This article questions how narrative writing is assessed, seeking to understand what we test, what we value, and why. It uses a single anomalous case that arose in the course of my recent PhD thesis to highlight the issues, asking if sufficient attention is being given to the value of emotional content in a piece of writing in comparison to its…

This study utilizes a pre-test/post-test assessment to investigate the instructional efficacy of a genre-based approach to teaching summary writing. Forty-one EFL university students in Taiwan were asked before and after the instruction to summarize a simplified version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a maximum of 500 words. All the students'…

Feedback in writing has in recent years attracted the attention of an increasing number of writing researchers. While much feedback research focuses on the act of feedback per se, little attention has been paid to the issue of teacher readiness to implement change in feedback. Using data gathered from Hong Kong secondary teachers attending a…

Implementing process pedagogy in an L2 writing classroom has its own limits for students with low English proficiency. Although L1 writers commonly benefit from writing multiple drafts, most of the low English level Korean college students in my English composition class did not benefit from the revisions. This article introduces an innovative…

Both research and practice have shown that while some comments on L2 writing lead to substantive revision, others go unattended, failing to achieve their anticipated instructional effect. It is therefore crucial to determine how learners perceive different commentary types, so that teachers can enhance the efficacy of their feedback. The present…

This article shows how a genre approach has been used in an EFL high school writing course to teach the university application letter genre to students preparing for post-secondary studies. The authors discuss specific classroom materials to illustrate how a genre-based approach can be employed, not simply to teach static textual patterns but to…

This study argues that L2 writing pedagogy needs to give more recognition to the impact emerging from new technological tools and online resources. While shifts in approaches from product to process to genre are well documented in the literature, little research has appreciated the collective influence generated by advances in technology. It is…

While research on portfolio assessment (PA) has focused largely on the summative aspects of writing assessment, not much has been done to find out its formative potential. Drawing upon student questionnaires and student and teacher interview data, this paper aims to explore the formative functions of PA and, specifically, how the formative…

Large corpora such as the British National Corpus and the COBUILD Corpus and Collocations Sampler are now accessible, free of charge, online and can be usefully incorporated into a process writing approach to help develop students' writing skills. This article aims to familiarize readers with these resources and to show how they can be usefully…

When teachers hear the word "cohesion", they usually think of grammatical cohesion--an aspect of cohesion reasonably well covered in student books and teacher materials. However, occupying an area that straddles both lexis "proper" and cohesion lies "lexical cohesion". In what follows, it is argued that the teaching and learning of certain aspects…

This article critically reviews the usefulness of grammar correction in second language writing instruction through the eyes of five second-language writers. It first examines the validity of four teaching principles that appear to influence how writing instructors approach error correction in classrooms and concludes with discussions as to why…

Process-oriented writing instruction stresses the value of between-draft revision. Yet current literature and traditional pedagogy have provided little guidance for motivating student writers to look beyond surface errors to develop and to refine their communicative intentions. Based on the assumption that this deep-level revision is most…

This article describes a genre-based literacy pedagogy which can be used with English language learners. The pedagogy discussed involves a combination of two explicit teaching methodologies, a genre-based and activity-based pedagogical approach. The pedagogy was introduced in an English Club at a local Hong Kong school, as part of a collaborative…

This paper investigates a particular aspect of teacher commentary on EFL students' writing and examines the influence on their revisions. Three types of handwritten commentary were used between drafts: statements, imperatives, and questions. The resulting 115 changes were analyzed based on the degree to which the students utilized each teacher's…

The article reports on a project conducted with a group of MA-ELT students during their teaching practicum. Many student-teachers, like many teachers in general, rarely see and hear themselves or experience the lessons they conduct from the other side of the fence. When teachers themselves are asked to do the things they normally assign to their…