth grades learned a mnemonic-based strategy for planning and…

Proposing a Wiki-Based Technique for Collaborative Essay Writing (Propuesta de un modelo pedagógico para la escritura colaborativa de ensayos en un entorno virtual wiki)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ortiz Navarrete, Mabel; Ferreira Cabrera, Anita

2014-01-01

This paper aims at proposing a technique for students learning English as a foreign language when they collaboratively write an argumentative essay in a wiki environment. A wiki environment and collaborative work play an important role within the academic writing task. Nevertheless, an appropriate and systematic work assignment is required in…

Enhancing the Quality of EAP Writing through Overt Teaching

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wee, Roselind; Sim, Jacqueline; Jusoff, Kamaruzaman

2009-01-01

This paper examines how overt teaching is instrumental in reducing subject-verb agreement (SVA) errors of Malaysian EAP learners which in turn improves the quality of their writing. The researchers used overt teaching of these grammatical items, that is, SVA and investigated how this method has significantly benefitted the learners who were second…

Reciprocal Teaching of Comprehension Strategies Improves EFL Learners' Writing Ability

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ghorbani, Mohammad Reza; Gangeraj, Atefeh Ardeshir; Alavi, Sahar Zahed

2013-01-01

Although the importance of reading in developing writing ability is undeniable, few competent readers in EFL contexts develop into competent writers. Since students are not aware that reading can assist them in writing, this study examined the effect of reciprocal teaching--which focuses on four reading comprehension strategies, namely…

The Writer's Mind: Ethics in the Teaching of Technical Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rubens, Philip M.

As opposed to being a "closed" text (tightly constrained by physical formats, corporate style, and specialized vocabulary), technical writing is actually "open" in the sense that such a text can be interpreted subjectively by an informed audience. Three ethical issues that should be explored in teaching technical writing include personality--the…

Responding to Student Essays: A Conversation.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Teichmann, Sandra Gail; Fike, Darrell

Two college writing teachers share their viewpoint that people outside the academic setting often misunderstand the time-consuming activities involved with responding to student writing. They agree that teachers should envision evaluation as conducting a conversation with the writer of the essay. The key component of this conversation, depending…

A Teaching Model for Scaffolding 4th Grade Students' Scientific Explanation Writing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yang, Hsiu-Ting; Wang, Kuo-Hua

2014-08-01

Improving students scientific explanations is one major goal of science education. Both writing activities and concept mapping are reported as effective strategies for enhancing student learning of science. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of a teaching model, named the DCI model, which integrates a Descriptive explanation writing activity, Concept mapping, and an Interpretive explanation writing activity, is introduced in a 4th grade science class to see if it would improve students' scientific explanations and understanding. A quasi-experimental design, including a non-randomized comparison group and a pre- and post-test design, was adopted for this study. An experimental group of 25 students were taught using the DCI teaching model, while a comparison group received a traditional lecture teaching. A rubric and content analysis was used to assess students' scientific explanations. The independent sample t test was used to measure difference in conceptual understanding between the two groups, before and after instruction. Then, the paired t test analysis was used to understand the promotion of the DCI teaching model. The results showed that students in the experimental group performed better than students in the comparison group, both in scientific concept understanding and explanation. Suggestions for using concept mapping and writing activities (the DCI teaching model) in science classes are provided in this study.

The Poet in the Warehouse. Creative Writing as Inquiry: Using Imaginative Writing To Explore Other Disciplines.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McCue, Frances

This master's project contains two essays and a long poem, examining the possibilities of creative writing as a tool of inquiry in mathematics, history, science, film, art, and architecture. The project's first essay, "The Poet in the Warehouse," introduces a brief history of imaginative writing and an argument for its inclusion in…

The Challenge of Writing for Publication: Implications for Teaching-Learning Nursing.

PubMed

Yancey, Nan Russell

2016-10-01

Disseminating new scientific knowledge through publication is critical for any discipline, including nursing. The challenge for nurse faculty is preparing emerging nurses with the skills, enthusiasm, and disposition to fully assume professional roles as nurse scientists and scholars, including that of author. Exploring how students learn to write for publication and barriers to writing for publication, recommendations are offered for teaching-learning as a guide to faculty in planning programs, developing curriculum, and identifying teaching-learning strategies. © The Author(s) 2016.

The Perennial Question--"What Do We Want from Public Writing?": A Conversation with Susan Wells

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Minnix, Christopher

2017-01-01

In this interview, Susan Wells discusses the teaching of public writing and the work of public rhetoric as they respond to both shifting and recurring political and social contexts. Drawing on insights from her extensive and current work on public rhetoric, including her foundational essay "Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do We Want from…

Embedding Academic Writing Instruction into Subject Teaching: A Case Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wingate, Ursula; Andon, Nick; Cogo, Alessia

2011-01-01

The benefits of embedding the teaching of writing into the curriculum have been advocated by educators and researchers. However, there is currently little evidence of embedded writing instruction in the UK's higher education context. In this article, we present a case study in which we report the design, implementation and evaluation of an…

Tales from the front lines: the creative essay as a tool for teaching genetics.

PubMed

Koehler, K E; Hawley, R S

1999-07-01

In contrast to the more typical mock grant proposals or literature reviews, we describe the use of the creative essay as a novel tool for teaching human genetics at the college level. This method has worked well for both nonmajor and advanced courses for biology majors. The 10- to 15-page essay is written in storylike form and represents a student's response to the choice of 6-8 scenarios describing human beings coping with various genetic dilemmas. We have found this tool to be invaluable both in developing students' ability to express genetic concepts in lay terms and in promoting student awareness of genetic issues outside of the classroom. Examples from student essays are presented to illustrate these points, and guidelines are suggested regarding instructor expectations of student creativity and scientific accuracy. Methods of grading this assignment are also discussed.

Tales from the front lines: the creative essay as a tool for teaching genetics.

PubMed Central

Koehler, K E; Hawley, R S

1999-01-01

In contrast to the more typical mock grant proposals or literature reviews, we describe the use of the creative essay as a novel tool for teaching human genetics at the college level. This method has worked well for both nonmajor and advanced courses for biology majors. The 10- to 15-page essay is written in storylike form and represents a student's response to the choice of 6-8 scenarios describing human beings coping with various genetic dilemmas. We have found this tool to be invaluable both in developing students' ability to express genetic concepts in lay terms and in promoting student awareness of genetic issues outside of the classroom. Examples from student essays are presented to illustrate these points, and guidelines are suggested regarding instructor expectations of student creativity and scientific accuracy. Methods of grading this assignment are also discussed. PMID:10388836

Voice and Dialogue in Teaching Reading/Writing to Qatari Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Golkowska, Krystyna U.

2013-01-01

This paper describes an attempt to improve the reading comprehension and writing skills of students coming from an oral culture. The proposed approach involves using voice and dialogue--understood literally and metaphorically--as a tool in teaching students how to engage texts and write with a reader in mind. The author discusses a pilot study…

Does Automated Feedback Improve Writing Quality?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wilson, Joshua; Olinghouse, Natalie G.; Andrada, Gilbert N.

2014-01-01

The current study examines data from students in grades 4-8 who participated in a statewide computer-based benchmark writing assessment that featured automated essay scoring and automated feedback. We examined whether the use of automated feedback was associated with gains in writing quality across revisions to an essay, and with transfer effects…

The Powers of Literacy: A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cope, Bill, Ed.; Kalantzis, Mary, Ed.

Documenting an educational experiment that began in Sydney, Australia, this book presents essays by theorists and practitioners in the genre literacy movement that describe this approach to literacy instruction in a clear, practical, and accessible way. The book notes that the genre approach to literacy teaching emphasizes content, structure, and…

A (Theory and Pedagogy) Essay on the (History) Essay

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jones, Adrian N.

2018-01-01

Everyone who writes anything--even non-fiction!--knows you discover things as you go along. Writing is a heuristic. Writing history is no different. Yet senior-secondary and tertiary exponents of the teaching and learning of history are often strangely tongue-tied on the matter of writing and thinking as engines of discovery in historical studies…

Mainstream Teacher Candidates' Perspectives on ESL Writing: The Effects of Writer Identity and Rater Background

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kang, Hyun-Sook; Veitch, Hillary

2017-01-01

This study explored the extent to which the ethnic identity of a writer and the background (gender and area of teaching) of a rater can influence mainstream teacher candidates' evaluation of English as a second language (ESL) writing, using a matched-guise method. A one-page essay was elicited from an ESL learner enrolled in an intensive English…

The Los Altos Writing Project.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kraft, Richard F.

The intent of this guide is to encourage teachers to have students write, both formally and informally, on a systematic basis. Three types of writing are emphasized: (1) journal writing; (2) research paper writing; and (3) essay writing. The section on journal writing includes a handout for the class explaining the purpose for journal writing and…

Teaching Psychological Report Writing: Content and Process

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wiener, Judith; Costaris, Laurie

2012-01-01

The purpose of this article is to discuss the process of teaching graduate students in school psychology to write psychological reports that teachers and parents find readable and that guide intervention. The consensus from studies across four decades of research is that effective psychological reports connect to the client's context; have clear…

Writing, Teaching, and Researching: An Interview with Rene Saldana, Jr.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Saldana, Rene, Jr.; Moore, David W.

2010-01-01

Rene Saldana, Jr., an assistant professor at Texas Tech University, is a writer of short stories, poetry, and novels. In order to get his storytelling right, he has relied on his memory when writing memoirs and consulted popular culture and family when writing fiction. In order to get his university teaching right, he reads seminal texts on…

Use of Comparative Biography in the Teaching of World History.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wolf, Ken

Comparative biography can be used as a means of enlivening the teaching of college level interdisciplinary world civilization courses. By providing (and writing) well-written "human interest" material drawn from biographical essays, instructors can illustrate problems or issues in human life by showing how major political or cultural…

Writing Pal: Feasibility of an Intelligent Writing Strategy Tutor in the High School Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Roscoe, Rod D.; McNamara, Danielle S.

2013-01-01

The Writing Pal (W-Pal) is a novel intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that offers writing strategy instruction, game-based practice, essay writing practice, and formative feedback to developing writers. Compared to more tractable and constrained learning domains for ITS, writing is an ill-defined domain because the features of effective writing are…

The Validity of Examination Essays in Higher Education: Issues and Responses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brown, Gavin T. L.

2010-01-01

The use of timed, essay examinations is a well-established means of evaluating student learning in higher education. The reliability of essay scoring is highly problematic and it appears that essay examination grades are highly dependent on language and organisational components of writing. Computer-assisted scoring of essays makes use of language…

Writing Programs.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brown, Peggy Ann, Ed.

1984-01-01

Ways that colleges and universities provide opportunities for students to improve their writing are discussed in two essays and program descriptions. In "Reinventing the Rhetorical Tradition: Finding Ways to Revalue Writing," Patrick Hartwell and Greg Waters briefly describe activities at colleges that center around the rhetorical…

Impact of Group Work and Extended Essay Writing on Online Advanced Placement Program® Student Performance. Research Report. ETS RR-07-22

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Handwerk, Phil

2007-01-01

Online high schools are growing significantly in number, popularity, and function. However, little empirical data has been published about the effectiveness of these institutions. This research examined the frequency of group work and extended essay writing among online Advanced Placement Program® (AP®) students, and how these tasks may have…

Improving Students' Chinese Writing Abilities in Taiwan with the "Conditioned Writing System"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liu, Yuan-Chen; Lee, Wan-Chun; Huang, Tzu-Hua; Hsieh, Hsiao-Mei

2012-01-01

This research investigates students' performance while writing Chinese essays using an interactive online writing system. Participants include students from two seventh-grade classes of a junior high school in Taoyuan County, Taiwan. The experimental group uses the conditioned writing interactive online system, while the control group receives…

Integrating Scientific Argumentation to Improve Undergraduate Writing and Learning in a Global Environmental Change Course

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Koffman, Bess G.; Kreutz, Karl J.; Trenbath, Kim

We present a strategy for using scientific argumentation in an early undergraduate laboratory course to teach disciplinary writing practices and to promote critical thinking, knowledge transformation, and understanding of the scientific method. The approach combines targeted writing instruction; data analysis and interpretation; formulation of a hypothesis; and construction of an argument. Students submit and receive feedback on two drafts of two different argumentation essays, providing the opportunity for guided practice. Each written argument is intended to draw on several weeks' course material, including short lectures, discussions, readings, and problem sets. Thus our aim with these writing assignments is to helpmore » students synthesize content and concepts, deepening their learning. We have found that this inquiry-based approach to writing engages students in course material, and significantly improves both writing and learning. We observed the greatest improvement among students with the lowest initial scores, suggesting that lower-achieving students benefitted disproportionately from this approach. Students have responded positively to the use of writing in the course, many stating on course evaluations that this is the first time they have received instruction in scientific writing. They have also pointed to a greater 'big-picture' understanding of the course gained through writing. We describe the course and our curriculum, and provide suggestions for implementation as well as rubrics used to evaluate problem sets and student argumentation essays.« less

Close Reading and Creative Writing in Clinical Education: Teaching Attention, Representation, and Affiliation

PubMed Central

Charon, Rita; Hermann, Nellie; Devlin, Michael J.

2015-01-01

Medical educators increasingly have embraced literary and narrative means of pedagogy, such as the use of learning portfolios, reading works of literature, reflective writing, and creative writing, to teach interpersonal and reflective aspects of medicine. Outcomes studies of such pedagogies support the hypotheses that narrative training can deepen the clinician's attention to a patient and can help to establish the clinician's affiliation with patients, colleagues, teachers, and the self. In this article, the authors propose that creative writing in particular is useful in the making of the physician. Of the conceptual frameworks that explain why narrative training is helpful for clinicians, the authors focus on aesthetic theories to articulate the mechanisms through which creative and reflective writing may have dividends in medical training. These theories propose that accurate perception requires representation and that representation requires reception, providing a rationale for teaching clinicians and trainees how to represent what they perceive in their clinical work and how to read one another's writings. The authors then describe the narrative pedagogy used at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. Since faculty must read what their students write, they receive robust training in close reading. From this training emerged the Reading Guide for Reflective Writing, which has been useful to clinicians as they develop their skills as close readers. This institution-wide effort to teach close reading and creative writing aims to equip students and faculty with the pre-requisites to provide attentive, empathic clinical care. PMID:26200577

Close Reading and Creative Writing in Clinical Education: Teaching Attention, Representation, and Affiliation.

PubMed

Charon, Rita; Hermann, Nellie; Devlin, Michael J

2016-03-01

Medical educators increasingly have embraced literary and narrative means of pedagogy, such as the use of learning portfolios, reading works of literature, reflective writing, and creative writing, to teach interpersonal and reflective aspects of medicine. Outcomes studies of such pedagogies support the hypotheses that narrative training can deepen the clinician's attention to a patient and can help to establish the clinician's affiliation with patients, colleagues, teachers, and the self. In this article, the authors propose that creative writing in particular is useful in the making of the physician. Of the conceptual frameworks that explain why narrative training is helpful for clinicians, the authors focus on aesthetic theories to articulate the mechanisms through which creative and reflective writing may have dividends in medical training. These theories propose that accurate perception requires representation and that representation requires reception, providing a rationale for teaching clinicians and trainees how to represent what they perceive in their clinical work and how to read one another's writings. The authors then describe the narrative pedagogy used at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. Because faculty must read what their students write, they receive robust training in close reading. From this training emerged the Reading Guide for Reflective Writing, which has been useful to clinicians as they develop their skills as close readers. This institution-wide effort to teach close reading and creative writing aims to equip students and faculty with the prerequisites to provide attentive, empathic clinical care.

Towards an Eclectic Framework for Teaching EFL Writing in a Chinese Context

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yan, Yi

2010-01-01

The challenges of writing itself and lack of appropriate teaching methodology demotivate EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners in some Chinese universities to write more, especially as the only incentive for students to write is the compulsory tests. The main objectives of this article are: (1) to discuss the background of the EFL learners…

Writing for the World: Wikipedia as an Introduction to Academic Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tardy, Christine M.

2010-01-01

As students move from writing personal essays to writing formal academic texts in English, they face several new challenges. Writing tasks in higher education often require students to draw upon outside sources and to adopt the styles and genres of academic discourse. They must conduct research, summarize and paraphrase, cite sources, adopt genre…

The Teaching of Writing: Illinois Teachers Report on Research & Practices. Sentence Combining as a Composition Technique.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Matthews, Dorothy, Ed.

1978-01-01

The ten articles in this journal report on research and practice in the teaching of writing. Topics covered include sentence combining as a composition technique, peer evaluation in a technical writing class, a plan for teaching paragraph construction, the use of literary humor in a writing class, methods for setting the scene, how students view…

Avoiding the Difference Fixation: Identity Categories, Markers of Difference, and the Teaching of Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kerschbaum, Stephanie L.

2012-01-01

In this essay, the author aims to show how a specific focus on interactionally emergent and rhetorically negotiated elements of a communicative situation can enrich the study of difference in composition research. She develops this argument by first identifying two strategies used by writing researchers when forwarding new understandings of…

Writing the Learning Organization: A Framework for Teaching and Research

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Amidon, Stevens R.

2005-01-01

The marginalization of business writing as a discipline has been traced to a lack of research and to the fact that many in the field teach in business departments that do not value the work of scholars in English studies. One way out of this position may be an act of disciplinary border crossing--aligning the field of business writing with…

How to Teach Poetry Writing: Workshops for Ages 8-13. Developing Creative Literacy, 2nd Edition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Morgan, Michaela

2011-01-01

Now in a fully revised and extended second edition, "How to Teach Poetry Writing: Workshops for Ages 8-13" is a practical and activity based resource of writing workshops to help you teach poetry in the primary classroom. Designed to help build writing, speaking and listening skills, this book contains a wide selection of workshops exemplifying a…

Treating of Content-Based Instruction to Teach Writing Viewed from EFL Learners' Creativity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jaelani, Selamet Riadi

2017-01-01

The objectives of the research are to examine: (1) whether Content-Based Instruction is more effective than Problem-based learning to teach writing to the EFL Learners; (2) whether the EFL Learners having high creativity have better writing than those having low creativity; and (3) whether there is an interaction between teaching methods and EFL…

Writeaerobics: 40 Workshop Exercises To Improve Your Writing Teaching. Bill Harp Professional Teachers Library.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thomason, Tommy

To teach writing well, teachers need three things: first, they have to understand writing itself, as well as writing pedagogy; second, they need to be writers themselves; and third, they need to know how to communicate their knowledge about writing effectively to their students. This book is based on the premise that writing ability--and teaching…

The Comparison of Fourth Grade Students' Essays Based on Free and Guided Writing Technique in Terms of the Quality of Written Expression

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Calp, Mehrali

2015-01-01

Writing exercises are more effective than grammar rules in terms of making children acquire language skills. Knowing the characteristics of text genres and the rules of writing are not enough to improve writing skills of teacher candidates and to acquire necessary strategies for teaching how to write. Teachers would be uncertain about assessment…

Essaying the essay: nursing scholarship and the hegemony of the laboratory.

PubMed

Gardner, Lyn; Rolfe, Gary

2013-01-01

It might appear odd or even perverse to be arguing for the essay as a vehicle for academic thought and writing, particularly given the current emphasis on scientific research and evidence-based practice. In fact, the scholarly essay has virtually ceased to exist as an academic form in practice disciplines such as nursing, excluded by what we will identify and refer to as the hegemony of the laboratory. In a practical as well as an intellectual attempt to reinstate it, this paper is structured in the form of two consecutive short essays. In the first, we identify the character, features and purpose of the scholarly essay and examine its demise as an academic form. In the second, we explore some possible reasons why the essay never became fully accepted as an academic form in nursing. We suggest that the essay is thematically eclectic and stylistically promiscuous, drawing from a broad range of cultural, disciplinary and academic reference points. As such, it presents a challenge to the dominant technical rational approach to academic nursing in both its form and its content, particularly in its disregard for the rigidly imposed genres and structures increasingly demanded by academic nursing journals. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Words Make a Difference: The Effects of Greco-Latinate and Anglo-Saxon Lexical Variation on College Writing Instructors.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Maylath, Bruce

1996-01-01

Uses 90 postsecondary writing instructors and their rankings of 9 student essays to determine whether they have biases for a Greco-Latinate or Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. Raises questions about assessment practices, teaching methods, and possible effects on students who are exposed to teachers who variously favor a Greco-Latinate or an Anglo-Saxon…

Using Popular Magazine Articles to Teach the Art of Writing for Nontechnical Audiences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sivey, John D.; Lee, Cindy M.

2008-01-01

Many undergraduate chemistry curricula are devoting increasing amounts of time to teaching technical writing skills. Significantly less attention, however, is given toward training students in nontechnical writing strategies. The ability of chemistry students to communicate effectively in writing to a wide variety of audiences is an essential (and…

Self-Efficacy of Risk Taking in Outdoor Recreation as a Predictor of the Self-Efficacy of Risk Taking in Essay Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Taniguchi, Stacy T.; Bennion, John; Duerden, Mat D.; Widmer, Mark A.; Ricks, Meagan

2017-01-01

During two decades of teaching, we have observed that writing students seem more emotionally honest when their writing class is accompanied by an outdoor recreation component. The ability to take perceived risks is important to both outdoor recreation and writing; thus, we postulated that confidence gained in taking risks in outdoor experiences…

Writing Assessment: Purposes, Problems, Possibilities. A Review Essay.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Weaver, Barbara

1987-01-01

Discusses three books that approach writing assessment from differing perspectives and will help writing program administrators reconsider purposes, anticipate problems, and envision new possibilities for writing evaluation. (HTH)

Studies in the History of Business Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Douglas, George H., Ed.; Hildebrandt, Herbert W., Ed.

Because written communication has nearly always been the medium for transmitting information in the business world, these essays are a step toward providing a seminal statement on the history and practice of business writing. The essays in this volume are: "Business Writing and the Spread of Literacy in Late Medieval England" (Malcolm Richardson);…

10 Writing Opportunities to "Teach to the Test"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

DeFauw, Danielle L.

2013-01-01

Within the current political and educative context, where high-stakes standardized assessments create a pressure-filled experience for teachers to "teach to the test," time spent on writing instruction that supports students in transferring their learning between classroom and assessment contexts is crucial. Teachers who must use prompts to…

Teaching Learning Concepts to Graduate Students through Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Coberly-Holt, Patricia G.; Walton, S. Taylor

2017-01-01

Over a period of four years, the instructor of History and Theory of Adult Education monitored and recorded graduate students' reactions to the experiences of learning through writing assignments that incorporate diverse methods associated with stringent pedagogical and andragogical methods. After experiencing the two divergent teaching styles and…

Essay Development for Secondary Students with Learning Disabilities: Graphic Organizers for Visualizing Organizational Patterns

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sundeen, Todd H.

2014-01-01

Students with disabilities often find expressive writing frustrating and difficult. The prospect of writing a well-developed five-paragraph essay can be especially daunting. One reason is that struggling writers may have difficulty conceptualizing how the elements of an effective essay are developed. This article describes an instructional…

Context-Model-Based Instruction in Teaching EFL Writing: A Narrative Inquiry

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lin, Zheng

2016-01-01

This study aims to re-story the provision of the context-model-based instruction in teaching EFL writing, focusing especially on students' development of the context model and learning to guide EFL writing with the context model. The research data have been collected from the audio recordings of the classroom instruction, the teacher-researcher's…

Motivation and Connection: Teaching Reading (and Writing) in the Composition Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bunn, Michael

2013-01-01

Teaching reading in terms of its connections to writing can motivate students to read and increase the likelihood that they find success in both activities. It can lead students to value reading as an integral aspect of learning to write. It can help students develop their understanding of writerly strategies and techniques. Drawing on qualitative…

Conceptualizing Essay Tests' Reliability and Validity: From Research to Theory

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Badjadi, Nour El Imane

2013-01-01

The current paper on writing assessment surveys the literature on the reliability and validity of essay tests. The paper aims to examine the two concepts in relationship with essay testing as well as to provide a snapshot of the current understandings of the reliability and validity of essay tests as drawn in recent research studies. Bearing in…

Astr 101 Students' Attitudes Towards Essays On Transits, Eclipses And Occultations

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

D'Cruz, Noella L.

2012-05-01

Joliet Junior College, Joliet, IL offers a one semester introductory astronomy course each semester. We teach over 110 primarily non-science major students each semester. We use proven active learning strategies such lecture tutorials, think-pair-share questions and small group discussions to help these students develop and retain a good understanding of astrophysical concepts. Occasionally, we offer projects that allow students to explore course topics beyond the classroom. We hope that such projects will increase students' interest in astronomy. We also hope that these assignments will help students to improve their critical thinking and writing skills. In Spring 12, we are offering three short individual essay assignments in our face-to-face sections. The essays focus on transits, eclipses and occultations to highlight the 2012 transit of Venus. For the first essay, students will find images of transit and occultation events using the Astronomy Picture of the Day website and describe their chosen events. In addition, students will predict how variations in certain physical and orbital parameters would alter their particular events. The second essay involves transits, eclipses and occultations observed by spacecraft. Students will describe their transit event, their spacecraft's mission, orbital path, how the orbital path was achieved, etc. The third essay deals with transiting exoplanets. Students will choose at least two exoplanets from an exoplanet database, one of which has been discovered through the transit method. This essay will enable students to learn about detecting exoplanets and how they compare with our solar system. Details of the essay assignments and students' reactions to them will be presented at the meeting.

Teaching Margery and Julian in Anthology-Based Survey Courses

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Petersen, Zina

2006-01-01

Recognizing that many of us teach the medieval English women mystics Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich in survey courses, this essay attempts to put these writers in context for teachers who may have only a passing familiarity with the period. Focusing on passages of their writings found in the Longman and Norton anthologies of British…

Writing in the Content Areas. Second Edition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Benjamin, Amy

2005-01-01

Do you spend entirely too much time correcting your students' papers? Do your students' essays and term papers take side trips to nowhere? Is their writing riddled with mechanical errors? Do their lab reports and essays lack specificity and clarity? Writing in the Content Areas, Second Edition is for middle and high school content area teachers…

Achieving Consistency in Writing across the Curriculum

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Andersen, Richard

2003-01-01

From the early 1900s to the present, there have always been inconsistencies in how teachers evaluate the writing quality of their students' essays. Their critiques vary as much as their personalities. To establish common standards in writing for all courses in which essays are assigned and, at the same time, not infringe on the integrity of…

An Approach to the Teaching of Academic Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Johnston, Sue Ann

1985-01-01

Discusses solutions to problems in teaching research paper writing skills to English as a second language students in developing countries where library resources are inadequate. Suggests the use of interviews as an alternative research source and shows how an oral report on research results can help to develop synthesizing skills. (SED)

Teaching Writing in Sociology: A Social Constructionist Approach.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Anderson, Leon; Holt, Mara

1990-01-01

Provides an overview of the "social constructionist" approach to teaching composition in sociology courses. Describes a course that is team taught by the authors and is based on the social constructionist paradigm. Stresses that sociological writing is a special type of discourse that can be taught most effectively by sociologists who…

Comic Strips: A Study on the Teaching of Writing Narrative Texts to Indonesian EFL Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Megawati, Fika; Anugerahwati, Mirjam

2012-01-01

Comic strips are proposed in the teaching of writing not only because of their appealing forms, but also due to their salient features as media to present content, organization and grammatical aspects of narrative texts. This study investigates the implementation of comic strips in teaching writing through a collaborative classroom action research…

Because Digital Writing Matters: Improving Student Writing in Online and Multimedia Environments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

DeVoss, Danielle Nicole; Eidman-Aadahl, Elyse; Hicks, Troy

2010-01-01

As many teachers know, students may be adept at text messaging and communicating online but do not know how to craft a basic essay. In the classroom, students are increasingly required to create web-based or multi-media productions that also include writing. Since writing in and for the online realm often defies standard writing conventions, this…

Best Practices in Writing Instruction. Solving Problems in the Teaching of Literacy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Graham, Steve, Ed.; MacArthur, Charles A., Ed.; Fitzgerald, Jill, Ed.

2007-01-01

Highly practical and accessible, this indispensable book provides clear-cut strategies for improving K-12 writing instruction. The contributors are leading authorities who demonstrate proven ways to teach different aspects of writing, with chapters on planning, revision, sentence construction, handwriting, spelling, and motivation. The use of the…

"Things Fall Apart so They Can Fall Together": Uncovering the Hidden Side of Writing a Teaching Award Application

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McCormack, Coralie; Vanags, Thea; Prior, Robyn

2014-01-01

Teaching awards are now common practice in higher education. However, few award applicants and their writing guides have investigated their experience of writing a teaching award application, a writing process recognised as different from that required in research publication. To systematically research and analyse their personal experiences two…

Analysis of Teacher Beliefs and Efficacy for Teaching Writing to Weak Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mohar, Tunku Mohani Tunku; Singh, Charajit Kaur Swaran; Kepol, Napisah; Ahmad, Ahmad Zainuri Loap; Moneyam, Sasigaran

2017-01-01

The present study investigated the beliefs and efficacy of a teacher teaching English to students who were weak at the language. The objective of the study was mainly to investigate the beliefs and efficacy of the ESL teacher for teaching writing to weak learners. The research was a case study of the English Language teacher teaching Form Three…

Teaching All Children To Write: A Little Comprehensive Guide. Bill Harp Professional Teachers Library.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Glazer, Susan Mandel

Noting that all children need to write often and without criticism, this book aims to be a comprehensive guide for teaching all children to write. It proposes that the art of reading is the art of writing, and that the more students read, the more easily they will be able to write. After a "prelude" by the author, the chapters are: (1) Children…

Writing Essays: Does Self-Efficacy Matter? The Relationship between Self-Efficacy in Reading and in Writing and Undergraduate Students' Performance in Essay Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Prat-Sala, Merce; Redford, Paul

2012-01-01

Self-efficacy beliefs have been identified as associated with students' academic performance. The present research assessed the relationship between two new self-efficacy scales (self-efficacy in reading [SER] and self-efficacy in writing [SEW]) and students' writing performance on a piece of assessed written coursework. Using data from first and…

Five Portraits of Teachers' Experiences Teaching Writing: Negotiating Knowledge, Student Need, and Policy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wahleithner, Juliet Michelsen

2018-01-01

Background: Numerous reports have highlighted problems with writing instruction in American schools, yet few examine the interplay of teachers' preparation to teach writing, the instructional policies they must navigate, and the writing development of the students in their classrooms. Purpose: This study examines high school English teachers'…

Encountering Student Texts: Interpretive Issues in Reading Student Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lawson, Bruce, Ed.; And Others

Designed to raise the full range of hermeneutic concerns regarding evaluation of student writing, and to spur further research and discussion, this collection of essays focuses on a reconsideration of the interpretation and evaluation practices of writing teachers. Essays include: "A Reflective Conversation: 'Tempos of Meaning'"…

The High School Writing Center: Establishing and Maintaining One.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Farrell, Pamela B., Ed.

Focusing on high school writing centers, this collection of essays discusses a variety of issues associated with the writing center, including the process of securing the principal's support, setting goals, working out physical arrangements, training tutors and professional staff, fostering student participation, and record keeping. Essays and…

Teaching EFL Writing: An Approach Based on the Learner's Context Model

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lin, Zheng

2017-01-01

This study aims to examine qualitatively a new approach to teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) writing based on the learner's context model. It investigates the context model-based approach in class and identifies key characteristics of the approach delivered through a four-phase teaching and learning cycle. The model collects research…

An Essay on Pedagogy by Mikhail M. Bakhtin

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bazerman, Charles

2005-01-01

This is an extended summary of a pedagogic essay by Mikhail M. Bakhtin on writing style, titled "Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics as Part of Russian Language Instruction in Secondary School." In this essay, written in spring 1945 while Bakhtin was a secondary school teacher of Russian language arts, he argues that every…

Reading Strategies to Improve Writing Instruction.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bulakowski, Carole

Reading instructors have valuable expertise to share with writing instructors to improve the writing ability of students. Writing instructors often give reading assignments to provide topics for students' essays or discussion, without understanding the reading process. A reading teacher can (1) show the writing instructor how to determine the…

For the Sake of Argument: An Approach to Teaching Evidence-Based Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Friedrich, Linda; Bear, Rachel; Fox, Tom

2018-01-01

The National Writing Project's (NWP) College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) aims to improve young people's ability to write thoughtful, evidence-based arguments. In an era where public discourse has become increasingly polarized, and "echo chambers" of narrow views populate people's social media feeds, teaching students to…

Essays That Worked for Business Schools. 35 Essays from Successful Applications to the Nation's Top Business Schools. With Comments from Admissions Officers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Curry, Boykin, Ed.; Kasbar, Brian, Ed.

Thirty-five exemplary application essays, chosen by admissions officers from top business schools around the country, are presented with the intention of inspiring people applying to business schools. The essays prove that such pieces of writing do not have to be boring and stuffy with pretentious wording. An accurate, enthusiastic reflection of…

Citation Behaviors Observed in Japanese EFL Students' Argumentative Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kamimura, Taeko

2014-01-01

Effective use of outside source texts is one of the key components of successful academic writing. This study aims at clarifying Japanese university EFL students' citation behaviors in producing argumentative writing. Twenty-six Japanese university EFL students wrote an argumentative essay. Their essays were analyzed quantitatively by six…

Reflective Journal Writing as a Tool to Teach Aspects of Social Studies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Al-karasneh, Samih M.

2014-01-01

This article analyses the impact of a constructivist approach to learning in Jordan, where a traditional context of passive/receptive philosophy of teaching prevails. Student teachers were introduced to journal writing. It was expected that their experiences with journal writing would afford them a better understanding of how it would affect their…

How Teachers Teach the Writing Process. Final Report.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Perl, Sondra; And Others

Presented in this report are the results of a three-year case study designed (1) to document what happened in the classrooms of 10 teachers who were trained in a process approach to the teaching of writing, and (2) to provide those teachers with occasions to deepen their understanding of the process approach, by collaborating with them in the…

Developing a Differentiated Model for the Teaching of Creative Writing to High Performing Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ngo, Thu Thi Bich

2016-01-01

Differentiating writing instruction has been a puzzling matter for English teachers when it comes to teaching creative writing to high potential and high performing (HPHP) students. The lack of differentiation in creative writing pedagogy for HPHP students in Australia is due to two major issues: (1) teachers' lack of high-level linguistic and…

The ABC Approach to Teaching Letter Writing (Instructional Note).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chin, Susan Ho

1994-01-01

Describes how one English teacher used a method of teaching letter writing to foster students' communication and thinking skills. Outlines a method which involves students dually as both consumer complainant and company representative responding to the complaints. Claims that such a process enhances student learning. (HB)

Teaching ESL Beginners Metacognitive Writing Strategies through Multimedia Software

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wei, Jing; Chen, Julian Chengchiang; Adawu, Anthony

2014-01-01

This case study explores how strategy-based instruction (SBI), assisted by multimedia software, can be incorporated to teach beginning-level ESL learners metacognitive writing strategies. Two beginning-level adult learners participated in a 10-session SBI on planning and organizing strategies. The Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach…

Principled Eclecticism: Approach and Application in Teaching Writing to ESL/EFL Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Alharbi, Sultan H.

2017-01-01

The principal purpose of this paper is to critically examine and evaluate the efficacy of the principled eclectic approach to teaching English as second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) writing to undergraduate students. The paper illustrates that this new method adapts mainstream writing pedagogies to individual needs of learners of ESL/EFL in order to…

Teaching Writing Informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics: "I Never Would Have Thought of Doing That..."

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hodgson-Drysdale, Tracy

2013-01-01

Writing is an essential tool for creating meaningful communication and as such it must be taught beginning in elementary school. Although in the past 100 years writing has become more common in our everyday lives, methods of teaching writing and teacher education have not kept pace with changes (National Commission on Writing, 2003). As a result,…

Teaching Technical Writing and Editing -- In-House Programs That Work. Anthology Series No. 5.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shaw, James G., Ed.

The 12 articles in this publication provide indepth treatment of important aspects of in-house training programs for technical writing and editing. The articles deal with the following topics: the value of an in-house writing course, teaching in industry, developing an in-house writing course for engineers and scientists, a new approach to…

Gender Difference and Student Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Flynn, Elizabeth A.

An exploratory study examined gender differences in writing in the essays of five male and five female freshman composition students. The findings suggest parallels between the writing and speaking behaviors of men and women students and between student writing and the work of male and female professional writers. The male students made few…

Alternatives to Grading Student Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tchudi, Stephen, Ed.

The result of an investigation into the grading writing by the National Council of Teachers of English Committee on Alternatives to Grading Student Writing, this collection of essays offers the writing teacher several innovative and interesting options. Following an introduction by the editor (chair of the Committee), in which he delineates the…

The Art of Science Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Worsley, Dale; Mayer, Bernadette

Aimed at secondary school science and English teachers, this book presents practical advice for developing good student writing in science and mathematics. Five main sections cover: (1) an essay development workshop; (2) 47 specific writing assignments; (3) over 30 questions teachers ask about science writing, and the answers; (4) an anthology of…

Essays on Character & Opportunity

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Center on Children and Families at Brookings, 2014

2014-01-01

These essays provide richer set of writings on the philosophical, empirical and practical issues raised by a focus on character, and in particular its relationship to questions of opportunity. Each one is an intellectual pemmican: sharp and to the point. Two scholars draw attention to the gendered nature of character formation (Segal and Lexmond);…

Teaching Writing to Middle School Students in Portugal and in Brazil: An Exploratory Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Veiga Simão, Ana Margarida; Malpique, Anabela Abreu; Frison, Lourdes Maria Bragagnolo; Marques, André

2016-01-01

Learning how to write is a challenging process, typically developed in schools. Teachers' practices in teaching writing, however, have been under researched. The aim of this study was to survey a sample of teachers from Portugal (n = 96) and Brazil (n = 99) about their practices for and perceptions about writing instruction. Teachers reported on…

Source-Based Tasks in Writing Independent and Integrated Essays

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gholami, Javad; Alinasab, Mahsa

2017-01-01

Integrated writing tasks have gained considerable attention in ESL and EFL writing assessment and are frequently needed and used in academic settings and daily life. However, they are very rarely practiced and promoted in writing classes. This paper explored the effects of source-based writing practice on EFL learners' composing abilities and…

5 CFR 5501.107 - Teaching, speaking and writing by special Government employees in the Public Health Service.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-01-01

... 5 Administrative Personnel 3 2011-01-01 2011-01-01 false Teaching, speaking and writing by special Government employees in the Public Health Service. 5501.107 Section 5501.107 Administrative Personnel... DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES § 5501.107 Teaching, speaking and writing by special Government...

5 CFR 5501.107 - Teaching, speaking and writing by special Government employees in the Public Health Service.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... 5 Administrative Personnel 3 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Teaching, speaking and writing by special Government employees in the Public Health Service. 5501.107 Section 5501.107 Administrative Personnel... DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES § 5501.107 Teaching, speaking and writing by special Government...

Fourth year medical students’ reflective writing on “death of Ivan Ilych: a qualitative study

PubMed Central

ZOHOURI, MAHSHID; AMINI, MITRA; SAGHEB, MOHAMMAD MEHDI

2017-01-01

Introduction: Medical students should be familiar with the end of life ethical issues and its considerations. For teaching end of life care to medical students, literature is a source of excellent narratives of patients with experiences of terminally ill condition in their journey through suffering and one of the most favourite bioethics literature readings has been the death of Ivan Ilych by Tolstoy. We used this novel to show medical students end of life events and suffering and asked them to write a reflective essay on it. We aimed to find what students think about terminally ill patients and their journey to death. Methods: In an inductive qualitative content analysis model, 350 essays, collected by homogenous sampling, were analyzed. The fourth year medical students were provided with the Death of Ivan Ilych novel to read. They were asked to write a reflection essay based on the reflective stages defined by Sandars. These essays served as the unit of analysis, each being read several times and a coding model was formed according to main topics. The related concepts in each unit were named as themes and each theme was abstracted to a code and the related codes were compared and developed as categories. Results: Qualitative content analysis of 350 essays of fourth year medical students revealed three major categories in students’ reflection on reading Death of Ivan Ilych as an end of life human body. These included: 1) Emotional experience, 2) Empathy and effective communication, 3) Spirituality and dignity. Analysis of essays showed that this reflection activity may help medical students have a deeper idea of the end of life situation and feelings. Conclusion: This project suggests that literature can be used as an example to introduce new ethical concepts to less experienced medical trainees. The students acquired the concept of the story and reflected the major aspects of the suffering of a human being in their essays. Having used and evaluated the effect

Writing and Teaching behind Barbed Wire: An Exiled Composition Class in a Japanese-American Internment Camp

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wu, Hui

2007-01-01

By reflecting on Japanese internment camps executed by the U.S. government in World War II, this article examines camp schools' curricula and writing assignments and an English teacher's response to student essays to show how racially profiled students and their Caucasian teacher negotiated the political meanings of civil rights and freedom.…

Innovations in Teaching: How Novice Teaching Assistants Include LGBTQ Topics in the Writing Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jaekel, Kathryn S.

2016-01-01

This article examines how three novice graduate teaching assistants included lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer topics in their first-year writing classrooms. Findings suggest that inclusion of these topics can be successfully done through attention to identity in the classroom, including current-day events, and structuring classroom…

Teaching Students to "Cook": Promoting Writing in the First Year Experience Course

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Eberly, Charlene; Trand, Patsy A. Self

2010-01-01

This paper is a continuation of a previous article, "Teaching Students to "Cook": Promoting Reading in the First Year Experience Course," The Learning Assistance Review 14 (2), on the importance of teaching critical thinking through the foundational skills of analytical reading and writing within the First Year Experience (FYE)…

Changes in Teachers' Beliefs after a Professional Development Project for Teaching Writing: Two Chinese Cases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Teng, Lin Sophie

2016-01-01

A plethora of research has found that teachers' beliefs directly influence their classroom practices and teaching outcomes. While numerous studies in second/foreign language writing have examined the effectiveness of different innovative approaches on students' learning to write, there is a paucity of research on writing teachers' beliefs about…

Otto Peters on Distance Education: The Industrialization of Teaching and Learning. Routledge Studies in Distance Education.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Keegan, Desmond, Ed.

This book contains new and previously published translations of 11 essays and articles about the industrialization of teaching and learning in distance education that were originally published in German by Otto Peters between 1965 and 1993. A "Preface" (Desmond Keegan) and an introduction placing Peters' writings in their historical…

Teaching CSD Graduate Students to Think Critically, Apply Evidence, and Write Professionally

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grillo, Elizabeth U.; Koenig, Mareile A.; Gunter, Cheryl D.; Kim, Sojung

2015-01-01

The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of teaching modules designed to enhance the use of critical thinking (CT), evidence-based practice (EBP), and professional writing (PW) skills by graduate students in communication sciences and disorders. Three single-session teaching modules were developed to highlight key features of CT,…

The Application of "Three Dimensional" Model in the Teaching Design of EFL Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Li, Xiping

2013-01-01

As an indispensable and most difficult part of language acquisition, the importance of English writing has been intensified by the economic globalization and internet revolution due to the special role of English as a universal language (Warshauer, 2000). However, writing teaching and learning has been long perplexing language teachers and…

Impact of a novel teaching method based on feedback, activity, individuality and relevance on students' learning.

PubMed

Edafe, Ovie; Brooks, William S; Laskar, Simone N; Benjamin, Miles W; Chan, Philip

2016-03-20

This study examines the perceived impact of a novel clinical teaching method based on FAIR principles (feedback, activity, individuality and relevance) on students' learning on clinical placement. This was a qualitative research study. Participants were third year and final year medical students attached to one UK vascular firm over a four-year period (N=108). Students were asked to write a reflective essay on how FAIRness approach differs from previous clinical placement, and its advantages and disadvantages. Essays were thematically analysed and globally rated (positive, negative or neutral) by two independent researchers. Over 90% of essays reported positive experiences of feedback, activity, individuality and relevance model. The model provided multifaceted feedback; active participation; longitudinal improvement; relevance to stage of learning and future goals; structured teaching; professional development; safe learning environment; consultant involvement in teaching. Students perceived preparation for tutorials to be time intensive for tutors/students; a lack of teaching on medical sciences and direct observation of performance; more than once weekly sessions would be beneficial; some issues with peer and public feedback, relevance to upcoming exam and large group sizes. Students described negative experiences of "standard" clinical teaching. Progressive teaching programmes based on the FAIRness principles, feedback, activity, individuality and relevance, could be used as a model to improve current undergraduate clinical teaching.

Teaching Intercultural Communication in a Basic Technical Writing Course: A Survey of Our Current Practices and Methods

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Matveeva, Natalia

2008-01-01

This research article reports the results of an online survey distributed among technical writing instructors in 2006. The survey aimed to examine how we teach intercultural communication in basic technical writing courses: our current practices and methods. The article discusses three major challenges that instructors may face when teaching about…

Effectiveness of a Test-Taking Strategy on Achievement in Essay Tests for Students with Learning Disabilities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Therrien, William J.; Hughes, Charles; Kapelski, Cory; Mokhtari, Kouider

2009-01-01

Research was conducted to ascertain if an essay-writing strategy was effective at improving the achievement on essay tests for 7th- and 8th-grade students with reading and writing disabilities. Students were assigned via a stratified random sample to treatment or control group. Student scores were also compared to students without learning…

De-Coding Writing Assignments.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Simon, Linda

1991-01-01

Argues that understanding assignments is the first step toward successful college writing. Urges instructors to support students by helping them to decode assignments. Breaks down instructions into individual tasks including (1) writing an essay, (2) examining an issue, (3) reviewing articles and books, and (4) focusing on some texts. Defines each…

An Evaluation of the IntelliMetric[SM] Essay Scoring System

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rudner, Lawrence M.; Garcia, Veronica; Welch, Catherine

2006-01-01

This report provides a two-part evaluation of the IntelliMetric[SM] automated essay scoring system based on its performance scoring essays from the Analytic Writing Assessment of the Graduate Management Admission Test[TM] (GMAT[TM]). The IntelliMetric system performance is first compared to that of individual human raters, a Bayesian system…

Pain and Pleasure in Short Essay Writing: Factors Predicting University Students' Writing Anxiety and Writing Self-Efficacy

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martinez, Christy Teranishi; Kock, Ned; Cass, Jeffrey

2011-01-01

Since the inception of the Writing Across the Curriculum movement more than 30 years ago, scholars have explored ways of enhancing students' writing performance. Faculty members across disciplines are often challenged by students' resistance to writing; resistance that may stem from anxiety, poor academic performance, and lack of recognition that…

Halley's Comet: A Bibliographic Essay.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gallant, Stephen L.

1985-01-01

This bibliographic essay evaluates six books on Halley's Comet as science writings that fall into three categories: middle school and junior high-level books; senior high to adult-level books; and advanced level. Author, number of pages, publication date, price, International Standard Book Number, and publisher information are provided. (EJS)

Linguistic Features of Humor in Academic Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Skalicky, Stephen; Berger, Cynthia M.; Crossley, Scott A.; McNamara, Danielle S.

2016-01-01

A corpus of 313 freshman college essays was analyzed in order to better understand the forms and functions of humor in academic writing. Human ratings of humor and wordplay were statistically aggregated using Factor Analysis to provide an overall "Humor" component score for each essay in the corpus. In addition, the essays were also…

Preparing Language Teachers for Blended Teaching of Summary Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yang, Yu-Fen

2014-01-01

Research on preparing language teachers for blended teaching of summary writing, a mix of on-site and online instruction for college students to grasp the gist of the texts, is scarce in higher education. This study examined the problems encountered and solutions proposed by six language teachers, who altogether instructed 214 college students on…

"Lo Cotidiano": The Effectiveness of Critical Task-Based Instruction in Teaching the Culture of Everyday Life

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

García-Villada, Eduardo

2014-01-01

Teaching cultural competency in the language classroom can be a challenge. This study explores the effectiveness of task-based instruction (Lee, 2000) on the learning of culture by students in college-level Spanish language courses. Students were required to record oral presentations, write essays, and make comparisons between the culture and…

First, Do No Harm: Teaching Writing in the Wake of Traumatic Events

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

DeBacher, Sarah; Harris-Moore, Deborah

2016-01-01

Sarah DeBacher and Deborah Harris-Moore offer their experiences with teaching in the aftermath of traumatic situations. DeBacher, who taught at the University of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and Harris-Moore, who taught at UC Santa Barbara following a mass shooting, explore the difficulty of teaching writing in the wake of…

How Important Is Content in the Ratings of Essay Assessments?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shermis, Mark D.; Shneyderman, Aleksandr; Attali, Yigal

2008-01-01

This study was designed to examine the extent to which "content" accounts for variance in scores assigned in automated essay scoring protocols. Specifically it was hypothesised that certain writing genre would emphasise content more than others. Data were drawn from 1668 essays calibrated at two grade levels (6 and 8) using "e-rater[TM]", an…

Writing and Healing: Toward an Informed Practice. Refiguring English Studies.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Anderson, Charles M., Ed.; MacCurdy, Marian M., Ed.

This book presents 15 essays composed by and directed toward writing teachers and others who have experienced writing and healing in a variety of settings--from classrooms to substance-abuse treatment centers to AIDS support groups. Essays in the book provide not only descriptions of particular practices but also explorations of areas of theory…

Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bishop, Wendy, Ed.; Ostrom, Hans, Ed.

In considering exactly what takes place in creative writing classrooms, this collection of 22 essays reexamines the profession of writing teacher and ponders why certain practices and contexts prevail. The essays and their authors are as follows: "Introduction: Of Radishes and Shadows, Theory and Pedagogy" (Hans Ostrom); (1) "The…

Understanding the cognitive processes involved in writing to learn.

PubMed

Arnold, Kathleen M; Umanath, Sharda; Thio, Kara; Reilly, Walter B; McDaniel, Mark A; Marsh, Elizabeth J

2017-06-01

Writing is often used as a tool for learning. However, empirical support for the benefits of writing-to-learn is mixed, likely because the literature conflates diverse activities (e.g., summaries, term papers) under the single umbrella of writing-to-learn. Following recent trends in the writing-to-learn literature, the authors focus on the underlying cognitive processes. They draw on the largely independent writing-to-learn and cognitive psychology learning literatures to identify important cognitive processes. The current experiment examines learning from 3 writing tasks (and 1 nonwriting control), with an emphasis on whether or not the tasks engaged retrieval. Tasks that engaged retrieval (essay writing and free recall) led to better final test performance than those that did not (note taking and highlighting). Individual differences in structure building (the ability to construct mental representations of narratives; Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust, 1990) modified this effect; skilled structure builders benefited more from essay writing and free recall than did less skilled structure builders. Further, more essay-like responses led to better performance, implicating the importance of additional cognitive processes such as reorganization and elaboration. The results highlight how both task instructions and individual differences affect the cognitive processes involved when writing-to-learn, with consequences for the effectiveness of the learning strategy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Craft So Hard to Learn: Conversations with Poets and Novelists about the Teaching of Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Graham, John, Ed.; Garrett, George, Ed.

This collection of interviews on the subjects of teaching and learning writing comes from eleven writers who were also college teachers of writing. The writers were on a staff of poets and novelists at the Hollins Conference in Creative Writing and Cinema, which took place in June 1970. John Graham, a member of the conference staff, taped 110…

Elephants and Paradigms: Conversations about Teaching L2 Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Blanton, Linda Lonon

1995-01-01

This article lays out a general scheme for looking at current competing theoretical bases for English as a Second Language. By focusing on only one arena of teaching, that of writing, the article emphasizes the systemic nature of some differing views. Some classroom implications of the social theory that factors in the reader of a text are…

Teaching High School Students How to Write: The Importance of Direct Explicit Instruction and Teacher Training

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Soiferman, L. Karen

2017-01-01

Learning how to teach writing is a skill just as learning how to write is a skill. Without a dedicated composition course in Education faculties pre-service teachers are not getting the training they require to be effective teachers of writing. In this report, a case is made for why teachers have to be more aware of how students learn to write and…

Learning to write in science: A study of English language learners' writing experience in sixth-grade science classrooms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Qi, Yang

Writing is a predictor of academic achievement and is essential for student success in content area learning. Despite its importance, many students, including English language learners (ELLs), struggle with writing. There is thus a need to study students' writing experience in content area classrooms. Informed by systemic functional linguistics, this study examined 11 ELL students' writing experience in two sixth grade science classrooms in a southeastern state of the United States, including what they wrote, how they wrote, and why they wrote in the way they did. The written products produced by these students over one semester were collected. Also collected were teacher interviews, field notes from classroom observations, and classroom artifacts. Student writing samples were first categorized into extended and nonextended writing categories, and each extended essay was then analyzed with respect to its schematic structure and grammatical features. Teacher interviews and classroom observation notes were analyzed thematically to identify teacher expectations, beliefs, and practices regarding writing instruction for ELLs. It was found that the sixth-grade ELLs engaged in mostly non-extended writing in the science classroom, with extended writing (defined as writing a paragraph or longer) constituting roughly 11% of all writing assignments. Linguistic analysis of extended writing shows that the students (a) conveyed information through nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbial groups and prepositional phrases; (b) constructed interpersonal context through choices of mood, modality, and verb tense; and (c) structured text through thematic choices and conjunctions. The appropriateness of these lexicogrammatical choices for particular writing tasks was related to the students' English language proficiency levels. The linguistic analysis also uncovered several grammatical problems in the students' writing, including a limited range of word choices, inappropriate use of mood

Teaching Phenomenological Research and Writing.

PubMed

Adams, Catherine; van Manen, Michael Anders

2017-05-01

In this article, we describe our approach and philosophical methodology of teaching and doing phenomenology. The human science seminar that we offer involves participants in the primary phenomenological literature as well as in a variety of carefully engaged writing exercises. Each seminar participant selects a personal phenomenological project that aims at producing a publishable research paper. We show how the qualitative methodology of hermeneutic phenomenology requires of its practitioner a sensitivity and attitudinal disposition that has to be internalized and that cannot be captured in a procedural or step-by-step program. Our experience is that seminar participants become highly motivated and committed to their phenomenological project while involved in the rather intense progression of lectures, workshop activities, readings, and discussions.

The Computer-Based Writing Program: A Clinical Teaching Experience for Education Interns to Develop Professional Knowledge and Skills in Effective Instructional Writing Practices

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Painter, Diane D.

2016-01-01

The four-week university-sponsored summer Computer-based Writing (CBW) Program directed by the head of a special education initial teacher licensure program gave teaching interns opportunities to work with young struggling writers in a supervised clinical setting to address keyboarding skills, writing conventions and knowledge and application of…

The Effect of Process Writing Activities on the Writing Skills of Prospective Turkish Teachers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dilidüzgün, Sükran

2013-01-01

Problem statement: Writing an essay is a most difficult creative work and consequently requires detailed instruction. There are in fact two types of instruction that contribute to the development of writing skills: Reading activities analysing texts in content and schematic structure to find out how they are composed and process writing…

Administrative Problem-Solving for Writing Programs and Writing Centers: Scenarios in Effective Program Management.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Myers-Breslin, Linda

Addressing the issues and problems faced by writing program administrators (WPAs) and writing center directors (WCDs), and how they can most effectively resolve the political, pedagogical, and financial questions that arise, this book presents essays from experienced WPAs and WCDs at a wide variety of institutions that offer scenarios and case…

Tips to Understanding and Writing Manuscript Abstracts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Plakhotnik, Maria S.

2017-01-01

An abstract represents a short summary of key elements of the manuscript. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the function, contents, and types of manuscript abstracts. The essay concludes with a few tips for authors to writing effective abstracts.

Reading and Writing Together: A Critical Component of English for Academic Purposes Teaching and Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grabe, William; Zhang, Cui

2013-01-01

"As Kroll (1993), among others, has pointed out, reading has traditionally been seen as a skill to be taught separately from writing, as well as something students are somehow expected to already know about when they reach the writing course, Teaching reading in a writing course may seem like an odd idea, if not an entirely unnecessary one. It may…

The Construction of Teaching Model on College English Writing from the Perspective of Cognitive Genre

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wenjuan, Hao; Rui, Liang

2016-01-01

Teaching is a spiral rising process. A complete teaching should be composed of five parts: theoretical basis, goal orientation, operating procedures, implementation conditions and assessment. On the basis of the genre knowledge, content-based approach and process approach, this text constructs the Teaching Model of College Writing Instruction, in…

Effectiveness of An Essay Writing Strategy for Post-Secondary Students with Developmental Disabilities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Woods-Groves, Suzanne; Therrien, William J.; Hua, Youjia; Hendrickson, Jo M.; Shaw, Julia W.; Hughes, Charles A.

2012-01-01

This study examined the effectiveness of the ANSWER Strategy (Hughes, Schumaker, & Deshler, 2005) in improving the essay composition skills of post-secondary students with developmental disabilities. The six-step strategy incorporated analyzing essay prompts, creating an outline, generating an essay response, and reviewing the answer. The…

Natural Approaches to Reading and Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Antonacci, Patricia; Hedley, Carolyn

Based on a two-day presentation workshop on early reading and writing approaches, the 12 essays in this book discuss the development of literacy, natural approaches in developing literacy, and supporting literacy development. Essays in the book are: (1) "Theories of Natural Language" (Carolyn N. Hedley); (2) "Oral Language…

Selected Papers of the Southeastern Writing Center Association.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Roberts, David H., Ed.; Wolff, William C., Ed.

Addressing a variety of concerns of writing center directors and staff, directors of freshman composition, and English department chairs, the papers in this collection discuss writing center research and evaluation, writing center tutors, and computers in the writing center. The titles of the essays and their authors are as follows: (1) "Narrative…

Writing as decision-making

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Souther, J. W.

1981-01-01

The need to teach informational writing as a decision-making process is discussed. Situational analysis, its relationship to decisions in writing, and the need for relevant assignments are considered. Teaching students to ask the right questions is covered. The need to teach writing responsiveness is described. Three steps to get started and four teaching techniques are described. The information needs of the 'expert' and the 'manager' are contrasted.

Electronic Communication across the Curriculum.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Reiss, Donna, Ed.; Selfe, Dickie, Ed; Young, Art, Ed.

This collection of 24 essays explores what happens when proponents of writing across the curriculum (WAC) use the latest computer-mediated tools and techniques--including e-mail, asynchronous learning networks, MOOs, and the World Wide Web--to expand and enrich their teaching practices, especially the teaching of writing. Essays and their authors…

Assessing Writing in MOOCs: Automated Essay Scoring and Calibrated Peer Review™

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Balfour, Stephen P.

2013-01-01

Two of the largest Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) organizations have chosen different methods for the way they will score and provide feedback on essays students submit. EdX, MIT and Harvard's non-profit MOOC federation, recently announced that they will use a machine-based Automated Essay Scoring (AES) application to assess written work in…

Trait Based Assessment on Teaching Writing Skill for EFL Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Asrobi, Maman; Prasetyaningrum, Ari

2017-01-01

This study was conducted in order to investigate the effectiveness of trait based assessment on teaching writing skill for EFL learners. Designed as pre-experimental study with one group pretest and posttest design, it examined 20 students of the second semester of English Department of "Hamzanwadi University" in the academic year…

Evaluating Pragmatic Competence in Nigerian Undergraduates' Language Errors within Descriptive ESL Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Muhammad, Anas Sa'idu; Nair, Subadrah Madhawa

2017-01-01

This study investigates the level of pragmatic competence for ESL writing skills among Nigerian undergraduates. Methodologically, it adopts descriptive research design within the explanatory framework of the QUAN-Qual model. The instruments used are descriptive essay text and focus group interview questions. In writing the descriptive essays, a…

Immediate Web-Based Essay Critiquing System Feedback and Teacher Follow-Up Feedback on Young Second Language Learners' Writings: An Experimental Study in a Hong Kong Secondary School

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Cynthia; Cheung, William Kwok Wai; Wong, Kelvin Chi Kuen; Lee, Fion Sau Ling

2013-01-01

This article is an effort to add to computer-assisted language learning by extending a study on an essay critiquing system (ECS) feedback to secondary school language learners' writing. The study compared two groups of participants' performance, namely the treatment group which received both the system feedback and teacher feedback (i.e., blended…

Going Beyond the Sentence: Implications of Discourse Analysis for the Teaching of the Writing Skill.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ghadessy, Mohsen

1984-01-01

Questions the prevalent attitude of English as a second language teachers regarding the teaching of writing skills. Weaknesses in syllabi and teaching strategies are cited, indicating deficiencies in the teaching of discourse analysis--the manipulation of words, structures, and ideas--all skills necessary for the development and production of a…

Impact of a novel teaching method based on feedback, activity, individuality and relevance on students’ learning

PubMed Central

Brooks, William S.; Laskar, Simone N.; Benjamin, Miles W.; Chan, Philip

2016-01-01

Objectives This study examines the perceived impact of a novel clinical teaching method based on FAIR principles (feedback, activity, individuality and relevance) on students’ learning on clinical placement. Methods This was a qualitative research study. Participants were third year and final year medical students attached to one UK vascular firm over a four-year period (N=108). Students were asked to write a reflective essay on how FAIRness approach differs from previous clinical placement, and its advantages and disadvantages. Essays were thematically analysed and globally rated (positive, negative or neutral) by two independent researchers. Results Over 90% of essays reported positive experiences of feedback, activity, individuality and relevance model.  The model provided multifaceted feedback; active participation; longitudinal improvement; relevance to stage of learning and future goals; structured teaching; professional development; safe learning environment; consultant involvement in teaching. Students perceived preparation for tutorials to be time intensive for tutors/students; a lack of teaching on medical sciences and direct observation of performance; more than once weekly sessions would be beneficial; some issues with peer and public feedback, relevance to upcoming exam and large group sizes. Students described negative experiences of “standard” clinical teaching. Conclusions Progressive teaching programmes based on the FAIRness principles, feedback, activity, individuality and relevance, could be used as a model to improve current undergraduate clinical teaching. PMID:26995588

Command Strategies for Balancing Respect and Authority in Undergraduate Expository Essays

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Sook Hee

2010-01-01

The primary purpose of the paper is to examine how undergraduate writers adopt various commanding strategies of "shouldness" in their expository essays and the extent to which their adoptions relate to the success in the assessment of essay writing. The theoretical bases of the commands operating both within and across clause complexes are derived…

Computer-Automated Approach for Scoring Short Essays in an Introductory Statistics Course

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zimmerman, Whitney Alicia; Kang, Hyun Bin; Kim, Kyung; Gao, Mengzhao; Johnson, Glenn; Clariana, Roy; Zhang, Fan

2018-01-01

Over two semesters short essay prompts were developed for use with the Graphical Interface for Knowledge Structure (GIKS), an automated essay scoring system. Participants were students in an undergraduate-level online introductory statistics course. The GIKS compares students' writing samples with an expert's to produce keyword occurrence and…

The Effects of Wiki-Based Recursive Process Writing on Chinese Narrative Essays for Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) Students in Singapore

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chin, Chee Kuen; Gong, Cheng; Tay, Boon Pei

2015-01-01

This paper reports on the effects of using wiki-based process writing in Singapore's Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) scenarios. A group of 32 Secondary 1 (Seventh Grade) students ("Students") received various forms of online scaffolding at different steps of the writing process over two years. A whole set of teaching materials on 45…

Online Placement in First-Year Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Peckham, Irvin

2009-01-01

This essay describes Louisiana State University's search for an alternative to available placement protocols. Under the leadership of Les Perelman at MIT, LSU collaborated with four universities to develop iMOAT, a program for administering online assessments of student writing. This essay focuses on LSU's On-line Challenge, which developed from…

An interim report on the MCAT Essay Pilot Project.

PubMed

Koenig, J A; Mitchell, K J

1988-01-01

Results from four pilot administrations of the Medical College Admission Test essay question are reported. Analyses focused on (a) the performance characteristics of sample groups differentiated by gender, size of hometown, race/ethnicity, and dominant language; (b) the relationships between essay scores and academic/demographic characteristics; and (c) the reliability of one 45-minute versus two 30-minute essays. No differences were found for examinees grouped by gender and size of home community. Mean differences among the racial/ethnic groups were explained largely by reading level differences. Differences in essay performance by language group were large and unexplained by reading level differences. No relationship was found between the essay score and the academic/demographic characteristics. Reliability estimates for two 30-minute essays were higher than for one 45-minute essay; however, the 30-minute period yielded writing of poorer quality. Test-retest reliabilities for the 45-minute topics will remain the focus of future studies as will performance by examinees for whom English is a second language. The impact of the essay on the selection process will also be assessed.

Directed Self-Inquiry: A Scaffold for Teaching Laboratory Report Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Deiner, L. Jay; Newsome, Daniel; Samaroo, Diana

2012-01-01

A scaffold was created for the explicit instruction of laboratory report writing. The scaffold breaks the laboratory report into sections and teaches students to ask and answer questions in order to generate section-appropriate content and language. Implementation of the scaffold is done through a series of section-specific worksheets that are…

Writing Portfolios in the Classroom: Policy and Practice, Promise and Peril. Evaluating Writing through Portfolios. Final Report.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Calfee, Robert C., Ed.; Perfumo, Pamela, Ed.

This book presents essays by researchers, practitioners, and policy makers who study the impact of classroom portfolios in the assessment of writing achievement by elementary and middle-grade students. Essays in the book report on a national survey of exemplary projects and presents contributions to a Portfolio Conference held at Stanford…

The Role of Grammar and the Teaching of Writing. Learning Package No. 39.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Collins, Norma, Comp.; Smith, Carl, Ed.

Originally developed as part of a project for the Department of Defense Schools (DoDDS) system, this learning package on the role of grammar and the teaching of writing is designed for teachers who wish to upgrade or expand their teaching skills on their own. The package includes an overview of the project; a comprehensive search of the ERIC…

The Use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Teaching ESL Writing Skills

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yunus, Melor Md; Nordin, Norazah; Salehi, Hadi; Embi, Mohamed Amin; Salehi, Zeinab

2013-01-01

Despite the existence of many studies showing positive effects of using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the teaching and learning process in general, the use of ICT in teaching writing skills in English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms is still not very encouraging. This study attempts to seek findings on the use of ICT in…

Teaching in the Dark: The Promise and Pedagogy of Creative Writing in Prison

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Appleman, Deborah

2013-01-01

Deborah Appleman's recent research has focused on teaching college-level language and literature courses for incarcerated men. In this article, she discusses using creative writing as a way to unlock creative potential, to foster students' love of language, and to offer a powerful outlet for self-expression in a class she teaches with…

Walking the Line: Teaching Remedial Writing in a Correctional Facility.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Crimmel, Henry Hays, III

When teaching remedial writing in a correctional facility, a teacher may carry assumptions shaped by formal education that do not always translate to a prison context. These include the idea that the classroom will provide a sphere of intellectual activity, immune from heavy-handed institutional intrusions; that students will want to get to know…

Reconfiguring the Role of the Research Paper: Collaborative Writing To Teach Basic Academic Research and Writing Strategies.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fleming, Michelle M.

Each year that the author of this paper, an English instructor at Moorhead College (Minnesota), teaches the first-year "research paper," one instructor turns more and more to collaborative writing work. And she admits that some of her motives in reshaping the research paper in collaborative ways can seem to be based in assisting herself…

Write Now! Using Reflective Writing beyond the Humanities and Social Sciences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cannady, Rachel E.; Gallo, Kasia Z.

2016-01-01

Writing is an important teaching and learning tool that fosters active and critical thinking. There are multiple pressures for disciplines outside the humanities and social sciences to integrate writing in their courses. The shift from teaching solely discipline-specific skills to including writing in a meaningful way can be a daunting process. An…

Subjectivity Matters: Using Gerda Lerner's Writing and Rhetoric to Claim an Alternative Epistemology for the Feminist Writing Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ryan, Kathleen J.

2006-01-01

In this article, the author argues the common assumption among teachers that the traditional academic essay is the most appropriate sustained writing activity for students. As a feminist, the author believes that the traditional academic essay considers a positivist, patriarchal epistemology that governs beliefs about knowledge and teaching…

Task-Based EFL Language Teaching with Procedural Information Design in a Technical Writing Context

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Roy, Debopriyo

2017-01-01

Task-based language learning (TBLL) has heavily influenced syllabus design, classroom teaching, and learner assessment in a foreign or second language teaching context. In this English as foreign language (EFL) learning environment, the paper discussed an innovative language learning pedagogy based on design education and technical writing. In…

The Binder Method: A Spatial, Conceptual Approach to Teaching Business Report Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sherman, Dean

1985-01-01

Discusses the binder method approach to teaching business report writing, explains its basic procedures, its organizational advantages, its time saving qualilty, and its adaptation to more than one user at different locations or different times. (EL)

A Sourcebook for Basic Writing Teachers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Enos, Theresa, Ed.

Focusing on the sociolinguistic dimensions of literacy, this sourcebook builds upon Mina Shaughnessy's contributions to the study of basic writing by gathering together contemporary research, theory, and practice on the subject. The 39 essays and their authors include: "Defining Basic Writing in Context" and "Perspectives on…

An Introduction to the Process-Conference Approach to the Teaching of Writing Skills in ABE Programs.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rutledge, George E.

Writing is an important tool in teaching skills to adult basic education (ABE) students. To be a successful teacher of writing, teachers must be successful writers. They must be aware of the writing process and willing to use it daily in their own lives in order to convey its importance and its usefulness to their students. One method of teaching…

Negotiating Ideologies about Teaching Writing in a High School English Classroom

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vetter, Amy; Myers, Joy; Hester, Madison

2014-01-01

More research needs to examine how novice teachers successfully negotiate multiple ideologies with others in ways that allow them to construct preferred teaching identities. This qualitative study addressed that need by investigating how one high school English teacher negotiated contradictory ideologies related to writing instruction at her…

Only Connect: How Literature Teaches Children To Read and Write.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sloan, Glenna Davis

Memorable language that delights children, makes them laugh or gasp, or causes them to ponder and wonder is the literature that will begin the process of teaching them to read and write. Literature is meant to connect, not with reason primarily, but with readers' and listeners' imaginations and emotions, and in the case of poetry, with something…

Add to Your Book: Teach a Pattern Approach to Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Quattrini, Joe

Using the "pattern approach" is a means of teaching students to be confident and competent writers. In this method, the writer uses a device called a planning blank to establish purpose, audience, topic, and role as a writer. Then the overall structure can be planned. A good writing plan should suggest not only a beginning, middle, and…

Understanding Sociocognitive Space of Written Discourse: Implications for Teaching Business Writing to Chinese Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zhu, Yunxia

2006-01-01

Confronted with various issues in teaching business writing to Chinese students in New Zealand, this paper sees the need for bridging the gap between genre-based research and teaching in an intercultural context. Specifically, it develops an intercultural reflective model in the light of Bhatia's sociocognitive genre study as well as…

An Overview of Automated Scoring of Essays

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dikli, Semire

2006-01-01

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is defined as the computer technology that evaluates and scores the written prose (Shermis & Barrera, 2002; Shermis & Burstein, 2003; Shermis, Raymat, & Barrera, 2003). AES systems are mainly used to overcome time, cost, reliability, and generalizability issues in writing assessment (Bereiter, 2003; Burstein,…

Expanding Writing Opportunities for Elementary School Children and Assisting Teachers' Knowledge of the Writing Process.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brand, Wendy

A practicum was designed to place the teaching of writing as a high priority in an elementary school; allow children more opportunities to share their writing; and assist teachers in their knowledge of teaching writing, especially through the writing process. Children's writing was given high visibility through the use of monthly "young…

Student Performance across the Domain of School Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lamb, Hilary

Students in New Zealand and several other countries were tested in writing skills near the end of their formal (secondary) education, as part of the International Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) tests. Among the categories tested were functional letter writing and narrative, persuasive, and reflective essay writing. New Zealand student…

Assessing Student Teachers' Reflective Writing through Quantitative Content Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Poldner, Eric; Van der Schaaf, Marieke; Simons, P. Robert-Jan; Van Tartwijk, Jan; Wijngaards, Guus

2014-01-01

Students' reflective essay writing can be stimulated by the formative assessments provided to them by their teachers. Such assessments contain information about the quality of students' reflective writings and offer suggestions for improvement. Despite the importance of formatively assessing students' reflective writings in teacher education…

Cognitive Tools and Thinking Performance: The Case of Word Processors and Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kellogg, Ronald T.; Mueller, Suzanne

A study examined whether word processing amplifies writing performance and whether it restructures the process of writing. Sixteen college students wrote a short essay in a single session on either a word processor or in longhand. The quality of the essays was assessed by trained judges who rated their content and style. Text analysis methods were…

How Learners Use Automated Computer-Based Feedback to Produce Revised Drafts of Essays

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Laing, Jonny; El Ebyary, Khaled; Windeatt, Scott

2012-01-01

Our previous results suggest that the use of "Criterion", an automatic writing evaluation (AWE) system, is particularly successful in encouraging learners to produce amended drafts of their essays, and that those amended drafts generally represent an improvement on the original submission. Our analysis of the submitted essays and the…

A Writing Teacher in the Physics Classroom.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kirkpatrick, Larry D.; Pittendrigh, Adele S.

1984-01-01

Describes a series of writing exercises specifically designed to improve students' comprehension of physics. Students are given a RAFT which defines their role, audience, format, and task. Format for writing essays focuses on key ideas, general ideas, specific cases, and additional insights. (JM)

An Analysis of the Language of Attribution in University Students' Academic Essays

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jabulani, Sibanda

2014-01-01

The study reports on challenges related to the use of the language of attribution in academic essay writing by Post-Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) students at Rhodes University, as a microcosm of similar challenges faced by university students elsewhere. The study content-analysed 150 essays written by 50 PGCE students taking the course…

SCMLA: Technical Writing. Proceedings (Houston, Texas, October 1987).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Oklahoma State Univ., Stillwater.

In order to make information about technical writing more available, the South Central Modern Language Association (SCMLA) has collected the papers not subject to copyright restrictions that were presented at the technical writing section of its 1987 meeting. The essays cover a wide range of topics in technical writing pedagogy and research. The…

Learning Dilemmas in Undergraduate Student Independent Essays

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wendt, Maria; Åse, Cecilia

2015-01-01

Essay-writing is generally viewed as the primary learning activity to foster independence and analytical thinking. In this article, we show that independent research projects do not necessarily lead to critical thinking. University-level education on conducting independent projects can, in several respects, counteract enhanced analytical skills.…

Writing a Review Article: A Graduate Level Writing Class

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ogunsolu, Omotola O.; Wang, Jamie C.; Hanson, Kenneth

2018-01-01

Despite the importance of scientific writing in a chemists' professional career, their development as scientific writers is often neglected in undergraduate and graduate curricula. Among the courses that do encourage students to generate written documents like proposals, lab reports, or essays, the scientific community rarely benefits from the…

Supporting the Argumentative Writing of Students in Linguistically Diverse Classrooms: An Action Research Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Campbell, Yvonne C.; Filimon, Claudia

2018-01-01

The number of English language learners (ELLs) mainstreamed into regular classrooms continues to increase. Curricular writing standards required by the Common Core State Standards require students to write essays analytically in response to text(s). Many English Language Arts (ELA) teachers may worry about effectively delivering essay writing…

Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Early, Gerald, Ed.

Black intellectuals and writers were invited to write essays on assimilation, race, and identity, using a famous quotation from W. E. B. Du Bois about the double soul of the American Negro as a point of departure. Considering the double consciousness of which Du Bois wrote resulted in the following essays: (1) "Free at Last? A Personal…

The Effects of Browse Time on the Internet on Students' Essay Scores

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Doan, Kim; Bloomfield, Aaron

2014-01-01

This study examined how 30 minutes of search time on the Web affected students' essay scores in response to a writing prompt. Expository essays were obtained from 49 fourth- and fifth-grade students enrolled in an elementary school in Virginia, in the United States. Students were placed by random assignment into three groups with the same writing…

Effectiveness of Indirect and Direct Metalinguistic Error Correction Techniques on the Essays of Senior Secondary School Students in South Western Nigeria

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Eyengho, Toju; Fawole, Oyebisi

2013-01-01

The study assessed error-correction techniques used in correcting students' essays in English language and also determined the effects of these strategies and other related variables on students' performance in essay writing with a view to improving students' writing skill in English language in South Western Nigeria. A quasi-experimental design…

Using Mini-Reports to Teach Scientific Writing to Biology Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Simmons, Alexandria D.; Larios-Sanz, Maia; Amin, Shivas; Rosell, Rosemarie C.

2014-01-01

Anyone who has taught an introductory biology lab has sat at their desk in front of a towering stack of lengthy lab reports and wondered if there was a better way to teach scientific writing. We propose the use of a one-page format that we have called a "mini-report," which we believe better allows students to understand the structure…

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. Critical Perspectives on the Past.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wineburg, Sam

What ways of thinking, writing, and questioning would be lost if we eliminated history from the curriculum? The essays in this book begin with the basic assumption that history teaches people a way to make choices, to balance opinions, to tell stories, and to become uneasy--when necessary--about the stories that are told. The book is concerned…

Reflective Writing in Pre-Service Teachers' Teaching: What Does It Promote?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cohen-Sayag, Etty; Fischl, Dita

2012-01-01

In this study, we examined changes in levels of pre service teachers' reflective writing and tried to identify links between these changes and pre service teachers' success in teaching. Participants were two groups of pre-service special education teachers that taught in two different special education settings: learning difficulties classes and…

Teaching Composition: Twelve Bibliographical Essays. Revised and Enlarged Edition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tate, Gary, Ed.

Intended for teachers of composition courses, this book provides twelve bibliographic essays covering various aspects of composition studies. The list of essays are as follows: (1) "Recent Developments in Rhetorical Invention" (Richard Young); (2) "Structure and Form in Non-Narrative Prose" (Richard L. Larson); (3)…

Teaching Writing for Keeps

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Alber-Morgan, Sheila R.; Hessler, Terri; Konrad, Moira

2007-01-01

Proficiency with written expression is critical for students' academic success. Unfortunately, writing presents a challenge for both students and teachers. Recent data suggest that many students in U.S. schools fail to meet even the most basic writing standards. And even when students receive effective (i.e., evidence-based) writing instruction,…

Inspiring Teaching. Carnegie Professors of the Year Speak.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Roth, John K., Ed.

Twenty-one essays describe the successful teaching strategies used by faculty who have been named "Teacher of the Year" by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Essays are grouped into those which focus on: teaching characteristics, teaching practices, teaching philosophies, and teaching teachers. The essays are: (1)…

Worries of Novice Researchers in Writing Research Papers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wilang, Jeffrey Dawala; Jantori, Parinda; Chutataweesawas, Sirikoy

2018-01-01

Due to 'pressures' to publish research papers, a group of novice researchers (n = 9) was encouraged to attend a 'Write right' workshop. The participants were asked to fill out a self-report anxiety questionnaire to understand their worries in writing research papers in English. Afterwards, they were asked to write an essay on situations that…

Writing Instruction.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Richgels, Donald J.

2003-01-01

Discusses four recent writing books: "Teaching to Write: Theory Into Practice" (Jane B. Hughey and Charlotte Slack); "The Writing Teacher's Handbook" (Jo Phenix); "Scaffolding Young Writers: A Writers' Workshop Approach" (Linda J. Dorn and Carla Soffos); and "Directing the Writing Workshop: An Elementary Teacher's Handbook" (Jean Wallace Gillet…

Experimental Evidence on the Effectiveness of Automated Essay Scoring in Teacher Education Cases

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Riedel, Eric; Dexter, Sara L.; Scharber, Cassandra; Doering, Aaron

2006-01-01

Research on computer-based writing evaluation has only recently focused on the potential for providing formative feedback rather than summative assessment. This study tests the impact of an automated essay scorer (AES) that provides formative feedback on essay drafts written as part of a series of online teacher education case studies. Seventy…

Resources and practices to help graduate students and postdoctoral fellows write statements of teaching philosophy.

PubMed

Kearns, Katherine D; Sullivan, Carol Subiño

2011-06-01

Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows currently encounter requests for a statement of teaching philosophy in at least half of academic job announcements in the United States. A systematic process for the development of a teaching statement is required that integrates multiple sources of support, informs writers of the document's purpose and audience, helps writers produce thoughtful statements, and encourages meaningful reflection on teaching and learning. This article for faculty mentors and instructional consultants synthesizes practices for mentoring graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty members as they prepare statements of teaching philosophy. We review background information on purposes and audiences, provide writing resources, and synthesize empirical research on the use of teaching statements in academic job searches. In addition, we integrate these resources into mentoring processes that have helped graduate students in a Health Sciences Pedagogy course to collaboratively and critically examine and write about their teaching. This summary is intended for faculty mentors and instructional consultants who want to refine current resources or establish new mentoring programs. This guide also may be useful to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty members, especially those who lack mentoring or who seek additional resources, as they consider the many facets of effective teaching.

The Acquisition of Written Language: Response and Revision. Writing Research: Multidisciplinary Inquiries into the Nature of Writing Series.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Freedman, Sarah Warshauer, Ed.

Viewing writing as both a form of language learning and an intellectual skill, this book presents essays on how writers acquire trusted inner voices and the roles schools and teachers can play in helping student writers in the learning process. The essays in the book focus on one of three topics: the language of instruction and how response and…

Revisiting the Personal Essay with Ben Hamper's "Rivethead"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kramer, Jacob

2011-01-01

The personal essay--a paper in which a student brings in his or her own experience or concerns--is probably familiar to most historians. Teaching at the City University of New York, the author has found grading personal essays somewhat perplexing. They are sometimes written in response to an assignment that does not call for personal reflection.…

Writing Lessons with Gavin Curtis.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fu, Danling; Lamme, Linda

2002-01-01

Discusses a literature-inspired model of teaching writing and two scenarios of reading and writing connections in the classroom. Presents several reading and writing lessons drawn from the children's book "The Bat Boy and His Violin" by Gavin Curtis. Discusses Curtis' craft and demonstrates how to use this book to teach writing. Includes brief…

Sophistic Ethics in the Technical Writing Classroom: Teaching "Nomos," Deliberation, and Action.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Scott, J. Blake

1995-01-01

Claims that teaching ethics is particularly important to technical writing. Outlines a classical, sophistic approach to ethics based on the theories and pedagogies of Protagoras, Gorgias, and Isocrates, which emphasizes the Greek concept of "nomos," internal and external deliberation, and responsible action. Discusses problems and…

Large-Scale Assessment, Locally-Developed Measures, and Automated Scoring of Essays: Fishing for Red Herrings?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Condon, William

2013-01-01

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has garnered a great deal of attention from the rhetoric and composition/writing studies community since the Educational Testing Service began using e-rater[R] and the "Criterion"[R] Online Writing Evaluation Service as products in scoring writing tests, and most of the responses have been negative. While the…

The Eye of the Reporter: Literature's Heritage in the Press. An Essays in Literature Book.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Knight, Bill, Ed.; McLean, Deckle, Ed.

Noting that the reporting-to-writing route is sometimes circuitous and rough, although reliable, this essay collection considers the road from writing journalism to writing other literary genres such as fiction and poetry. The collection points out that newspapers have provided a proving ground for many aspiring authors, from Walt Whitman and Mark…

Organization and Development Features of Grade 8 and Grade 10 Writers: A Descriptive Study of Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP) Essays

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Albertson, Bonnie

2007-01-01

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy of formulaic writing such as the five-paragraph theme (FPT) or essay for the purpose of earning high scores on high-stakes writing assessments. This qualitative descriptive study analyzed more than 1000 essays from Delaware Grade 8 and 10 writers, written for a statewide…

Science + Writing = Super Learning. Writing Workshop.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bower, Paula Rogovin

1993-01-01

Article presents suggestions for motivating elementary students to learn by combining science and writing. The strategies include planning the right environment; teaching the scientific method; establishing a link to literature; and making time for students to observe, experiment, and write. (SM)

Automated Assessment of Non-Native Learner Essays: Investigating the Role of Linguistic Features

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vajjala, Sowmya

2018-01-01

Automatic essay scoring (AES) refers to the process of scoring free text responses to given prompts, considering human grader scores as the gold standard. Writing such essays is an essential component of many language and aptitude exams. Hence, AES became an active and established area of research, and there are many proprietary systems used in…

Using Daedalus Interchange and New Daedalus Write To Teach Audience Awareness, Revision Techniques, and Textual Interpretation in a First-Year Writing Course on Contemporary Legal Issues.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Viti, Lynne Spigelmire

Writing 125 is a 13-week course that all first-year students at Wellesley College (Massachusetts) are required to take. One instructor teaches a section of it called "Law in Contemporary Society" which centers writing and reading activities around legal issues, namely "Roe v. Wade" and "Webster v. Cruzan." As an…

The Vision of Sequoyah: A Bibliographic Essay.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wagner, Elaine

In 1821, Sequoyah, a Cherokee Indian, presented to his tribal council a syllabary of the Cherokee language--an invention that enabled a previously illiterate people to read and write in their own language. This document includes a brief essay describing Sequoyah's life and accomplishment and a bibliography of further resources. Sequoyah was born…

The Opinions of Instructors Teaching Turkish to Foreigners about the Writing Skills of Syrian Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sengül, Murat

2015-01-01

This study focuses on the difficulties experienced by the instructors while teaching writing skill to Arabians from Syria, and how these difficulties could be overcome. The study group of the research includes 11 instructors working in Turkish Teaching Centers (TTCs) of Cukurova University and Adana Science and Technology University. The data…

Applications of the Wilkinson Model of Writing Maturity to College Writing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sternglass, Marilyn

1982-01-01

Examines the four-category model developed by Andrew Wilkinson at the University of Essex (England) to assess growth in writing maturity. The four measures of development are stylistic, affective, cognitive, and moral. Each has several subcategories. Includes college student essays to illustrate the model. (HTH)

Teaching Google Search Techniques in an L2 Academic Writing Context

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Han, Sumi; Shin, Jeong-Ah

2017-01-01

This mixed-method study examines the effectiveness of teaching Google search techniques (GSTs) to Korean EFL college students in an intermediate-level academic English writing course. 18 students participated in a 4-day GST workshop consisting of an overview session of the web as corpus and Google as a concordancer, and three training sessions…

The Use of Video Feedback in Teaching Process-Approach EFL Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Özkul, Sertaç; Ortaçtepe, Deniz

2017-01-01

This experimental study investigated the use of video feedback as an alternative to feedback with correction codes at an institution where the latter was commonly used for teaching process-approach English as a foreign language (EFL) writing. Over a 5-week period, the control and the experimental groups were provided with feedback based on…

Writing on the board as students' preferred teaching modality in a physiology course.

PubMed

Armour, Chris; Schneid, Stephen D; Brandl, Katharina

2016-06-01

The introduction of PowerPoint presentation software has generated a paradigm shift in the delivery of lectures. PowerPoint has now almost entirely replaced chalkboard or whiteboard teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels. This study investigated whether undergraduate biology students preferred to have lectures delivered by PowerPoint or written on the board as well as the reasons behind their preference. Two upper-division physiology courses were surveyed over a period of 7 yr. A total of 1,905 students (86.7%) indicated they preferred lectures delivered by "writing on the board" compared to 291 students (13.3%) who preferred PowerPoint. Common themes drawn from explanations reported by students in favor of writing on the board included: 1) more appropriate pace, 2) facilitation of note taking, and 3) greater alertness and attention. Common themes in favor of PowerPoint included 1) increased convenience, 2) focus on listening, and 3) more accurate and readable notes. Based on the students' very strong preference for writing on the board and the themes supporting that preference, we recommend that instructors incorporate elements of the writing on the board delivery style into whatever teaching modality is used. If instructors plan to use PowerPoint, the presentation should be paced, constructed, and delivered to provide the benefits of lectures written on the board. The advantages of writing on the board can be also incorporated into instruction intended to occur outside the classroom, such as animated narrated videos as part of the flipped classroom approach. Copyright © 2016 The American Physiological Society.

Rewriting the Social Body: What English Composition Programs Can Learn with the Language Poets.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Beech, Jennifer

The job of teachers of composition is to teach students how to write, and what they teach them to write is the school essay. Yet, if they stop to see the school essay for what it really is, they will discover that for all their humanistic claims of wanting to give students voices, the genre is one that actually works to exclude many of these…

Coherence, Cohesion and Comments on Students' Academic Essays

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Todd, Richard Watson; Khongput, Somreudee; Darasawang, Pornapit

2007-01-01

This study investigates the relationships between connectedness in discourse and the in-text comments that tutors write on postgraduate essays at a Thai university. Connectedness was divided into cohesion, propositional coherence and interactional coherence which were analysed using Hoey's lexical analysis [Hoey, M. (1991). "Patterns of lexis…

Counterstatement: Reesponse to Maxine Hairston, "The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing" (with a Reply by Maxine Hairston).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Blom, Thomas E.

1984-01-01

Presents an essay refuting Hairston's proposal that the composition profession is undergoing a radical shift in paradigm to one based more on the writing process. Presents Hairston's defense of her proposal. (HTH)

Linking Adverbials in First-Year Korean University EFL Learners' Writing: A Corpus-Informed Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ha, Myung-Jeong

2016-01-01

This study examines the frequency and usage patterns of linking adverbials in Korean students' essay writing in comparison with native English writing. The learner corpus used in the present study is composed of 105 essays that were produced by first-year university students in Korea. The control corpus was taken from the American LOCNESS…

Fostering Collaborative Teaching and Learning Scholarship through an International Writing Group Initiative

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Marquis, Elizabeth; Healey, Mick; Vine, Michelle

2016-01-01

The research presented here explored the experiences of participants in an international collaborative writing group (ICWG) initiative that ran in conjunction with the 2012 International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSoTL) conference. The ICWG sought to cultivate collaborative pedagogical scholarship by bringing together…

Engaging Sources through Reading-Writing Connections across the Disciplines

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Carillo, Ellen C.

2016-01-01

This essay argues that what might otherwise be considered "plagiarism" in student writing is a symptom of the difficulties students encounter in their reading and writing, moments in which students' inabilities to critically assess, read, and respond to sources through the act of writing come to the surface. Expanding the context within…

Tolstoy, the Writing Teacher.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Blaisdell, Bob

1998-01-01

Discusses Tolstoy's nearly lifelong career as a teacher. Quotes from Tolstoy's own writings about teaching: his accounts of his interactions with the peasant children at his school; his own theories about teaching; and how the teacher should follow the child. Draws parallels to the author's experiences teaching writing workshops at a soup kitchen…

Writing in the Elementary Classroom: A Reconsideration.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Evans, Janet, Ed.

This book presents 15 essays that consider writing development from many different angles, creating a collage that focuses on how to help students develop into competent writers. The first section of the book consists of four chapters on how to support young writers. In the second section, the essays explore how a variety of issues influence…

Author! Author! Colleges Struggle to Evaluate Applicants' Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gose, Ben

2007-01-01

The dreaded personal essay used to be the toughest part of the college-admissions process for the applicant. These days it's admissions officers who fret about student writing--and not just because they fall asleep reading endless takes on "overcoming adversity." They've got weightier concerns--plagiarized essays, students who receive…

Content Area Teacher Candidates' Self-Efficacy Beliefs of Teaching Writing Online

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Saine, Paula; West, Jessica A.

2017-01-01

This article focuses on a research study of social studies candidates' self-efficacy beliefs in teaching writing. They coached high school writers online during their content-area literacy course in an effort to assist the high school students in revising their multigenre papers. Over a period of 6 weeks the candidates and the high school students…

The College Application Essay: A Rhetorical Paradox.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Paley, Karen Surman

An informal study explored the dynamics of the task of writing college application essays, which urge self-revelation but are judged by omnipotent admissions committees. Four students in the top 17% of their class of 194 in a predominantly white suburban school completed think-aloud protocols as they drafted a response to an application question…

Teaching Writing in Graduate School

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sallee, Margaret; Hallett, Ronald; Tierney, William

2011-01-01

Graduate students are typically expected to know how to write. Those who write poorly are occasionally penalized, but little in-class attention is given to help students continue to develop and refine their writing skills. More often than not, writing courses at the graduate level are remedial programs designed for international students and…

Selected Speeches and Essays of Mina Pendo Shaughnessy.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shaughnessy, Mina

1980-01-01

Presents Mina Shaughnessy's thoughts on why English professors dislike the teaching of writing, what is needed in writing research, the disadvantages of being a writing teacher at an open admissions school, what open admissions policies have revealed about education in general and basic writing instruction in particular, and writing evaluation…

Use of a journal club and letter-writing exercise to teach critical appraisal to medical undergraduates.

PubMed

Edwards, R; White, M; Gray, J; Fischbacher, C

2001-07-01

There is growing interest in methods of teaching critical appraisal skills at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. We describe an approach using a journal club and subsequent letter writing to teach critical appraisal and writing skills to medical undergraduates. The exercise occurs during a 3-week public health medicine attachment in the third year of the undergraduate curriculum. Students work in small groups to appraise a recently published research paper, present their findings to their peers in a journal club, and draft a letter to the journal editor. Evaluation took place through: informal and formal feedback from students; number of letters written, submitted and published, and a comparison of marks obtained by students submitting a literature review assignment with and without critical appraisal teaching during the public health attachment. Feedback from students was overwhelmingly positive. In the first 3(1/2) years, 26 letters have been published or accepted for publication, and 58 letters published on the Internet. There were no significant differences in overall marks or marks for the critical appraisal component of the literature review assignments between the two student groups. We believe our approach is an innovative and enjoyable method for teaching critical appraisal and writing skills to medical students. Lack of difference in marks in the literature review between the student groups may reflect its insensitivity as an outcome measure, contamination by other critical appraisal teaching, or true ineffectiveness.

Building the Foundation the WRITE WAY: Mini-Lessons with Practical Strategies for Teaching the Personal Narrative, Feature Article, "How-to..." Article, and Persuasive Letter.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Miller, Susan A.; Vincent, Donna

This book presents strategies for teaching the personal narrative, feature article, how-to article, and persuasive letter, and for teaching fiction and reflective thinking and writing. It includes definitions, lesson plans, originals for transparencies and photocopies, and sample student writing. The first four sections are: Teaching the Personal…

Natural language processing in an intelligent writing strategy tutoring system.

PubMed

McNamara, Danielle S; Crossley, Scott A; Roscoe, Rod

2013-06-01

The Writing Pal is an intelligent tutoring system that provides writing strategy training. A large part of its artificial intelligence resides in the natural language processing algorithms to assess essay quality and guide feedback to students. Because writing is often highly nuanced and subjective, the development of these algorithms must consider a broad array of linguistic, rhetorical, and contextual features. This study assesses the potential for computational indices to predict human ratings of essay quality. Past studies have demonstrated that linguistic indices related to lexical diversity, word frequency, and syntactic complexity are significant predictors of human judgments of essay quality but that indices of cohesion are not. The present study extends prior work by including a larger data sample and an expanded set of indices to assess new lexical, syntactic, cohesion, rhetorical, and reading ease indices. Three models were assessed. The model reported by McNamara, Crossley, and McCarthy (Written Communication 27:57-86, 2010) including three indices of lexical diversity, word frequency, and syntactic complexity accounted for only 6% of the variance in the larger data set. A regression model including the full set of indices examined in prior studies of writing predicted 38% of the variance in human scores of essay quality with 91% adjacent accuracy (i.e., within 1 point). A regression model that also included new indices related to rhetoric and cohesion predicted 44% of the variance with 94% adjacent accuracy. The new indices increased accuracy but, more importantly, afford the means to provide more meaningful feedback in the context of a writing tutoring system.

Writing Inspired

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tischhauser, Karen

2015-01-01

Students need inspiration to write. Assigning is not teaching. In order to inspire students to write fiction worth reading, teachers must take them through the process of writing. Physical objects inspire good writing with depth. In this article, the reader will be taken through the process of inspiring young writers through the use of boxes.…

Considerations When Writing and Reviewing a Higher Education Teaching Protocol Involving Animals.

PubMed

Vemulapalli, Tracy H; Donkin, Shawn S; Lescun, Timothy B; O'Neil, Peggy A; Zollner, Patrick A

2017-09-01

The targeted use of animals in teaching at institutions of higher learning is fundamental to educating the next generation of professionals in the biologic and animal sciences. As with animal research, universities and colleges that use animals in teaching are subject to regulatory oversight. Instructors must receive approval from their IACUC before using animals in their teaching. However, the questions asked on many institutions' animal care and use protocol (ACUP) are often geared more toward the use of animals for research. These questions may not be wholly appropriate in evaluating a teaching protocol; some questions are not applicable (for example, power analysis to justify animal numbers) whereas other important questions may be missing. This article discusses the issues surrounding the rationale for animal use in teaching; it also proposes a framework that instructors and IACUC members alike can use when writing and reviewing teaching ACUP. We hope this framework will help to ensure the most appropriate IACUC review of the ethical use of animals in higher education.

Teaching Language, Teaching Culture.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liddicoat, Anthony J., Ed.; Crozet, Chantal, Ed.

1997-01-01

Essays and research reports on the relationship between teaching second languages and teaching culture include: "Teaching Culture as an Integrated Part of Language Teaching: An Introduction" (Chantal Crozet, Anthony J. Liddicoat); "Primary Socialization and Cultural Factors in Second Language Learning: Wending Our Way through Semi-Charted…

Exploring & Writing Geometry

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sanders, Cathleen V.

2009-01-01

When given opportunities to explore mathematics, make conjectures, and write about what they have discovered, students gain a deeper understanding of this fascinating subject. In this article, the author describes her successful Geometry Portfolio class. In addition to traditional student work, the author frequently added short essay questions or…

Teaching and Assessing Writing Skills at University Level: A Comparison of Practices in French and Colombian Universities

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Escorcia, Dyanne

2015-01-01

Background: The analysis of teachers' conceptions about writing at university level allows the study of teaching practices associated with academic writing. At the same time, it is important to consider the context (disciplines, culture, institution, pedagogical organisation, etc.) where these practices take place. Purpose: The present article…

The Nature of Automated Essay Scoring Feedback

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dikli, Semire

2010-01-01

The purpose of this study is to explore the nature of feedback that English as a Second Language (ESL) students received on their writings either from an automated essay scoring (AES) system or from the teacher. The participants were 12 adult ESL students who were attending an intensive English center at a university in Florida. The drafts of the…

Contextualized Writing: Promoting Audience-Centered Writing through Scenario-Based Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Golden, Paullett

2018-01-01

Scenario-based learning is an approach for student-centered learning used in the medical and legal fields, but is little used in liberal arts. In this study, I examine students' understanding and application of audience-centered writing techniques after a semester of formal scenario-based essays and problem-based activities. Comparing the grades…

THEMES, THEORIES, AND THERAPY, THE TEACHING OF WRITING IN COLLEGE. THE REPORT OF THE DARTMOUTH STUDY OF STUDENT WRITING.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

KITZHABER, ALBERT R.

A REPORT ON THE TEACHING OF WRITING IN COLLEGE CONSISTS OF BOTH A GENERAL SURVEY OF FRESHMAN ENGLISH COURSES IN A WIDE VARIETY OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS AND A SPECIFIC STUDY OF THE FRESHMAN ENGLISH PROGRAM AT DARTMOUTH COLLEGE. THE GENERAL SURVEY PROVIDES A DISCUSSION OF TYPES OF FRESHMAN COURSES, THE PRESENT STATE OF FRESHMAN COMPOSITION PROGRAMS…

Integrating Critical Thinking into the Assessment of College Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McLaughlin, Frost; Moore, Miriam

2012-01-01

When writing teachers at any level get together to assess student essays, they often disagree in their evaluations of the writing at hand. This is no surprise as writing is a complex process, and in evaluating it, teachers go through a complex sequence of thoughts before emerging with an overall assessment. Critical thinking, or the complexity of…

Contextualize Technical Writing Assessment to Better Prepare Students for Workplace Writing: Student-Centered Assessment Instruments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yu, Han

2008-01-01

To teach students how to write for the workplace and other professional contexts, technical writing teachers often assign writing tasks that reflect real-life communication contexts, a teaching approach that is grounded in the field's contextualized understanding of genre. This article argues to fully embrace contextualized literacy and better…

Genre-Based Approach: What and How to Teach and to Learn Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dirgeyasa, I Wy.

2016-01-01

In Indonesian education context, recently the word "genre" seems to gain its most popular and hot issue to teaching and learning English, particularly writing skill. However, many of them the students, teachers, or university students, or even lecturers in universities apparently are not good at understanding and are not truly well…

Using Peer Assisted Strategies to Teach Early Writing: Results of a Pilot Study to Examine Feasibility and Promise

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Puranik, Cynthia S.; Patchan, Melissa M.; Lemons, Christopher J.; Al Otaiba, Stephanie

2017-01-01

Despite the poor outcomes for U.S. students on national writing tests, overall research on how to teach writing is sparse, and this scarcity is more pronounced in the early years of beginning to write. In this study 81,200 we present preliminary findings from Year 1 of a 3-year Institute of Education Sciences-funded Goal 2 project aimed at…

Detection of Common Errors in Turkish EFL Students' Writing through a Corpus Analytic Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Demirel, Elif Tokdemir

2017-01-01

The present study aims to explore Turkish EFL students' major writing difficulties by analyzing the frequent writing errors in academic essays. Accordingly, the study examined errors in a corpus of 150 academic essays written by Turkish EFL students studying at the Department of English Language and Literature at a public university in Turkey. The…

Writing: Keeping It Real. Teacher to Teacher.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kist, Bill

When teaching writing to adult learners, teachers must achieve a balance between "content" and "mechanics." The first step is to assign "real" writing for "real" purposes. The next step is to teach the writing process more than the product and teach the place that correct "mechanics" (spelling,…

The Effect of Online Peer Feedback on the Academic Writing Ability of Iranian EFL Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moradi, Mohammad Reza; Karimpour, Zahra

2012-01-01

This paper reports an exploratory study of 60 English as a foreign language (EFL) student's experiences of online peer feedback in an essay writing course at Islamic Azad University, Dezful Branch. They were required to comment on their peers' writing essays using the checklist to whom had been made available, but in different ways. The groups…

Class Blogs as a Teaching Tool to Promote Writing and Student Interaction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sullivan, Miriam; Longnecker, Nancy

2014-01-01

Blogs are a useful teaching tool for improving student writing and increasing class interaction. However, most studies have looked at individual blogs rather than blogs maintained by a whole class. We introduced assignments involving participation in class blogs to four science communication classes with enrolments of between 15 and 36 students.…

Topical Structure in Argumentative Essays of EFL Learners and Implications for Writing Classes

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kiliç, Mehmet; Genç, Bilal; Bada, Erdogan

2016-01-01

The literature on the topical organization of essays suggests that there are four possible types of progression from the topic of one clause to the topics of the following clauses. These are parallel, sequential, extended parallel, and extended sequential progressions. Essay writers' ability to create cohesion and coherence can be evaluated on the…

An Online Writing Partnership: Transforming Classroom Writing Instruction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Townsend, Jane S.; Nail, Allan; Cheveallier, Jennifer; Browning, Angela

2013-01-01

The four authors of this article have each at different times over a ten-year period helped develop versions of the Online Writing Partnership between future English teachers learning to teach writing and high school students learning to write better. The authors have been striving to help future English teachers learn how to help high school…

Computer-Based Writing and Paper-Based Writing: A Study of Beginning-Level and Intermediate-Level Chinese Learners' Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kang, Hana

2011-01-01

Chinese writing is one of the most difficult challenges for Chinese learners whose first language writing system is alphabetic letters. Chinese teachers have incorporated computer-based writing into their teaching in the attempt to reduce the difficulties of writing in Chinese, with a particular emphasis on composing (as opposed to simply writing…

Strategy Instruction in Writing for Adult Literacy Learners

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

MacArthur, Charles A.; Lembo, Leah

2009-01-01

This study investigated the effectiveness of cognitive strategy instruction in writing with adult literacy learners. Three middle-aged African-American adults participating in adult education with the goal of passing the GED received tutoring in a strategy for planning, writing, and revising persuasive essays along with self-regulation strategies.…

Reflections on Contemporary Currents in Writing Center Work

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lunsford, Andrea A.; Ede, Lisa

2011-01-01

This article presents the text of a speech presented at The International Writing Centers Association and the National Conference on Peer Tutoring (IWCA-NCPTW) joint conference in Baltimore, Maryland, in November 2010. It stemmed from a larger project--a collection of previously published and new essays titled "Writing Together: Collaboration in…

The Teaching of Writing in Primary Schools: Could Do Better. Discussion Paper.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Office for Standards in Education, London (England).

This paper is intended to contribute to the debate about how to raise standards of literacy. It summarizes early evidence from HMI (Her Majesty's Inspectors) about the teaching of writing within the National Literacy Strategy and exemplifies good practice in the schools inspected by HMI. In some respects it breaks with tradition in quoting…

Intermodality in Teaching Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Christensen, Margarette

2012-01-01

This dissertation articulates a writing pedagogy based on a theory of "intermodality" to help writing instructors navigate the affordances and challenges of multimodal composition. Drawing from recent discoveries in neuroscience about how the brain makes meaning, I situate this pedagogy of intermodality--literally, "between the…

"I write to know what I think": a four-year writing curriculum.

PubMed

Lister, Elena; Kravis, Nathan; Sandberg, Larry; Halpern, Jeffrey K; Cabaniss, Deborah L; Singer, Meriamne B

2008-12-01

The four-year writing curriculum of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research has as its main objective to teach candidates to learn about analysis through writing. Learning to write about analyses ultimately entails learning to clarify and then express how one thinks and functions as an analyst. Since its inception ten years ago, the program has evolved into its current structure, a stepwise approach through the years of candidate training based on a didactic method called "layering." For each level of the course, candidates' typical writing difficulties are examined, and examples given of write-ups and how they were used in teaching. The essential role of the faculty experience is also described.

Women's Studies: A Bibliographic Essay.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kirtland, Monika

The essay section provides a definition and short history of women's studies and explores the implications in regard to the administration and teaching of such courses. The bibliography lists and annotates material useful for all levels of education. Information sources covered include government agencies and societies, reference sources (such as…

Considerations When Writing and Reviewing a Higher Education Teaching Protocol Involving Animals

PubMed Central

Vemulapalli, Tracy H; Donkin, Shawn S; Lescun, Timothy B; O'Neil, Peggy A; Zollner, Patrick A

2017-01-01

The targeted use of animals in teaching at institutions of higher learning is fundamental to educating the next generation of professionals in the biologic and animal sciences. As with animal research, universities and colleges that use animals in teaching are subject to regulatory oversight. Instructors must receive approval from their IACUC before using animals in their teaching. However, the questions asked on many institutions’ animal care and use protocol (ACUP) are often geared more toward the use of animals for research. These questions may not be wholly appropriate in evaluating a teaching protocol; some questions are not applicable (for example, power analysis to justify animal numbers) whereas other important questions may be missing. This article discusses the issues surrounding the rationale for animal use in teaching; it also proposes a framework that instructors and IACUC members alike can use when writing and reviewing teaching ACUP. We hope this framework will help to ensure the most appropriate IACUC review of the ethical use of animals in higher education. PMID:28903820

The Impact of Self-Assessment on Language Learners' Writing Skill

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mazloomi, Siamak; Khabiri, Mona

2018-01-01

The present study investigates the impact of self-assessment (SA) training applied as a writing task and a dynamic assessment on English language learners' writing ability and explores the changes in their language proficiency level. This quasi-experimental research on two homogenised essay writing classes of 60 Iranian university students at…

Writing to Read: A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Writing and Writing Instruction on Reading

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Graham, Steve; Hebert, Michael

2011-01-01

Reading is critical to students' success in and out of school. One potential means for improving students' reading is writing. In this meta-analysis of true and quasi-experiments, Graham and Herbert present evidence that writing about material read improves students' comprehension of it; that teaching students how to write improves their reading…

Exploring the Writing Approaches in the "Facebook" Environment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Annamalai, Nagaletchimee

2016-01-01

The following is a qualitative case study investigating the writing approaches that are evident when a group of ESL students were to complete their narrative writing task in the "Facebook" environment. Six students and a teacher interacted in the "Facebook" environment to revise and improve the quality of their essays. Data in…

Learning to Write, Writing to Learn: Theory and Research in Practice

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Indrisano, Roselmina, Ed.; Paratore, Jeanne R., Ed.

2005-01-01

Improving the way to teach writing requires deepening one's understanding of the process of writing. Each chapter in this collection brings together the perspectives of a university researcher and a classroom teacher to show explicitly the connection between writing theory, and practice. The book covers writing development in grades K?12 and…

Foreign Language Writing Fellows Programs: A Model for Improving Advanced Writing Skills

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Snyder, Delys Waite; Nielson, Rex P.; Kurzer, Kendon

2016-01-01

Within the growing field of scholarly literature on foreign language (FL) writing pedagogy, few studies have addressed pedagogical questions regarding the teaching of writing to advanced language learners. Writing fellows peer tutoring programs, although typically associated with first language writing instruction, likely can benefit and support…

The Word for Teaching Is Learning: Essays for James Britton.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lightfoot, Martin, Ed.; Martin, Nancy, Ed.

Reflecting the influence of James Britton in the field of language and learning, this book--a collection of essays by researchers and practitioners in the area of language and learning--focuses on recent issues of language development in learning. The book contains the following 27 essays: (1) "Social Interaction as Scaffold: The Power and…

How Histories Begin: A Note on the Writing of Openings

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Leeson, D. M.

2011-01-01

As every history professor soon discovers, undergraduates often have trouble writing effective openings for their book reviews and research papers. some students hand in essays that begin with anodyne general pronouncements ("throughout history, some things have changed, while others have remained the same"), while others hand in essays without…

Improving Scientific Writing in Undergraduate Geosciences Degrees Through Peer Review

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Day, E. A.; Collins, G. S.; Craig, L.

2016-12-01

In the British educational system, students specialise early. Often geoscience undergraduates have not taken a class that requires extended writing since they were sixteen years old. This can make it difficult for students to develop the written skills necessary for a geoscience degree, which often has assessments in the form of essays and reports. To improve both the writing and editing skills of our undergraduates we have introduced a peer review system, in which seniors review the work of first year students. At Imperial College London we set written coursework in every year of the degree. Communication is taught and assessed in many courses. There are two major modules with substantial written components that bookend the undergraduate degree at Imperial; the freshmen all write an assessed essay, while all seniors take 'Science Communication', a course that aims to prepare them for a range of possible careers. In the 2015-16 academic year we linked these courses by introducing a modified form of peer marking and instruction. Seniors had to complete reviews of draft first year essays for credit in Science Communication. These reviews are completed for the department 'journal' and introduce the first and fourth years to the nature of peer review. Seniors learn how to critically, but kindly, evaluate the work of other students, and are also prepared for potentially submitting their senior theses to journals. Reviews were managed by volunteer seniors, who acted as associate editors. They allocated anonymous reviewers and wrote decision letters, which were sent to the freshmen before their final assessed essay submission. Ultimately the fourth year reviews were formally assessed and graded by members of staff, as were the revised and resubmitted first year essays. Feedback for both courses has improved since the introduction of student reviews of essays. The markers of the freshman essay have also commented on the improvement in the standard of the writing and a

Professional Writers Teaching Professional Writing: Transcending the Borders between Professional Writers and Academic Scholars, Harmonizing Throught and Reality: A Text Arguing for Teaching Sentences First, Last, and Foremost.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Beene, LynnDianne

Good writing is good sentences. It is a simple truth that many in the business of teaching writing have strayed from. Good writing is a first sentence that makes a reader want to read the second sentence, a second sentence that makes a reader want to read the third, and so on. Erika Lindemann suggests that certain types of sentence instruction can…

Prospective Science Teachers' Attitudes and Views of Using Journal Writing in the "Methods of Teaching Science" Course

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ambusaidi, Abdullah

2014-01-01

The aim of this study was to investigate the attitudes of prospective science teachers at Sultan Qaboos University towards and their views about using journal writing in the Methods of Teaching Science course. Twenty-six prospective science teachers were asked to write about each topic in the course in their journal to show their understanding of…

Raising voices: How sixth graders construct authority and knowledge in argumentative essays

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Monahan, Mary Elizabeth

This qualitative classroom-based study documents one teacher-researcher's response to the "voice" debate in composition studies and to the opposing views expressed by Elbow and Bartholomae. The author uses Bakhtin's principle of dialogism, Hymes's theory of communicative competence, as well as Ivanic's discussion of discoursally constructed identities to reconceptualize voice and to redesign writing instruction in her sixth grade classroom. This study shows how students, by redefining and then acting on that voice pedagogy in terms that made sense to them, shaped the author's understanding of what counts as "voiced" writing in non-narrative discourse. Based on a grounded-theory analysis of the twenty-six sixth graders' argumentative essays in science, the author explains voice, not as a property of writers or of texts, but as a process of "knowing together"---a collaborative, but not entirely congenial, exercise of establishing one's authority by talking with, against, and through other voices on the issue. As the results of this study show, the students' "I-Ness" or authorial presence within their texts, was born in a nexus of relationships with "rivals," "allies" and "readers." Given their teacher's injunctions to project confidence and authority in argumentative writing, the students assumed fairly adversarial stances toward these conversational partners throughout their essays. Exaggerating the terms for voiced writing built into the curriculum, the sixth graders produced essays that read more like caricatures than examples of argumentation. Their displays of rhetorical bravado and intellectual aggressiveness, however offsetting to the reader, still enabled these sixth graders to composed voiced essays. This study raises doubts about the value of urging students to sound like their "true selves" or to adopt the formal registers of academe. Students, it seems clear, stand to gain by experimenting with a range of textual identities. The author suggests that voice

The Prewriting of Unsuccessful Writers on Timed Writing Competence Tests.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chiste, Katherine Beaty; O'Shea, Judith

1990-01-01

Examines the characteristics of prewriting activities of unsuccessful writers who took the Alberta Universities' Writing Competence Test. Finds that the students' limited and ineffective use of prewriting strategies interferes with their ability to generate and develop ideas in writing a timed essay. (KEH)

What Is Successful Writing? An Investigation into the Multiple Ways Writers Can Write Successful Essays

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Crossley, Scott A.; Roscoe, Rod; McNamara, Danielle S.

2014-01-01

This study identifies multiple profiles of successful essays via a cluster analysis approach using linguistic features reported by a variety of natural language processing tools. The findings from the study indicate that there are four profiles of successful writers for the samples analyzed. These four profiles are linguistically distinct from one…

Teaching Technical Report Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

De Pasquale, Joseph A.

1977-01-01

A high school electronics teacher describes the integration of technical report writing in the electronics program for trade and industrial students. He notes that the report writing rather than just recording data seemed to improve student laboratory experience but further improvements in the program are needed. A sample lab report is included.…

Third and Fourth Grade Teacher's Classroom Practices in Writing: A National Survey

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Brindle, Mary; Graham, Steve; Harris, Karen R.; Hebert, Michael

2016-01-01

A random sample of teachers in grades 3 and 4 (N = 157) from across the United States were surveyed about their use of evidence-based writing practices, preparation to teach writing, and beliefs about writing. Teachers' beliefs included their efficacy to teach writing, their orientations to teach writing, their attitude about teaching writing, and…

Three Essays on Educator Labor Markets: Evidence from Missouri Public Schools

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shi, Shishan

2013-01-01

This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay investigates the feasibility of moving high-performing teachers to low-performing schools using administrative micro data from Missouri. I define teacher labor markets concentrically and construct models to allow teachers' local labor markets, within teaching, to influence their mobility…

ScrapbookUSA: Writing 'Cross Grade, 'Cross Curriculum, 'Cross Country.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Roth, Emery, II

1993-01-01

Describes the ScrapBookUSA Writing Project, a computer telecommunications project linking classrooms across the country, and its educational opportunities for the writing and multicultural studies curricula. Examples of Hello letters, student essays, and ScrapBook Chronicles are given to demonstrate the impact a wide audience and immediate…

"My Initial Concern Is to Get a Hearing": Exploring What Makes an Effective History Essay Introduction

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Worth, Paula

2016-01-01

Struck by the dullness of some of her students' essay introductions, Paula Worth reflected on the fact that she had never focused specifically on introductions. After surveying existing work by history teachers on essay structure in general and introductions in particular, she turns to the work of historians. Drawing on scholarly writing by…

Parents and Communities as Partners in Teaching Writing in Canadian Middle Grades Classrooms

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McClay, Jill Kedersha; Peterson, Shelley Stagg; Nixon, Rhonda

2012-01-01

Educators have long recognized that parental and community supports are important underpinnings for children's success in school. With respect to the teaching of writing, however, little research has been conducted to provide evidence of effective practices teachers use to involve parents and communities. As part of a national Canadian study of…

A Teaching Model for Scaffolding 4th Grade Students' Scientific Explanation Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yang, Hsiu-Ting; Wang, Kuo-Hua

2014-01-01

Improving students scientific explanations is one major goal of science education. Both writing activities and concept mapping are reported as effective strategies for enhancing student learning of science. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of a teaching model, named the DCI model, which integrates a Descriptive explanation…

Why teach literature and medicine? Answers from three decades.

PubMed

Jones, Anne Hudson

2013-12-01

In this essay, I look back at some of the earliest attempts by the first generation of literature-and-medicine scholars to answer the question: Why teach literature and medicine? Reviewing the development of the field in its early years, I examine statements by practitioners to see whether their answers have held up over time and to consider how the rationales they articulated have expanded or changed in the following years and why. Greater emphasis on literary criticism, narrative ethics, narrative theory, and reflective writing has influenced current work in the field in ways that could not have been foreseen in the 1970s. The extraordinary growth of interest and work in the field nationally and, especially since 1996, internationally has included practitioners in many additional areas such as disability studies, film studies, therapeutic writing, and trauma studies. Along with the emergence of narrative medicine, this diverse community of scholars and practitioners-affiliated more through their use of narrative methodologies than the teaching of literature-makes the perennial challenge of evaluation and assessment even more complicated.

Language Simulations: The Blending Space for Writing and Critical Thinking

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kovalik, Doina L.; Kovalik, Ludovic M.

2007-01-01

This article describes a language simulation involving six distinct phases: an in-class quick response, a card game, individual research, a classroom debate, a debriefing session, and an argumentative essay. An analysis of student artifacts--quick-response writings and final essays, respectively, both addressing the definition of liberty in a…

Writing as Envision: Autobiographical and Academic Writing in the Composition Class.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tokarczyk, Michelle M.

Three students in an autobiography class--an African-American, a woman, and a gay man struggling to come out--used their writing to both affirm their places in the world and envision another place. Having reviewed her early educational experiences as an African-American, Holly focused her essay back to her present college days and her attempts to…

Augmenting Literacy: The Role of Expertise in Digital Writing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Van Ittersum, Derek

2011-01-01

This essay presents a model of reflective use of writing technologies, one that provides a means of more fully exploiting the possibilities of these tools for transforming writing activity. Derived from the work of computer designer Douglas Engelbart, the "bootstrapping" model of reflective use extends current arguments in the field…

Of Groomers and Tour Guides: The Role of Writing in the Fellowships Office

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bickford, Leslie

2017-01-01

Making writing less scary for students and focusing on the messy, recursive nature of writing helps students use the writing process to bring forth the thoughts that might otherwise not find their way into essays. Students who revisit their writing also revisit their thinking and are empowered to cultivate and articulate that thinking in clearer…

Teaching Argument Writing to 7- to 14-Year-Olds: An International Review of the Evidence of Successful Practice

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Andrews, Richard; Torgerson, Carole; Low, Graham; McGuinn, Nick

2009-01-01

A systematic review was undertaken in 2006 to answer the question "What is the evidence for successful practice in teaching and learning with regard to non-fiction writing (specifically argumentational writing) for 7- to 14-year-olds?", using EPPI-Centre methodology. Results showed that certain conditions have to be in place. These…

The Views of Turkish Pre-Service Teachers about Effectiveness of Cluster Method as a Teaching Writing Method

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kitis, Emine; Türkel, Ali

2017-01-01

The aim of this study is to find out Turkish pre-service teachers' views on effectiveness of cluster method as a writing teaching method. The Cluster Method can be defined as a connotative creative writing method. The way the method works is that the person who brainstorms on connotations of a word or a concept in abscence of any kind of…

A Writing and Ethics Component for a Quantum Mechanics, Physical Chemistry Course

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Reilly, John T.; Strickland, Michael

2010-01-01

A writing-across-the-curriculum and ethics component is presented for a second-semester, physical chemistry course. The activity involves introducing ethical issues pertinent to scientists. Students are asked to read additional material, participate in discussions, and write essays and a paper on an ethical issue. The writing and discussion…

Military Legislation: Explaining Military Officers’ Writing Deficiencies

DTIC Science & Technology

2016-06-01

A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing,” College Composition and Communication 32, no. 4 (December... Informative essay • Personal response to a text • Informative website • Literacy narrative posted to a blog • Critique of a text • Critique of...Fowler and Aaron: • Informative essay • Personal response to a text • Informative website • Literacy narrative posted to a blog • Critique of a

Using Explicit Teaching to Improve How Bioscience Students Write to the Lay Public

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Moni, Roger W.; Hryciw, Deanne H.; Poronnik, Philip; Moni, Karen B.

2007-01-01

The media role model was recently developed to frame how science faculty members can teach their students to write more effectively to lay audiences (14). An Opinion Editorial (Op-Ed) was introduced as a novel assignment for final-year physiology and pharmacology undergraduates. This second phase of this study, reported here, demonstrated the…

"The Text Opened My Eyes": A Book Club on Teaching Writing to ELLs

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Andrei, Elena; Ellerbe, Marcie; Cherner, Todd

2015-01-01

This qualitative study looked at a book club for US teachers in public schools focused on teaching writing to English language learners (ELLs). To guide the study, the central research questions were: (1) What are teachers' perceptions about a book club professional development experience?; and (2) How are teachers' views about second language…

Writing as a Survival Skill: How Neuroscience Can Improve Writing in Organizations

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Douglas, Yellowlees

2012-01-01

This article looks at the apparent paradox between the demand for strong writing skills and the lack of colleges of business that require their MBA students to complete writing courses. In the past, most approaches to teaching writing proved inadequate in producing graduates with the ability to write clearly, effectively, and efficiently. This…

Re-Writing the Subject: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Creative Writing and Composition Pedagogy.

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Harris, Judith

2001-01-01

Suggests that the teaching of both composition and creative writing would benefit from focusing less exclusively on the writing process and products and more on the writing subject. Claims that focusing on the writing subject through the lens of psychoanalysis provides several potential benefits. Concludes psychoanalysis can be a filtrate for the…

Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. Second Edition, Revised and Updated.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Villanueva, Victor, Ed.

This revised and updated resource contains a total of 43 essays that serve to initiate graduate students and more experienced teachers into the theories that inform composition studies. Under Section One--The Givens in Our Conversations: The Writing Process--are these essays: "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product" (Donald M. Murray);…

The Essay as a Lens on Transition to the University: Student and Staff Perceptions of Essay Writing

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McEwan, Michael P.

2017-01-01

The interplay between student and teacher expectations about the requirements for successful learning in higher education (HE) can impact on successful student outcomes. This study aims to identify and understand the expectations that first year university students have towards essay production during their acculturation to HE. By examining the…

Writing beyond Borders: Rethinking the Relationship between Composition Studies and Professional Writing

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Bay, Jennifer

2010-01-01

This essay attempts to forge connections between the fields of Composition Studies and professional writing. I argue that a stronger relationship would foster more sustainable ties in light of the corporate university and global capitalism. I point to three of what Dale Jacobs calls threshold spaces, sites where we can foster a culture of…

Undergraduate Essay Writing: Online and Face-to-Face Peer Reviews

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Chong, Mike R.; Goff, Lori; Dej, Kimberly

2012-01-01

We implemented two different approaches of using peer review to support undergraduate essay assignments for students taking large second-year courses in life sciences and biology: a web-based online peer review (OPR) approach and a more traditional face-to-face peer review (FPR) approach that was conducted in tutorial settings. The essays…

Learning autonomy in writing class: Implementation of project-based learning in english for spesific purposes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ayu Sukerti, G. N.; Yuliantini, Ny

2018-01-01

This research was aimed to analyze students’ attitude on learning autonomy through the implementation of project-based learning (PBL). Writing has been considered one of the most difficult competencies to master as it incorporates several integrated language skills. Thus, teaching writing in English for Specific Class posts a huge challenge as students often feel discouraged by the complex series of processes involved in producing a well-structured piece of writing. This research implemented PBL as the learning model to boost students’ learning outcomes and construct self-directed learning. Participants were 25 second semester students enrolled in a three-year undergraduate program in Informatics Management. The implementation of PBL in writing class contributed real advantages since it allowed students to collaboratively arrange outline in order to produce individual drafts and final essays. The study revealed that students were able to be involved in a more deep and autonomous learning as they helped each other during group discussion. The students autonomously engaged in the completion of the project in a more positive attitude. They also acquired more knowledge in the aspect of grammar and learned how to use language in proper context based on the feedbacks they got during revising their writing.

Exploring the Interactions on an Online Narrative Writing Platform

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Annamalai, Nagaletchimee; Eng, Tan Kok; Abdullah, Amelia; Sivagurunathan, Sorojini

2015-01-01

Purpose: This paper reports a study that investigated the interactions of six students learning to write narrative essays on an online narrative writing platform (ONWP). Participants were six students and a teacher from an urban Chinese Secondary School in the northern region of Malaysia. Methodology: The qualitative data used in this study were…

Construct Validity of "e-rater"® in Scoring TOEFL® Essays. Research Report. ETS RR-07-21

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Attali, Yigal

2007-01-01

This study examined the construct validity of the "e-rater"® automated essay scoring engine as an alternative to human scoring in the context of TOEFL® essay writing. Analyses were based on a sample of students who repeated the TOEFL within a short time period. Two "e-rater" scores were investigated in this study, the first…

On the Relation between Automated Essay Scoring and Modern Views of the Writing Construct

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Deane, Paul

2013-01-01

This paper examines the construct measured by automated essay scoring (AES) systems. AES systems measure features of the text structure, linguistic structure, and conventional print form of essays; as such, the systems primarily measure text production skills. In the current state-of-the-art, AES provide little direct evidence about such matters…

Improvement of Writing at Grades 10 and 11: Does Automated Essay Scoring Software Help Students Improve Their Writing Skills?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Gollnitz, Deborah-Lee

2010-01-01

Writing skills are considered essential to lifelong success, yet experts cannot agree on one model or set of traits that distinguishes good writing from poor writing. Instructional strategies in developing student writing at the high school level need to include a means by which students receive immediate, specific feedback that acts as a scaffold…

Writing Partners: Expanding the Audiences for Student Writing.

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Gillis, Candida

1994-01-01

Describes how one English teacher developed an approach to teaching writing that pairs student writers with writers in the community outside the school. Outlines the features of this writing partners project, including the responsibilities of each partner. Argues that such programs foster writer skill and self-esteem. (HB)

Does Writing as Process = Writing as Social Practice?

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