Poor Writers Research Articles

“Are you Gonna Help us with Writing?” Empowering Writers though Dialogue Journaling

AbstractBefore ever entering a formal educational setting, children use writing to make themselves known. Yet by the time students reach the fourth grade, only a small minority of students demonstrate writing skills considered competent by national standards. By this time in their school career, many have begun to internalize that they are poor writers and have become apprehensive toward writing tasks and tests. Using an approach that applies the well‐established literacy practice of dialogue journaling, Leah, a teacher, facilitated an after‐school book club for fourth‐grade students who experienced writing apprehension. The outcomes of the book club were that students began to build confidence and develop more positive attitudes toward writing.

Emergent Neuroimaging Findings for Written Expression in Children: A Scoping Review.

Background: There is currently a dearth of research on the neural framework of writing tasks in children, as measured by neuroimaging techniques. Objective: This paper provides an overview of the current literature examining the neurological underpinnings of written expression in children. Design: Using a scoping review approach, with thorough searches of key databases, this paper presents the available literature comprising 13 different studies using both structural and functional neuroimaging techniques with the 0–18 English speaking population. Results: Studies largely presented small sample sizes, with most studies utilizing elementary or middle school-aged children. Emergent findings revealed a complex network of neural contributions to the writing process in children. There were associations between the left fusiform gyrus and orthographic coding (i.e., handwriting), and spelling and written composition measures were significantly correlated with activity in the left posterior cingulate, left precuneus, and right precuneus regions. Additionally, results revealed that good versus poor writers manifested differential brain activation patterns during many tasks associated with written expression, with good writers performing more efficiently than poor writers with respect to brain regions activated during a writing task across handwriting, spelling, and idea generation. Conclusions: The findings from this scoping review lay the foundation for future studies examining the interface between writing skills in children and underlying neural pathways that support the various components of the writing process. It will be important for future research to examine the neurological bases of the various components of written expression in children and adolescents.

The Use of Rhetorical Strategies in Argumentative Essays

The most challenging skill perceived by students when they learn the English language is the writing skill. This recent study would like to identify the rhetorical strategies used by good writers and poor writers. Two participants were selected, and written essays was the instrument employed for this study. Both participants were required to write an essay on ‘Should examinations be abolished?’ The essays written were analysed using a coding technique. The findings indicated that both writers utilised the three elements, Logos, Ethos and Pathos, differently. Both were considerate to the readers when they wrote the essays and presented their message, which was also heavily emphasised. However, they did not focus on their roles as writers. Based on the findings, it can be concluded that teachers need to help students familiarise themselves with rhetorical strategies. As for students, they should be aware of the rhetorical strategies to enhance their writing skills to write argumentative essays.

‘I think we ought not to acknowledge them [paupers] as that encourages them to write’: the administrative state, power and the Victorian pauper

ABSTRACT At the heart of this article stand three questions that we believe are crucial to an understanding of the character of the poor law and its role in the lives of the poor who had to navigate its rules. First, what was actually ‘new’ about the central administrative structures and processes required to make the New Poor Law function? Second, how did those processes change over time and, in particular, how far did the central authority itself engage with the poor directly? Third, did the processes and structures of the central authority afford a space in which the poor could learn to better navigate the New Poor Law and exercise their own agency? Using a sample of letters written directly to ‘the Centre’ by paupers in the English midlands, and the subsequent epistolary responses of the central authorities, we trace a situation in which the Centre was duty bound to respond to poor letter writers much as they did to everyone else. Rights to contest local welfare regimes remained strong in the post-1834 period, and the central authorities, through their responses, afforded a space of agency that came to be well known.

Remedial Writing Composition Module and Achievement of Grade 11 Senior High School Humanities and Social Sciences Students

The Remedial Writing Composition Module is one of the strategies for non-proficient writers and also enhancement strategy among developing writers and poor writers which encourages them to love writing. It was conducted among the Grade 11 Senior High School Students of STI College Tacurong during the School Year 2018-2019.The study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of the module, which was evaluated in terms of its content, relevance, acceptability, and instructional quality. The level of the writing achievement of the students was evaluated in terms or reading sentences writing, paragraphs writing, and narrative writing. The significant difference on the students writing achievement and the mean gain scores between the control group and experimental group in the pre-test and in the post-test were tested. Based on the results, the “Remedial Writing Composition Module” was excellent and passed the qualities expected by the target users, which composed of the reading and writing teachers and tutors. Based on the evaluation, the writing composition module met 91% and above quality standards. The experimental group who utilized the writing composition module got the highest mean compared to the control group, after they underwent an intensive intervention strategy. A significant improvement was revealed in the students’ writing achievement after utilizing the module, which contained various activities such as the sentences writing, paragraphs writing, and narratives writing. It is recommended that the “Remedial Writing Composition Module” should be adapted by STI College Tacurong and any other private and public schools and be integrated in their classroom program. Moreover, reading module should be utilized by the teachers during their class especially the reading and writing teachers during regular class or even remedial class.

Syntactic Priming: Improving Senior High School Learners' Writing Proficiency

Syntactic priming is a tendency for a speaker or writer to repeat of a recently produced or heard in a language structure by processing and sharing the same underlying syntactic structure which serves as the intervention for the students who were having difficulties in writing specifically on coordinating conjunctions. It would enhance the secondary students' writing proficiency in sentence construction to produce better-written outputs not only in educational context but also to the corporate world as well. This experimental research investigated the significant difference on the Grade 11 students Section Tulip before and after using syntactic priming as an intervention in writing. The researcher made use of structured test like pre-test and post-test to measure the effectiveness of syntactic priming in students' writing performances. Statistical techniques such as mean and t-test were also used. Analyzed data revealed that there was an increased on their scored mean from pre-test to post-test among thirty identified participants as poor writers. Furthermore, there was a significant difference between pre-test and post-test since the P-Value (0.000) was lesser than 0.5, the null hypothesis was rejected with 95% level of confidence based on the students' scores before and after taking the intervention which was not the same.

Writing Tasks to Elicit Language and Creativity: Describe Completed Drawings vs. First Draw, Then Describe

This study investigated a new writing task that utilizes drawing to elicit students’ language and original thinking. Two forms of pictures were designed and administered to 118 children. One form was conventional and consisted of completed pictures, requiring students to simply describe the pictures in writing. The other form, which was new, comprised incomplete pictures, requiring students to first draw and then describe them in writing. The descriptions were scored for originality (to represent creative thinking) and vocabulary and text length (to reflect linguistic domains). The originality scores were higher for students who were given the unfinished pictures regardless of their writing proficiency. Vocabulary diversity and text length fluency depended on the level of writing proficiency: for poor writers, these abilities were facilitated when they were given completed pictures, while for good writers, the form variation made no difference. This study highlights that to stimulate original thinking, an unfinished picture form is useful because it affords students opportunities to express unique ideas regardless of poor or good writers.

A repetição em corpora históricos como índice de inabilidade em escrita

Neste trabalho, o objetivo é discutir sobre a repetição de vocábulos na escrita por mãos inábeis, a partir de um corpus constituído por cartas pessoais de sertanejos baianos (1906-2000), redatores em fase inicial de aquisição da escrita, cuja edição está disponibilizada em Santiago (2011; 2012). A repetição é uma das dimensões da inabilidade em escrita alfabética proposta por Barbosa (2017), para a caracterização de corpora históricos. Nas cartas dos sertanejos, a presença dessa dimensão é mais um indício de que são textos espontâneos, sem planejamento e revisão, coincidindo, na escrita dos mais inábeis, com outras características, como os aspectos relacionados à escriptualidade (desconhecimento de convenções do padrão gráfico); a presença de uma escrita fonética e a pouca habilidade no plano motor, o que pode indicar um maior distanciamento aos modelos da escrita convencional. Em textos desse tipo, os redatores transferem para o registro escrito mecanismos de coesão e coerência comuns à oralidade, e os segmentos repetidos podem estar expressando funções semelhantes às da gramática da língua oral, como demonstram estudos como o de Dutra (2003), em dados de redações infantis, e o de Marcuschi (1996), com dados orais. Para melhor compreender algumas motivações que originaram as repetições pelos redatores das cartas, os exemplos são distribuídos de acordo com as possíveis funções que estejam manifestando, à luz das funções básicas já identificadas para textos orais: no plano textual, as relações de coesividade, e, no plano discursivo, as relações de compreensão, continuidade tópica, argumentatividade e interatividade.

Interactional Metadiscourse Markers in Introduction Section of Dissertation: Differences Across English Proficiency Level

Following the concept of Interpersonal model of Metadiscourse markers proposed by Hayland and Tse (2004) then developed by Hayland (2005), this content analysis aims to find the use of interactional metadiscourse markers in the introduction sections of two dissertations written by good and poor writers of doctorate students State University of Surabaya. The interactional metadiscourse markers were categorized into Booster, Hedges, Attitude Markers, Engagement Markers, and Self Mention.The good writer used more in number and variations of interactional metadiscourse markers than those of the poor writer used. For the most frequent interactional metadiscourse markers,the good writer used Engagement Marker, while the poor writer used the Self Mention as the most frequent one. It can be concluded that the use of interactional metadiscourse markers can be used as indicators of a good writer. So, it is suggested for the English teacher/lecturer to teach explicitly the use of interactional metadiscourse markers especially when the students write in academic writing.

Handwriting Movement Sonification: Why and How?

Sonifying handwriting, i.e., transforming some characteristics of handwriting movement into sounds, aims to improve handwriting perception, evaluation, and control. The educative or clinical interest is to make hidden variables of handwriting, which are not accessible through a visual inspection of the trace, perceptible and useful for novice or poor writers. From a theoretical point of view, handwriting sonification might be a powerful tool for assessing multisensory integration in motor control and learning. In a brief introduction, the main studies on handwriting sonification are reported and the interest of handwriting movement sonification is justified. Then, the project of sonification is described, with a specific focus on select variables of handwriting movement and associated sounds. The experimental validations of this sonification strategy are presented, followed by a conclusion and a few theoretical perspectives.

An Analysis of the Pragmatic Implicatures of Selected Advert Billboards around Jos Metropolis in Terms of Grice (1975) Maxims of Cooperative Principle

The essence of utterance in discourse, whether spoken or written is that it should elicit some response from the listener (addressee). At times we wonder why people do not behave in conformity with the message intended by the speaker or writer. Could it be due to the non-adherence of the communication to certain pragmatic, syntactic and semantic rules among other things? It is on this basis that this paper focuses on the analysis of pragmatic implicatures observed on selected advert billboards around Jos metropolis in Plateau State, Nigeria. It is primarily aimed at ascertaining the extent of adherence or otherwise of these advert billboards to Grice (1975) Maxims of Cooperative Principle (CP). The study reveals that the strength of the Cooperative Principle lies in the distinction between the Gricean Maxims. In trying to observe a Maxim they violate another. But this does not make the writers poor writers since at times they violate certain maxims in order to arouse the interest of the public to that which is advertised. The paper concludes that CP is important to our understanding of language use in the society because it enables us to know why communication: spoken or written quite often fails and how it can be more successful. Therefore, this paper suggests that advert billboards writers must always note that informativeness is what the public desires.

Do Good Writers Use More Ellipses in Writing?

Ellipsis has been analyzed, if at all, as a type of cohesion markers by earlier studies. The underestimation of its importance and the lack of attention it has received has resulted in only few empirical studies analyzing the ellipsis as a primary object of inquiry. At the same time, there are conflicting findings on whether the relationship between ellipsis use and discourse quality is substantially positive or insignificant. Aware of these gaps, this study focuses on ellipsis and its subtypes to examine whether ellipses enhance the quality of writing. The study participants were 315 Korean high school students who wrote stories in English. Their writing samples were analyzed for ellipsis use and writing quality. The findings revealed that ellipsis occurrences in writing had a substantial relationship with the overall writing quality. This result was substantiated by a separate examination of the good vs. poor writer groups: Good writers used a significantly greater number of ellipses than did poor writers. Structural and nominal ellipses were the most prominent types of ellipses while clausal and verbal ellipsis occurred rarely. This pattern was held true for both good and poor writer groups. The current study promotes the status of ellipsis as a definitely contributing factor to good writing.

STRATEGIES IN DEVELOPING ENGLISH AND INDONESIAN ACADEMIC WRITING BY EFL STUDENTS

This study was aimed at seeing the writing strategies used by EFL Undergraduate students at Muhammadiyah University of Malang. This study used content analysis as the design, focusing on the quality of rhetoric and strategies in developing English academic essays written in Bahasa Indonesia and in English Language. The study assigned 10 students as the subject of the study. Data of this study included English and Indonesian essays, answers of questionnaires and responses of interview given to the 10 students. The study revealed that good writers wrote linear essays in Bahasa Indonesia and in English language. In writing practices and strategies, poor writers did not write draft of the essays, did not revise, and did not edit the essays, either. Good writers, on the contrary did make drafting, revising, and editing before final copy of an essay was achieved. In addition, reading references were also influential for the good writers to improve writing style and quality of the content of the essays, but not for the poor ones.

Teaching the Writing of English as Foreign Language: An Indonesian Context

This research, conducted from August to November 2014, aimed at describing how English as a foreign language (EFL) writing is taught and learned in an Indonesian context, that is, three junior schools in the City of Kupang, East Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia. The study used instruments such as interviews, observations, and students’ English writings. The data were analyzed descriptively using theories of Bogdan and Biklen (2007), Odell (1977), and Ivanic (1995). The results showed that the teachers have traditionally done the teaching of EFL writing in the schools, that is, the teaching of writing aims at improving students’ speaking, reading, listening, vocabulary and grammar, but not writing itself. Teachers’ treatments of both good and poor student writers were, in general, the same. The students’ writings were generally poor although there were some who could write well. The teachers, however, determined to improve their EFL teaching practices, namely, moving from traditional ways to contemporary practices of EFL writing teaching and learning whose aim is to improve students’ writing itself and along their processes of writing, their teachers act as learning facilitators right from topic choice to writing to rewriting to publishing. Keywords: Teaching, learning, writing, and EFL writing

Learning to write and get school success: A quasi-experimental study among 9th formers

1 IntroductionWhat is now proved was once, only imagin'd William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and - Proverbs of Hell (Erdman 1998:36)Portuguese is the 6th most spoken language in the world (Ethnologue, 20141) and it is one of the official languages in the European Union2. As such there is a deep concern by Portuguese authorities to assess language skills in the mother tongue so as to promote individuals' language fluency in a plurilingual and multicultural context. The results of the 2001 International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), conducted every five years since 2001, has shown poor results Portuguese students have in national assessment. Poor writing skills were further flashed out in the Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA), as reported in the study by OECD (2004, 2007). On a national level school achievement and literacy skills have been at the core in the agenda in the educational policy, particularly at the time the case study addressed in this paper was designed, i.e., 2007-2008. Seventh and eighth formers have been singled out in several studies for their poor writing skills. National assessment of educational progress implemented every year since 2000 has indicated that Portuguese fourth graders have difficulty with bridging the gap between literal meaning and referential meaning, with making inferences, interpreting texts and writing cohesive and coherent texts (Ministerio da Educacao 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004). Later on, the study undertaken in 1700 Portuguese schools, by the Secretary of Education (GAVE/IAVE 2010, 2012), also indicated that students from the 8th to the 12th forms have shown poor lexical and syntactic competence as well as poor writing skills, particularly concerning writing a coherent and cohesive text3 (2012). Students' poor writing skills are correlated with low achievement and, in many cases, with high early school dropout rate4 along with poor basic qualifications (CNE - Conselho Nacional de Educacao 2011).In the 1991 Reading Literacy Study, conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, Portuguese students were reported to have performed below the international average in writing (Elley 1992). PIRLS 2001, 2006 might have provided further reliable longitudinal data necessary to assess students' progress and to identify areas of strength and weaknesses. However, these studies did not cover the Portuguese context in 2001, 2006. The few indicators available then only considered the fourth form. PISA results (2006) drawing on fifteen year-old informants' written output suggest that Portuguese students have specific difficulties with interpreting and writing cohesive and coherent texts. For example, PISA 2003 and PISA 2006 results show that most students are able to retrieve explicit information and to develop textbased interpretations, but have difficulties with relating textual information to extratextual data, notably, background information (and schemata at large), with an impact on poor writing skills (OECD, 2004, 2007). In fact, this case study intends to focus on the group of students not addressed in the previous national/international reports, but having been broadly assessed as poor writers. For this purpose, and in order to narrow down the scope of analysis for reliability issues, the current paper covers the 9th formers having been identified in 2006-2007 by a group of teachers of Portuguese as mother tongue under the auspices of the Regional Board of Education in Madeira (Portugal) in 2006. At the core of stands out the research question: how can Portuguese students, particularly, 9th formers, improve their writing skills and school achievement and thus prevent school failure?2 Literature ReviewDumber than We Thoughti (1993) and Adding-Up the Under-Skilled5 (1993) raised public awareness in many countries two decades ago6. According to the US Department of Education, it is not enough to learn the basic R's ( i. …

Content and construct validity of Here's How I Write (HHIW): A Child's Self-Assessment and Goal Setting Tool.

We examined content and construct validity of Here's How I Write: A Child's Self-Assessment and Goal Setting Tool, to assess children's perception of their handwriting and set child-directed goals. In Study 1, a content validity study, 6 occupational therapists and 2 educators assessed the need for this type of measure and examined the proposed items. Thirty-four occupational therapists and educators then completed an online survey examining the items. Study 2, a construct validity study, compared the self-ratings of 20 children with poor handwriting and 20 children with good handwriting in Grades 2-5 with their teachers' ratings. Results supported test content and indicated freedom from culture and gender bias. The assessment discriminated between good and poor writers. The relationship between teacher and student ratings was significant, although teachers of poor writers rated the children lower than the children rated themselves. These studies provide support for the tool's validity.

The Effect of Writing Proficiency onWriting Planning Strategy Use: A Case Study of Saudi Learners of English

This study investigated English language writing planning strategies (WPSs) of Saudi Arabian third-year male university students and the effect of writing proficiency on the frequency of use of these strategies. The participants were 197 Saudi learners of English as a Foreign Language attending their third year of university in Saudi Arabia. The data used in this study were obtained using a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The collected data were computed and analysed via descriptive statistics, the t test, and one-way repeated measure ANOVA. The participants reported applying most of the strategies in the questionnaire at a level higher than the midpoint of the scale. They reported applying only a few of those strategies (i.e. less than three) but all strategies were reported to be used by at least one of the subjects. Concerning English writing proficiency, a significant difference between good and poor writers was found in the frequency of overall use of WPSs (z = -2.527, P = .011). The results showed that good writers claim to use WPSs more frequently than do poor writers.

Learning new movement patterns: A study on good and poor writers comparing learning conditions emphasizing spatial, timing or abstract characteristics

In the earliest stages of motor-skill learning cognitive, visuo-spatial and dynamic processes play an important role. Which of these should be addressed first when children need to learn a new complex movement sequence? This study compares three learning methods in a within-subject design by having 18 good and 18 poor 8-year-old writers master unfamiliar, letter-like patterns by (1) tracing a trajectory on a screen, (2) tracking a moving target (pursuit), and (3) performing the pattern using written explicit instructions. Following each 10-trial learning phase, the children completed a short test phase. Besides errors and kinematic data, Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) was used to calculate the deviation for each pattern from the ideal shape (DTW-distance). As predicted, the number of errors and DTW-distance were very low during the learning phase of the tracing and pursuit conditions and higher in the explicit condition. Conversely, in the test phase, tracing yielded the highest DTW-distance and the explicit condition the lowest DTW-distance and error percentages. The results were remarkably similar for the good and poor writers. The poor learning results of the tracing condition and the good results of the explicit condition have important implications for the teaching of handwriting and remedial therapy.

"What you think, feel, and experience shape your writing:" Cognitive, affective, and contextual processes in ESESL writing

The present study positions itself within the research tradition based on the cognitive process and focuses the research lens on young writers, investigating the composing processes of six students at three proficiency levels in their final year in high school. Cognitive-based previous research is generally limited to describing how cognitive strategies interact during writing and how these strategies spell the difference between good and poor writers. There is a need to look at the writing context and varying experiences among writers, which help account for the differences in the cognitive processes among writers and their sources of difficulty. Hence, the present study seeks to describe (1) how secondary graduating students in a product-oriented writing context approach the writing task; and (2) how they are different or similar in terms of cognitive strategies, metacognitve models, emotions while writing, and sources of difficulty. The study underscores that writing should be viewed as multiprocesses including cognitive and emotional processes analyzed within the classroom context and experiences of writers. The findings lead to tentative conclusions and suggest implications for pedagogy and research.

Differences between good and poor child writers on fMRI contrasts for writing newly taught and highly practiced letter forms.

During fMRI imaging, 12 good and 8 poor writers aged 11 wrote a newly taught pseudoletter and a highly practiced letter. Both letters were formed from the same components, but the pseudoletter had a novel configuration not corresponding to a written English letter form. On the first fMRI contrast between the newly taught pseudoletter and highly practiced letter, based on a group map, good and poor writers significantly activated many common regions; but the poor writers showed spatially more extensive brain activation than did the good writers. The additional regions of significant activation may reflect inefficiency in learning a new letter form. For the second contrast between the highly practiced and newly taught letters, individual brain activation analyses, based on exact clusters, showed that good and poor writers differed significantly in activation only in left fusiform. This individual fusiform activation correlated significantly with behavioral measures of automatic letter writing and expressive orthographic coding. Multiple regression in which both individual fusiform activation and individual orthographic coding were entered explained significant variance in written composition. Results are discussed in reference to the role of the orthographic loop, from internal letter form to external letter writing by hand, in writing letters and composing. The overall results are consistent with prior brain and behavioral studies of writing.