Developing reading-writing connections; the impact of explicit instruction of literary devices on the quality of children's narrative writing

The purpose of this collaborative schools-university study was to investigate how the explicit instruction of literary devices during designated literacy sessions could improve the quality of children's narrative writing. A guiding question for the study was: Can children's writing can be enhanced by teachers drawing attention to the literary devices used by professional writers or “mentor authors”? The study was conducted with 18 teachers, working as research partners in nine elementary schools over one school year. The research group explored ways of developing children as reflective authors, able to draft and redraft writing in response to peer and teacher feedback. Daily literacy sessions were complemented by weekly writing workshops where students engaged in authorial activity and experienced writers' perspectives and readers' demands (Harwayne, 1992; May, 2004). Methods for data collection included video recording of peer-peer and teacher-led group discussions and audio recording of teacher-child conferences. Samples of children's narrative writing were collected and a comparison was made between the quality of their independent writing at the beginning and end of the research period. The research group documented the importance of peer-peer and teacher-student discourse in the development of children's metalanguage and awareness of audience. The study suggests that reading, discussing, and evaluating mentor texts can have a positive impact on the quality of children's independent writing

Mixed Methods: Using a Combination of Techniques to Assess Writing Ability

A productive ability such as writing can be assessed only through a candidate‘s performance on a task, giving rise to concerns about the reliability and validity of writing assessments. In this chapter, it is argued that a combination of different techniques can help improve the quality of an evaluation of writing ability. First, an indirect test can be applied to reliably assess specific components of the writing process (e.g., revision), adding to the validity of the assessment. Furthermore, an analytic rating procedure accompanied by anchor essays allows raters to reliably evaluate the content and overall structure of written pieces. And last, automated scoring techniques can be used to objectively score text features considered important to text quality. Combining these methods provides an evaluation that is solid and informativ

Responding to the message: Responsive written feedback in a Maori to English transition context

This paper reports on the writing component of a community and school Maori to English literacy transition programme implemented in a kura kaupapa Maori (Maori language immersion school. 21 Year 6, 7 and 8 students received responsive written feedback for their writing in English, over a ten-week period, during their weekly independent writing time. Students’ stories were mailed to a young Maori woman (the third author) in a provincial city 100 kilometres from the kura . She was not known to any of the students prior to the study, but she acted as an interested audience, and responded in writing by focussing on the content or messages in students’ stories. She did not provide any corrective feedback on students’ writing. The study employed an intra-subject multiple-baseline research design across four school terms, with the responsive written feedback being introduced sequentially to each of three student Year groups. Measures were taken of total words written, adventurous words written, as well as holistic ratings of audience impact and language quality. Data demonstrate positive gains in both the quantity and quality of students’ writing, as well as maintenance of high levels of writing accuracy for all Year groups

Beyond spelling: the writing skills of higher education students with dyslexia

To have a clearer idea of the problems students with dyslexia may face during their studies, we compared writings of 100 students with dyslexia and 100 age matched control students in higher education. The aim of this study was to compare the writing of young adults with dyslexia and young adults without dyslexia. The study was carried out in Belgium with writers of Dutch. First, we studied the number and type of spelling errors, the quality of the texts produced, the use of words, and the handwriting, both in a précis writing task (writing a summary of an informative text) and in a dictation task (sentence writing). Our results showed medium to large effect sizes for spelling errors: d = .93 for morphosyntactic spelling errors, d = .55 for memory-related spelling errors, and a medium effect size for punctuation and capitalization errors, d = .40. Second, experts who were blind to the aims of the study were asked to judge the quality of the writing of both groups based on transcriptions that were free from spelling errors. The quality of the texts produced was judged lower for students with dyslexia than for the controls, d = .61 for text structure and d = .56 for agreeability, even though the number and types of words used by both groups were very much the same. There was no significant difference in the quality of the handwriting, d = .15. Given that remedial teaching has been shown to be effective for essay-writing skills, educational support along these lines may be helpful for students with dyslexia

The School of Business and Writer's Place Partnership at The College of New Jersey

Like many institutions, The College of New Jersey, a public college with an undergraduate student population of about 6000, is grappling with the role and quality of undergraduate writing. Moreover, we are doing so in the context of a recent curricular revision through which all courses were transformed from 3credits to 4-credits and departments in the liberal arts and professional schools have begun to develop writing intensive courses. One goal driving this curricular revision was to have students dive more deeply into the subjects they study by writing more and better. Through this curricular change, we wrestled with questions such as “how will changes in the curriculum affect what kind and how much writing students do?” and “what effect will curricular transformation have on the balance between content and writing?” A key concern for many faculty centered on not being sure how to teach writing and to respond to student papers. As our community focused attention on these matters, we discovered unexpected and fruitful opportunities for collaboration across program and disciplinary lines. One such collaboration between The School of Business and The Write Place began last year in response to faculty concerns about the quality of student papers.University Writing Cente

The Balancing Act: Creating New Academic Support in Writing While Honoring The Old

In 2009, our university launched a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Program in response to an accreditation core requirement to focus a universitywide initiative on student learning, often referred to as the Quality Enhancement Plan. The campus committee that envisioned and documented this plan, which fortifies students’ writing skills in their future professions and disciplines, requires all undergraduate students to complete five writing-intensive courses, including the two courses in the composition sequence and two program-required, content-area courses in their major prior to graduation.University Writing Cente

THE USE OF COHESIVE DEVICES IN RELATION TO THE QUALITY OF THE STUDENTS’ ARGUMENTATIVE WRITING

The ability to compose an argumentative text is important for ESL and EFL learners. In terms of the communicative nature of writing, cohesion is regarded as an essential textual component, not only to create organized text but also to the comprehensiveness of the text. Therefore, the use of cohesive devices is really important. Based on Halliday and Hasan Cohesion theory (1976)this study is intended to investigate the use of cohesive devices and also the relationship between the frequency of cohesive devices using and the quality of argumentative writing. An analysis of 30 students’ argumentative writing showed that the students were familiar with various cohesive devices and used them in their writing. Among the cohesive devices, reference had the largest percentage of the total number cohesive devices, followed by lexical devices and conjunction devices. Furthermore, it was found that there was no significant relationship between the number of cohesive devi ces used and the quality of writing. The findings of the study have some important implications for EFL writing teachers and learners

The Development of the WISE (Writing to Inspire Successful Education) Writing Mentoring Program: A University-School Collaboration

Abstract This paper describes the development of a service learning writing mentoring program designed to close the achievement gap in writing proficiency for economically disadvantaged seventh grade students. Compared to writing mentoring studies found in the published literature, this program has three distinguishing components. First, it focused on economically disadvantaged middle school students. Second, it provided writing mentoring through a university-school partnership in which college students provided the intervention in collaboration with a seventh-grade teacher. Third, the program used technology to facilitate the mentoring process. Over the course of an academic year, mentors created videos with feedback on 19 writing assignments. The writing mentoring program was associated with a four-fold increase in the percentage of students who were graded as ‘proficient’ on a state standardized writing exam. These results suggest that semi-virtual, intensive writing mentoring and individualized feedback from college students can close the achievement gap and improve the quality of middle level education provided to economically disadvantaged students

What Do Graduate Students Want From The Writing Center? Tutoring Practices To Support Dissertations and Thesis Writers

Graduate writers—who are experienced students and emerging experts in their fields—face a range of challenges in academic writing, including finding the confidence to write, integrating relevant literature, and interpreting data (Kamler and Thomson 1). Graduate programs require students to produce a large quantity of high-quality, varied writing, and without focused support, developing “these skills may be a function of chance rather than design” (Aitchison 907). Addressing this gap between preparation and expected performance, the Council of Graduate Schools Ph.D. Completion Project recommends writing support as a way to shorten doctoral degree completion time and improve retention. The project calls for writing assistance “through trained writing coaches or writing consultants,” ideally senior-level graduate students, and advises universities to create opportunities for students to “focus on the dissertation . . . receive feedback, and build peer support” (“Executive Summary” 4). Since a lack of help and peer interaction contributes to high attrition rates from doctoral programs, particularly among students in marginalized positions, the stakes of this discussion are high.University Writing Cente