Don't Get It Right, Just Get It Written

Writing is an essential skill for students, as it helps them meet persistently changing social and academic demands. They are often evaluated based on written assignments, reports, term papers, and essays. For second and foreign language learners, mastering writing is a very challenging task. Therefore, many of them find it the most difficult of the four skills. To encourage students to develop this crucial skill and consolidate their learning, providing them with clear feedback is essential. Most ESL and EFL teachers perceive feedback as paramount for students' improvement in this vital skill. However, providing effective feedback is a complex process, as many factors and issues have to be considered. This chapter deals with feedback from different angles. The aim is to demonstrate to teachers the most effective ways and alternatives of giving feedback with the aim of guiding them to choose what works best for their students under various circumstances.

To Whom Do We Write?

Writing is a complex process and used of course for an incalculable range of purposes and audiences. Teaching students to write in their mother tongue is hard, but teaching them to do this in a second or foreign language is even harder. This chapter focuses on the question of audience in teaching and learning writing, arguing that it is vital for students to be aware of an audience that eventually determines what, why, and how they will write. It seeks to provide a thorough understanding of Omani EFL students' conception of audience and their current level of audience awareness and also to explore the relationship between audience awareness and students' performance in composition classes and tests.

Pathways towards Success for Novice Academic Writers in a CLIL Setting

Courses taught in English are emerging in Japanese universities. From an English-education perspective, this raises the question of how best to prepare new undergraduates at various proficiency levels to move onto such courses. The authors investigate a class based on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) principles, with a focus on academic listening and writing tasks. Research (Dalton-Puffer, 2007) suggests that a CLIL approach may not be effective in developing the skill of writing. However, the results show that scaffolding of writing literacy assisted students towards developing autonomous academic skills. Specifically, students were encouraged to access materials and advice across the campus, with no restriction on L1 use. Consequently, in addition to linguistic development, the authors observed that the class became increasingly useful as a resource for future content classes themselves. This helped to give the class extra validity and support all students' motivation level.

Writing Assessment

This chapter reports on the findings of a contextual mixed-method study investigating the factors that influence how teachers at the Language Center (LC) of Sultan Qaboos University, Oman (SQU), assess students' academic writing and the features on which they focus. Results from the quantitative data analysis indicate that the influence of raters' first language (L1) is statistically significant, while the impact of their experience of teaching a particular course is effectively insignificant. Findings from the qualitative data analysis, however, reveal other influential factors, notably teaching experience in general terms, learning experience, educational background, culture, and personality. As for the features teachers focus on while assessing writing, both quantitative and qualitative data analyses show different patterns for the L1 groups involved. Findings from this study could be useful for informing decision makers on the various ways teachers from different L1 and experiential backgrounds assess writing and the constructs they follow.

Omani Undergraduate Students' Writing Errors

This chapter analyses learners' writing errors. It focuses on error types and sources because these will reveal learners' current linguistic competence and what they need now for improvement. Data was collected mainly from the written work of English Department students at Al Buraimi University College. Results show that their errors are both interlingual and intralingual and that there is a positive relationship between these and learning strategies. Not only does the learners' previous language-learning experience influence the process of second language acquisition; target language learning experience does so as well.

Teaching and Learning to Write

Teaching writing is one of the most challenging tasks an EFL teacher has to face, and students find writing a difficult skill to develop. This chapter, however, focuses on Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) as a successful tool for tackling this problem. It defines TBLT and examines its importance for enhancing the writing skills of the EFL students, giving examples of tasks that have been successfully tried out in the classroom. The chapter also examines the use of various strategies for increasing EFL learners' involvement in reading-to-writing activities.

Awareness of Plagiarism

Evaluating students by giving them assignments and projects is essential for their learning. Yet the validity of this assessment can be threatened by the serious problem of plagiarism. Researchers have found that copying another's work is very common in schools (Decoo, 2002) and is caused by several factors. Curiously, most prominent among these is lack of awareness of what plagiarism is (Pritchett, 2010). Thus, this chapter tries to measure this awareness among English students in a Foundation Program at Oman's Sultan Qaboos University and determine how their teachers deal with it. The sample included 40 English Foundation students (20 males and 20 females) and 20 instructors (10 males and 10 females). A questionnaire revealed that these students lacked awareness of plagiarism because its meaning had not been explained at school. Participants thus suggested receiving more instruction about proper citation and quotation as one solution to the problem. Instructors dealt with plagiarism in different ways, with such penalties as deducting marks the most common. Moreover, a negative relationship was found between students' academic proficiency and their willingness to plagiarize. To help these Foundation students to avoid facing difficulties in higher education, the study suggested teaching them, while still in school, how to cite, quote, and use references without plagiarizing.

The Role of Online Tools in Promoting EFL Writing

Taking into account the paradigm shift we are witnessing because of the technological revolution, the call for drastic changes in writing instruction has grown louder and stronger in recent years. In this chapter, the potential for incorporating technology into EFL writing instruction is explored. It offers a detailed account of how to incorporate online synchronous and asynchronous communication into writing instruction and mentions the precedence of asynchronous tools in this respect. It then follows a description of possible online activities claimed to promote EFL writing proficiency as well as pitfalls that might be encountered. Clear guidelines are provided for online written communication, and emphasis is on the resulting drastic change in the teacher's role. The chapter ends by explaining how to integrate online asynchronous communication and the process writing approach to enhance EFL written production.

Investigating Scaffolding Writing Instruction

Throughout the Arabian Gulf and beyond, higher education students face the challenge of learning to write academic essays in English though possessing limited ability in the language. Scaffolding writing techniques provide support for them as they learn about essay structure while working within their Zone of Proximal Development (i.e. in the metaphorical space between what learners can accomplish unassisted and what they cannot do on their own). This chapter discusses the results of classroom research on how scaffolding writing instruction in English affected tertiary student writing outcomes in the Sultanate of Oman. Instructional techniques used in the study, which include aspects of the Hammond and Gibbons (2005) macro and micro ESL scaffolding model, as well as modeling and collaborative writing, are discussed in detail. The results of the study found that using scaffolding writing techniques revived students' forgotten knowledge of essay structure during approximately ten hours of instruction. In addition, data showed that students favored this instructional strategy.

A Reflective Overview of a Process Approach to Writing in Generation 1.5 ESL Classrooms

Today, process writing is an integral part of writing classes. Writing teachers provide students with plenty of opportunities to draft and revise their essays. This chapter aims to explore a process approach to writing in ESL classrooms by providing a brief literature review and insights regarding the implementation of process writing at two levels of pre-college ESL classes in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) program at a four year-college. This chapter is unusual as the student body discussed in it is made up predominantly of generation 1.5 students, a unique sub-group among ESL populations in the U.S. The authors share various documents that facilitate the revision process for students. They also draw on open-ended survey results regarding students' perceptions of the method described. Overall, the chapter represents an important contribution to the field, as the authors provide a reflective look at the application of process writing in their classrooms.