These are two of the thoughts that ran through my mind when my graduate studies advisor suggested I try “writingto-learn” activities in my classes. Like many high school science teachers, I often thought that devoting class time to writing would take away from valuable time that could be spent doing “science learning” activities. I also felt that my training as a science teacher had not fully p...

The purpose of this research was to analyze EFL writing tasks in the most popular ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) exam preparation courses in Iran: IELTS, TOEFL, FCE and CAE. Having collected the criteria of writing task appropriateness in light of the process-oriented approach to writing instruction, 114 learner participants were asked to rate EFL writing tasks based on a checkl...

Students in grades 5 to 9 (ages 10 to 14; 6 girls, 27 boys) who had persisting specific learning disabilities in transcription (handwriting and spelling) completed three kinds of composition tasks requiring translation (thought to written language) on iPads using alternating transcription modes (stylus or keyboard) across every three lessons: personal narratives (6 lessons) and written summarie...

Writing research has typically focussed on the text production elements of writing. Many everyday writing tasks, however, cannot be characterised simply in terms of text production since they often involve the use of source materials to support the composition process. As such, these tasks are better thought of as hybrid tasks. Such hybrid tasks have been given relatively little attention in th...

With the availability of Web 2.0 technologies, blogs have become useful and attractive tools for teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in their writing classes. Learners do not need to understand HTML in order to construct blogs, and the appearance and content can be facilitated via the use of photos, music, and video files (Vurdien, 2013). To provide an authentic and motivating writi...

The practice of ‘writing to learn’ has been propounded as fast-tracking the dynamic process of noticing problems in L2 writing. However, a marked melioration in learners’ attempted output requires a form of corrective feedback, among which modeling has proven to bear vigorous input enhancement effects. The present study attempted to inspect what EFL learners notice throughout their own output a...