Learning the Disciplines Through Linguistic Feedback: Contribution to the Development of a Discipline-Specific, Formative Evaluation of Students’ Assignments

Students write to learn. Besides, enculturation to the disciplinary discourse happens during writing. Feedback on the assignments from the students scaffolds students’ writing development and learning paths. However, knowledge about the relationship between language, including argumentation in the discipline, on one hand, and the content of the discipline, on the other, is needed. This article is based on a socio-cultural approach to writing in the disciplines, and theory on feedback, and focuses on the relationship between the meso-level of texts (sentences, clauses, word choice) and the content of the discipline. We discuss how insight into the meso-level of texts may be used to improve and to develop feedback and formative evaluation. Cases from an intervention project in a Danish upper secondary school are included, and indicate that teachers and students assign a lower priority to feedback on the meso-level. This article claims that providing feedback on the meso-level strengthens writing development and students’ learning processes. To illustrate how this may be accomplished two texts are analyzed: one from a history class and one from a biology class.

Co-Occurrence of Reading and Writing Difficulties: The Application of the Interactive Dynamic Literacy Model

This article presents the application of the interactive dynamic literacy (IDL) model (Kim, 2020a) toward understanding difficulties in learning to read and write. According to the IDL model, reading and writing are part of communicative acts that draw on largely shared processes and skills as well as unique processes and skills. As such, reading and writing are dissociable but interdependent systems that have hierarchical, interactive, and dynamic relations. These key tenets of the IDL model are applied to the disruption of reading and writing development to explain co-occurrence of reading–writing difficulties using a single framework. The following hypotheses are presented: (a) co-occurrence between word reading and spelling and handwriting difficulties; (b) co-occurrence of dyslexia with written composition difficulties; (c) co-occurrence between reading comprehension and written composition difficulties; (d) co-occurrence of language difficulties with reading difficulties and writing difficulties; (e) co-occurrence of reading, writing, and language difficulties with weak domain-general skills or executive functions such as working memory and attentional control (including attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD]); and (f) multiple pathways for reading and writing difficulties. Implications are discussed.

COMPUTING NUMERICAL IMAGES OF STUDENT WRITING

With the rapid increase in the number of available digital texts in schools, new methodological approaches to studying writing development in education are now emerging. However, with new methodological approaches follow new epistemological challenges. In this article, I examine some of these challenges and discuss how they affect the role of computational linguistics within the field of educational writing research. The article is structured around three main sections. First, I position computational linguistics within the wider field of educational writing research with particular focus on L1 writing and K12 education. Second, I discuss to what extent methods from computational linguistics can provide us with new insights into different aspects of educational writing. Third, I discuss the potential of the concept of affordance to bridge between technology-centered and human-centered methodological approaches, and I relate this idea to recent theoretical developments in the digital humanities. Based on this discussion, I conclude the article with suggestions for possible directions in future writing research.

L2 writing development through two types of writing task repetition

This study investigated whether any remarkable effects emerge in terms of overall complexity, complexity by subordination, accuracy, and fluency in two types of writing task repetition during a single academic semester (16 weeks). The Cognition Hypothesis states that tasks involving different cognitive demands will lead to different L2 output. Thus, this study explored whether any significant differences existed between two task types: descriptive and argumentative essays. The results revealed different patterns in the two types of writing tasks. For the descriptive essays, despite the improvements in overall complexity, complexity by subordination, and fluency with a large effect size, no significant findings were confirmed for accuracy. In contrast, in the argumentative essays, the learners improved all the linguistic aspects, but with a medium effect size. This study also unraveled developmental trajectories to demonstrate how different variables interacted in the two different types of writing tasks throughout the measurement period.