The percentage of people who produce a neat and clear handwriting is declining sharply. The traditional approach for handwriting teaching is to have a dedicated teacher for long hours of handwriting practice. Unfortunately, this is not feasible in many cases. In this paper we introduce an automated tool for teaching Arabic handwriting using tablet PCs and on-line handwriting recognition techniq...

As an important and a challenging source-based writing task, synthesizing offers rich opportunities to explore the connections between reading and writing. In this article, we report findings from a qualitative study of two Chinese students’ learning experiences with academic synthesis writing in a university ESL composition course. Specifically, we discuss how the two students’ understanding o...

In earlier issues, the Journal of Basic Writing has carried an exchange about adult socio-cognitive development and college students' writing. To date, this colloquy has included Myra Kogen's "The Conventions of Expository Writing," my (Hays) reply to that article, and Joseph and Nancy Martinez's response to both papers. Whether or not such dialogue changes any minds, it forces us to question, ...

A one-size-fits-all curriculum cannot address the issues faced by rural multigrade teachers and learners. In South Africa, despite government efforts to relieve adversity, poverty in rural areas is still rife and poor education still fails to lift people out of it (Joubert 2010). Equality is essential in ensuring that all South African children have access to quality education where they can le...

This case study describes how faculty members at Grinnell College, a small, highly selective undergraduate liberal arts college, create and maintain what in many ways is an ideal Writing Across the Curriculum program. Curricular elements of this program have been in place for more than twenty years: the tutorial, where Grinnell students focus on writing intensively in a one-semester course taug...

this study explored the nature of transfer among bilingual vs. trilinguals with varying levels of competence in english and their previous languages. the hypotheses were tested in writing tasks designed for 75 high (n= 35) vs. intermediate (n=40) proficient efl learners with turkish, persian, english and persian, english linguistic backgrounds. qualitative data were also collected through some ...

This paper looks at the principles and practices of teaching writing in the Writing Centre at the University of Cape Town (UCT). It outlines some of the context of higher education in South Africa and how writing centres need to contribute to both access and redress of past inequities. In order to critically engage with writing, the UCT Writing Centre takes an “academic literacies” approach, wh...

Abstract In Iran, most English teachers’ method of teaching writing is merely to have students do some writing exercises or simply to give them writing tests without any instruction, but writing is not an easy task for students, and teachers should be able to do more to facilitate their students’ writing. One of the ways to aid writing is dynamic assessment via graduated prompt. The graduated p...