The preparation of student teachers to be effective writing requires attention both their skills and personal confidence. When have confidence in themselves as writers strong writer identities, they are likely better placed develop identities own students. It is suggested secure identity contribute high self-efficacy. However, studies suggest often lack writers. Improving the quality school stu...

In the pursuit of a remedy for the poor spelling of dyslexic writers, a software system has been developed which features centrally a user model of the writer’s spelling error patterns. Dyslexic writers are poorly catered for by most spelling programs because of their diverse errors. In this system, Babel, a user model directs the search towards likely corrections considering the writer’s commo...

Obstruction-free concurrent algorithms differ from those with stronger nonblocking conditions in that they separate progress from correctness. While it must always maintain data invariants, an obstructionfree algorithm need only guarantee progress in the absence of contention. The programmer can (and indeed must) address progress as an out-of-band, orthogonal concern. In this work we consider t...

The “ten-year rule” suggests that it takes about 10 years of preparation to reach “expert” status. How long does it take, however, for someone to reach a level of creative greatness? Through an analysis of 215 contemporary fiction writers, we found that these writers took an average of 10.6 years between their first publication and their best publication, although there was a high degree of var...

This article is concerned with the computational treatment of Appraisal, a Systemic Functional Linguistic theory of the types of language employed to communicate opinion in English. The theory considers aspects such as Attitude (how writers communicate their point of view), Engagement (how writers align themselves with respect to the opinions of others) and Graduation (how writers amplify or di...

The basis of the study reported in this article sprang from the assumption that incorporating the use of web search engines such as Google or Yahoo into English as a second language (ESL) writing may be useful for learners in identifying grammatical errors in their texts. The study has measured the effectiveness on reducing the number of grammatical errors by way of a simple method which divide...