This paper examines whether use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and non-standard informal written language therein harms youths' literacy skills.An experiment was conducted with 500 Dutch youths of different educational levels and age groups to assess if social media use affects their school writings.It was measured if chatting via WhatsApp directly impacts youths' performance on a narrative writing task, in terms of writing quality and spelling, or their ability to detect and correct deviations from the standard language in a grammaticality judgement task.WhatsApp use had a direct effect on the story writing task, but only on participants' spelling: adolescents who were primed with WhatsApp immediately beforehand produced significantly fewer misspellings in their narratives.The present study thus gives no cause for concern about negative transfer from social media to school writing: if anything, CMC use may provide youths with greater orthographic awareness and positively affect their spelling performance.

Teaching the craft of written science communication is an arduous task that requires familiarity with disciplinary writing conventions. With the burgeoning of technological advancements, practitioners preparing novice research writers can begin to augment teaching and learning with activities in digital writing environments attuned to the conventions of scientific writing in the disciplines. The Research Writing Tutor (RWT) is one such technology. Grounded in an integrative theoretical framework, it was designed to help students acquire knowledge about the research article genre and develop research writing competence. One of its modules was designed to facilitate revision by providing different forms of automated feedback and scaffolding that are genre-based and discipline-specific. This study explores whether and how the features of the RWT may impact revision while using this module of the tool. Drawing from cognitive writing modeling, this study investigates the behaviors of a multidisciplinary group of 11 graduate-student writers by exploring how they interacted with the RWT's features and how this interaction may create conditions for enhanced revision processes and text modifications. Findings demonstrate promising potential for the use of this automated feedback tool in fostering writers' metacognitive processing during revision. This research adds to theory on cognitive writing models by acknowledging the evolving role of digital environments in writing practices and offering insights into future development of automated tools for genre-based writing instruction.

The interest in computer-assisted interventions to promote literacy has increased over the years. In this study, we developed the Portuguese version of the GraphoGame Fluent and tested its effects on reading, spelling, and phonological awareness. Second graders struggling to read were randomly assigned to two groups: GraphoGame Fluent group (n = 15), which received a computer-assisted remedial reading intervention, or GraphoGame Math group (n = 15), which received a computer-assisted numeracy intervention. An additional, non-playing group, composed by second graders without reading difficulties, was formed (business-as-usual group, n = 15). Results showed clear benefits of GraphoGame on spelling and phonological awareness. After the intervention and one month later, the GraphoGame Fluent group displayed spelling and phonological awareness skills similar to the business-as-usual group, and above the GraphoGame Math group. Overall, these findings indicate that Portuguese struggling readers benefit from computer-assisted interventions that combine letter-sound correspondences with more complex orthographic patterns.

C-SAW (Computer-Supported Argumentative Writer) is an online authoring software embodying design principles derived from theories on written argumentation, self-regulation and conceptual change as well as feedback from practitioners and users, in line with a design-based research approach. Designed to scaffold writing processes, C-SAW is intended as additional support in instructional designs using argumentative writing for learning. This article presents the results of a mixed-method study comparing undergraduate students writing with C-SAW or a text editor. Outcome measures included the number of arguments and the degree of their completion, knowledge of argument components, topic knowledge and changes in epistemic beliefs. Participants writing with C-SAW elaborated arguments to a greater degree, but there were otherwise no significant differences between conditions for other measured outcomes. Furthermore, results were influenced by informal reasoning skills that outweighed the effects of condition. These results are discussed with respect to the difficulties of studying the effects of digital tools on writing and learning in controlled first-use contexts and the importance of developing instructional designs with explicit learning outcomes that are aligned to the instructional principles embedded in digital tools.

This paper extends our research into a novel Story-Writing-Coding engine, where Primary School children produce animated stories through writing computer code. We first discuss the theoretical basis of our engine design, drawing on Systemic Functional Grammar, embodied cognition and perceived animacy. This design aims to help children draw on the appearances of characters, props and scenery to evoke linguistic constructs leading to the emergence of stories. The second part of this paper reports on an empirical study where we aim to answer two research questions. First can compositions so produced be seen as valid compositions? To answer this question we conducted a linguistic analysis of coded stories and those written in an English classroom, and also using teacher ratings of these stories. Results indicate that while there are no significant linguistic differences between coded and English stories, coded stories are impoverished and should be seen as a first-draft to be revised in the English classroom. The second question was to probe our observation that while coding, children spontaneously told stories. Here we draw upon theories of embodied cognition and of perceived animacy. Our analysis suggests that these theories, taken together, help to explain the spontaneous emergence of stories.

To date, research into functional descriptions of unfolding language has been almost entirely focused on speech. And whilst writing research has examined the revision of language units, it has backgrounded how these revisions contribute to the unfolding of a text’s meanings. Therefore, using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as an underlying framework, and keystroke logging software (Inputlog) as a data collection tool, this paper takes a first step toward a dynamic description of written text in terms of the language structures, functions, and systemic choices found in the written revisions of two 2nd year UK undergraduates. More specifically, in detailed textual analysis of four unfolding, digitally composed text, whose end products totalled approximately 1700 words, this paper focuses on the revisions made during consecutive writing sessions, which lasted anything from 8mins to 8hrs 37mins and totalled 56hrs 18mins of recordings. The findings suggest that certain language choices may play a key role when it comes to shaping academic essays, and it is proposed that this new model of analysis can provide an additional perspective on writing behaviour in terms of how meaning-making practices unfold in real time.

In two experimental studies, we examined the effects of types of written production mode (hypertext writing versus linear writing, Study 1 and 2) and learning mode (performance versus observational learning, Study 2). Participants in Study 1 (Grade 10) were initiating the more formal academic argumentative text, while in Study 2 students (Grade 11) were familiar with the genre. Dependent variables were students’ content knowledge, self-efficacy for writing and text quality. For the independent variable written production mode both studies did show interaction effects between learning condition and pretest scores. For content knowledge, students with lower prior content knowledge performed best in the hypertext condition; students with higher prior content knowledge in the linear condition. For self-efficacy, linear writing was most effective for students with initial high self-efficacy (Study 2 only). For text quality, students with relatively very strong initial writing skills performed best in the hypertext condition, students with weak initial writing skills in the linear condition (Study 2 only). For the independent variable learning mode for the hypertext text learning activity (performing versus observing), almost no differences in effects could be observed: performing the hypertext learning activities or observing these performances did not make a difference, except to students with relatively low initial topic knowledge: students with low prior knowledge performed better in the performing condition. These complex patterns of interactions between learning conditions and pretest variables are discussed.

This study investigates Grade 12 students’ global and local strategies for writing from the Internet. Analysis of screen captures, think-aloud protocols, and interviews showed two global writing strategies: 1) Students created mediating planning documents; they alternated between researching online and creating mediating planning documents, then drafted a text, and then revised. 2) Students created no (or almost no) mediating documents; they wrote directly from the source documents, alternating frequently between researching, drafting, and revising. Each global strategy comprised several sub-ordinate strategies (e.g., search using a combination of content and rhetorical keywords; take hard copy notes; draft a text out of the sequence in which it appears in the final text; use automatic spelling and grammar checkers to guide review). Some of these strategies are similar to those used in print-based writing from sources. However, using the Internet also resulted in new researching and writing strategies. We argue that writers created task environments and used strategies that maximized the affordances of the Internet, electronic writing medium, and internal cognition, and minimized their constraints. This work extends classical cognitive work on writing as well as more recent work on writing from sources.

Writing researchers have long attempted to classify and describe patterns of citation and source use both to describe disciplinary differences, and to identify discourse-level characteristics of new knowledge production. The analysis of large corpora has provided great insights about the formal characteristics of citations, but little information about their rhetorical nature, which we know from interview studies as central to the understanding of source use practices. This study reports on an attempt to understand and describe patterns of source use across disciplines, genres and levels of participation through systematic verbal data analysis of documents produced by sixteen participants in expert/novice pairs (faculty advisor/doctoral advisee) from four disciplines (Computer Science, Chemical Engineering, Materials Science Engineering and Humanities and Social Sciences). The results of this analysis showed that, despite some disciplinary differences, all participants used similar patterns of reference use, namely elaboration, evaluation and relation to one’s own work.

The rise of digital humanities has led many writing researchers to consider using digital tools to analyze rhetorical patterns in text. Yet taking a digital approach to the analysis of texts is a complex task. We are faced with a variety of techniques and tools, all of which require significant investment to learn and use. How can we best understand the costs and benefits of adopting a particular approach? Are they simply alternatives or can they be integrated? The three sets of authors in this special section attempt to address these questions by using alternative methodologies to analyze a common set of documents. The following opening piece serves as an introduction to the project. In it, we place their research in the context of taxonomy of approaches to text analysis, and review prior attempts at integration. Following the articles, a closing piece examines the prospects for integration. In it, we provide a brief review of the results of the analyses followed by an examination of their commonalities and variations. Finally, we conclude with the considerations that should be taken into account in choosing a method for textual analysis, as well as a discussion of the potential for an integration of methods.

This article proposes novel methods for computational rhetorical analysis to analyze the use of citations in a corpus of academic texts. Guided by rhetorical genre theory, our analysis converts texts to graph-theoretic graphs in an attempt to isolate and amplify the predicted patterns of recurring moves that are associated with stable genres of academic writing. We find that our computational method shows promise for reliably detecting and classifying citation moves similar to the results achieved by qualitative researchers coding by hand as done by Karatsolis (this issue). Further, using pairwise comparisons between advisor and advisee texts, valuable applications emerge for automated computational analysis as formative feedback in a mentoring situation.

This study investigated students' practice of philosophical thinking through collaborative writing in secondary education. A philosophy course was developed following the rationale of the learning communities in which writing was used as an epistemic tool. 45 students organized into 13 teams participated in the course. In this study, a subsample of six students working in 2 teams during one collaborative argumentative writing activity were analyzed. These groups were selected on the basis of their output (high and medium quality) and because both followed an integrating construction strategy for collaborative writing. Data collected included audio, video and computer screen recordings of both groups' discourse and writing activity during collaborative writing (using Camtasia and Atlas-ti software). Analysis focused on collaborative writing interaction (types of talk; evidence of philosophical competences - problematization, argumentation and conceptualization; regulation of the collaborative writing activity and group dynamics) and the quality of individual and collaborative texts.Results indicate that quality of the interaction was related to text quality. Collaborative writing helped the students: 1) to transform abstract ideas into more concrete and appropriate philosophical concepts using examples related to their experiences, 2) to use these philosophical concepts in their own discourse and 3) to problematize their own ideas and provide arguments to support them. From these results, the importance of a structured context of learning to promote critical thinking through writing is discussed as well as the need to train students to develop efficient peer discussion for learning through collaborative writing.

This study investigated situational and writer characteristics that influence the revision process. Thirty-four students who scored high on print exposure and 32 students who scored low on print exposure had 10 or 70 seconds to think about each of 2 prompts before beginning to write (prewriting time) the essays on a computer. A keystroke-logging program captured writing and editing behavior, including pauses, edits (deletions, substitutions, insertions), and prompt reviews. Quality was measured using an 8-factor, 3-point analytic scoring rubric. Results indicated that high print exposure students wrote longer and higher quality essays than low print exposure students. In addition, the short prewriting time increased prompt reviewing and average pause lengths. High and low print exposure writers showed differential responses to the prewriting time manipulation in terms of total pause-associated edits during writing. The complexity of the revision process and the importance of understanding multiple immediate variables in the writing situation are discussed.

Peer review is a family of instructional techniques. Historically, these have been employed in writing and many other educational domains. Modern computer technologies facilitate the use of peer review, which is especially relevant to educational settings where it is not practical to administer peer review manually. The use of computer support for peer review has shed light on many important scientific questions, some of which we summarize. These findings set the context for the papers in this special issue, which demonstrate how computer support for peer review enables research on peer review itself and on its pedagogical significance.

Computer-supported peer review systems can support reviewers and authors in many different ways, including through the use of different kinds of reviewing criteria. It has become an increasingly important empirical question to determine whether reviewers are sensitive to different criteria and whether some kinds of criteria are more effective than others. In this work, we compared the differential effects of two types of rating prompts, each focused on a different set of criteria for evaluating writing: prompts that focus on domain-relevant aspects of writing composition versus prompts that focus on issues directly pertaining to the assigned problem and to the substantive issues under analysis. We found evidence that reviewers are sensitive to the differences between the two types of prompts, that reviewers distinguish among problem-specific issues but not among domain-writing ones; that both types of ratings correlate with instructor scores; and that problem-specific ratings are more likely to be helpful and informative to peer authors in that they are less redundant.

This paper focuses on the ways girls use digital environments, like Word, PowerPoint and chatting programmes, for writing and communication purposes. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis and by adopting a critical discourse framework, we will explore the relationship between girls and new media, especially the ones related to digital writing, in terms of three interconnected variables. The first one is related to the role of the two most important socialisation institutions, home and school, at the present historical juncture, characterised by intense mobility and an expansion of traditional forms of literacy. The strategic choices of the girls’ families and their schools’ teaching practices contributed significantly to the formulation of their digital writing practices. The second variable is gender. Our data clearly show that a substantial number of girls were more inclined than their male peers to use word-processing and presentation software, performing, thus, the school discourses of ‘diligent students’. The third key variable concerns the personality of the girls who filtered in their own unique ways their social experiences, overcame limitations, took initiatives and appropriated technologically-mediated writing media for personally meaningful ends that enhanced their school and/or entertainment Discourses.

With the use of the computers, the task of writing is intertwined with the task of searching for information that can be relevant for the document that is being written, however very little research has been done to understand how the two tasks intertwine. In this paper we present an initial attempt to develop a model of writing and information seeking with computers and to develop helpful software that can improve the quality of the information searched and the written paper. Proactive Recommendation System (PRS) can relieve authors from explicit searching by means of automatically searching, retrieving and recommending information relevant to the text currently being written, and therefore PRS can be helpful to writers. However it is also possible that there are some moments during writing in which presenting proactive information can be an interruption rather than a help. In our research, we have used the PRS IntelliGent™ to investigate its impact in the different stages of writing. We found that when IntelliGent™ offers relevant information the time to task completion is shorter and the quality of the written product increases compared with the control situations in which writers have to look actively for information. We discuss these findings in the context of developing models and tools that integrate searching and writing processes when using computers as the writing environment.