To understand how human readers navigate a literate landscape that newly includes AI-generated prose, we asked participants (n=76) to read and make decisions about who and/or what is responsible for writing anonymized, “ambiguously-authored” texts. Findings suggest that readers’ assumptions about who and/or what wrote a text are rooted in “felt sense.” Prompting participants to make their “felt sense” explicit allowed us to catalog the evidential warrants participants relied on when making authorship decisions. Enabled by a modified grounded theory approach to analysis, we constructed two main themes. First, readers are “triggered” by certain textual cues that, when combined with prior experiences and knowledge, evidentially warrant assumptions about who and/or what wrote a text. Second, after recognizing the consequences of making one’s felt sense explicit, some readers experience what we call an “axiological crisis.” Axiological crises emerge when participants meta-cognitively hear or see themselves attributing certain characteristics and values to an AI text-generator or human author. We conclude by reimagining the axiological crisis as an opportunity for improving metacognitive awareness about how felt sense affects our reading practices.

Writing from multiple texts is among the most common yet challenging tasks for higher education students. However, limited research has examined the strategies used by these highly competent readers and writers. The present descriptive study examines reading strategy use, writing strategy use, and writing performance in a sample of higher education students enrolled in graduate-level education classes. Students completed a scholarly multiple texts reading-to-write (S-MTRW) task, asking them to read three short research articles and to write a research report while thinking aloud and sharing their screen. Results indicate that students commonly reported evaluating, elaborating, and paraphrasing content during reading. During writing, students commonly engaged in summarizing, composing, and rereading information from the texts provided. Furthermore, the majority of students produced emergent documents models, reflecting limited attempts at synthesis in their writing about the research articles they read. A medium positive correlation was found between the number of instances students reported paraphrasing content while reading and the number of instances of multiple-text integration in students’ writing.

Generative AI has the potential to transform writing in schools and universities. This makes it necessary to develop training programmes for writing with AI, especially for students in teacher training. So far, however, little is known about the students' initial preconditions on which the trainings can be based upon. Evidence so far has come mainly from observational studies and questionnaire studies examining the frequency and type of AI use. However, the students themselves were not considered, nor the extent to which they can be categorised into groups. In other words, the focus has been on the writing rather than on the writers. To address this gap, the present article analyses data from a survey of N=505 students. To identify writer profiles, i.e. groups of students with comparable characteristics, we apply two-step cluster analysis. The students are clustered based on their use of AI for writing, as well as their level of awareness of AI applications, AI literacy, digital media literacy and writing-related self-concept. The results reveal four clusters, the two largest of which are characterised by the fact that students tend not to use AI, sometimes because they apparently have no awareness of AI, sometimes despite having such awareness. Merely one cluster, which describes 20% of the students, is characterised by regular use of AI for writing. The results therefore provide a useful insight for planning training in the context of university teaching.

Metacognitive reading awareness, involving cognitive process control and reading strategies, is linked to better comprehension and performance, but its relationship with intertextual integration strategies and the quality of argumentative essays remains unexplored. This study aimed to investigate the role of metacognition in employing integration strategies when reading conflicting texts. 69 undergraduate students participated in an online reading-writing activity, where they wrote argumentative essays based on conflicting texts about red meat consumption. We examined the students' use of intertextual integration strategies (refutation, weighing, synthesizing) and assessed their metacognitive awareness through their reflections on these strategies. The quality of the argumentative essays served as a measure of multiple text comprehension. The results indicated a lack of metacognitive awareness regarding integration strategies, with students overestimating their ability to employ these strategies. However, they demonstrated better understanding of refutational strategies based on the examples provided in their essays. Interestingly, students who were aware of and utilized these strategies in their essays performed better in the multiple-text comprehension task.

The book Writing and reading connections: Bridging research and practise, edited by Zoi A. Philippakos and Steve Graham (2023) is a collection of works concerning writing–reading relationships and suggestions for instructional practices that can support the synergetic development of writing and reading. The editors commence by pointing out that an instructional divide that promotes separate instruction of reading and writing exists. With this book, they argue that this divide is unfortunate and that bringing together writing and reading in research and in the classroom can yield positive effects.

Composing a well-written text is a prolonged and challenging process. The present study explored the incipient stages in descriptive texts written (pen and paper) or dictated by 283 Hebrew-speaking Israeli children in second to fifth grades. This study aims to better understand the interplay between age, literacy-related abilities, and descriptive text quality by exploring developmental aspects across grade levels regarding text structural quality, length of text and literacy related abilities, and by analyzing the relation between text structural quality and literacy related abilities (cognitive, transcriptional, linguistic, and reading), beyond length of text and grade level. Regarding the developmental aspects, the results indicate that text structure quality becomes more sophisticated and complete with age, attaining high-quality descriptive text structure from third grade on in the production of autonomous texts with genre-driven elaborate features. Length of text and literacy related abilities also increase with age. Regarding the relation between text structural quality and literacy related abilities, we found in 2nd grade, for P&P text, a significant total effect of syntactic lexical ability on text structure rank, partially mediated by length of text, and a weaker but still significant direct effect of syntactic lexical ability on TS rank, when controlling for length of text. We also found in 5th grade, for DICT text, a significant total effect of reading high ability on TS rank, not mediated by length of text.

Students need support through intentional writing instruction to develop their discipline-specific writing skills outside of Language Arts. Yet, we argue not all writing instruction provides the same opportunities for student learning. In this study, with the support of professional development, teachers engaged students in civic perspective-taking through writing, focusing on locally relevant public issues. Drawing from disciplinary literacy and genre pedagogy, our research team conducted a descriptive study where thematic analysis was applied to examine second and third graders’ civics writing samples. Our findings indicate that students’ engagement with key civic concepts became more complex and purposeful as they practiced argumentative writing. Development continued from second to third grade in both the sophistication of their civic perspective-taking as well as their writing. Additionally, we found that student motivation to engage in argumentative writing increased in all classrooms across both grade levels when engaging with locally relevant public issues. This article provides details about the elementary civics writing curriculum and the students’ writing outcomes as well as includes the two graphic organizers used in the curriculum.

This study focuses on disciplinary literacy in primary craft education. Disciplinary literacy refers to the specialised ways of reading, writing, and speaking in a particular discipline. In Finland, crafts is an obligatory school subject, and pupils are supposed to conceive and manage a complete crafts process, including documentation. However, disciplinary literacy in crafts has rarely been studied, let alone at the primary level. In this study, we explored the quality of a sample of work descriptions produced by third-graders. The data included digitally produced work descriptions (N=79) written by 42 third-grade pupils in a Finnish primary school. Based on a qualitative analysis, six main dimensions of work descriptions as a textual genre emerged: word count, crafts vocabulary, structure, spelling, multimodality, and self-assessment. The quality of work descriptions was analysed quantitatively according to scoring criteria based on these dimensions. A cluster analysis indicated that there were three groups of work descriptions with respect to their level of disciplinarity: limited, emerging, and advanced descriptions. The results show that the structure of the disciplinary texts develops first, and subject-specific vocabulary stabilises after that. The paper discusses the foundation for disciplinary literacy in primary craft education.

Upper elementary students face conceptual and linguistic challenges when writing in science. One way to scaffold science writing is the explicit teaching of cross-disciplinary language. Limited research has explored the dynamics of these language changes in instructional contexts. This study examines the micro-developmental changes in cross-disciplinary language skills and their contributions to the quality of 191 science explanations written by 65 fourth graders that participated in language and literacy-based instruction. The instruction’s pedagogical design was focused on writing-to-learn and learning-to-write the scientific explanation genre. Each student wrote an initial, a scaffolded draft, and a final explanation that was scored for scientific quality and productive cross-disciplinary language skills. Students’ prior and final scientific knowledge was also measured. The results showed large instruction size effects on the scientific quality (0.71), productive cross-disciplinary language skills (0.46), and explanation length (0.64). Stepwise regression analysis showed that prior and final science knowledge and productive cross-disciplinary language skills significantly predict the quality of the final explanation (R2 = .704, F(11,38) = 9.03, p < .000). This research offers evidence of the dynamic relationships between language, literacy, and science in contexts of explicit cross-disciplinary language instruction for disciplinary literacy and learning.

Much attention has been paid to the complexity underlying writing, but the versatile roles that collaborative writing can encourage in elementary students remain scarcely understood. In this exploratory study, we developed a framework for observing the participatory roles that elementary students spontaneously adopt as they engage in collaborative writing in environmental and social studies classrooms. To concretize the applicability of the framework, we illustrate how five students shift between the roles across task types. We identified 18 participatory roles and allocated them into six categories: content-, literacy-, performance-, process-focused, expressive, and off-task roles. While these generally align with previous research on participatory roles, literacy-focused and expressive role categories emerged as new data-driven findings. The concrete examples provided for illustrating how these roles are reflected when students engage in collaborative writing deepen the understanding of the variety and flexibility in roles adopted across the students and task types. We expect the framework to be beneficial for both teachers and researchers, to observe how flexibly students adopt roles from different categories when writing collaboratively. This can provide insights into designing instruction and selecting task types to effectively promote flexible and meaningful participation among all students when writing collaboratively in subject-area classrooms.

This study investigated the effect of a four-week socioscientific issues (SSI)-based intervention on sixth-grade students’ argumentative writing and transferability of argument skills across topics. Students in three treatment classrooms engaged in an SSI unit on space exploration while students in three comparable classrooms continued regular space science lessons. Argumentation skills were assessed by individual decision letters about space exploration. Argument transfer was assessed by an essay to address a novel SSI. Treatment students wrote more elaborated decision letters with stronger arguments, relied less on personal ideas, and transferred argument skills to a novel SSI after the intervention. The implications of using SSI as a promising approach to integrating science and literacy learning for diverse adolescents were discussed.

Phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge are commonly considered the most powerful literacy predictors at the beginning of schooling. Our aim was to analyse the contribution of invented spelling in kindergarten to reading and spelling in Grade 1 beyond the effects of those two variables. Participants were 92 Portuguese 5-year-old children. Phonological awareness, alphabet knowledge, and invented spelling were assessed in kindergarten and were used to predict word reading and spelling at the end of first grade, using correlation statistics, sequential regression analyses, and path analysis models. General cognitive ability and parents’ educational level were control variables. The results showed that invented spelling predicted reading and spelling performance beyond phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge, with a statistically significant improved prediction in both cases. Alphabet knowledge and phonological awareness influenced invented spelling, which in turn influenced reading and spelling results in the first year of primary school. Additionally, alphabet knowledge directly influenced reading and spelling. Phonological awareness also had a direct influence on spelling but its effect on reading was only mediated by invented spelling. These results are in line with those of other linguistic contexts and provide insightful findings towards the importance of invented spelling at the onset of literacy learning.

Preparing preservice teachers (PSTs) as teachers of writing has gained attention in recent years, but little is known about their preparedness when engaging with student writers over extended periods. We examine PSTs’ preparedness to teach writing within a structured literacy tutoring experience to better understand the skills and knowledge of PSTs related to teaching writing. Results indicate PSTs contextualized writing instruction, considered clients’ affect around writing, and used data to inform writing lessons. PSTs were also grappling with specific pedagogical considerations related to writing instruction, offering implications for teacher educators and researchers.    

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.

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.

The present book was edited in honour of Liliana Tolchinsky, to pay tribute to her career as a researcher in the field of writing development. For this purpose, the editors of Written and Spoken Language Development Across the Lifespan have brought together researchers from all around the world who wished to share results from studies that reflect Liliana Tolchinsky’s influence on their work. The book starts with an introduction by the editors Perera, Aparici, Rosado and Salas, in which Liliana Tolchinsky’s career is described. In this introduction, the reader is embarked on a pleasant travel throughout Liliana Tolchinsky’s career, filled with ambitious and innovative projects, international collaborations and awards won. This book comprehends a total of 19 chapters, all aiming at investigating language development. It is divided into two parts: Part I gathers chapters focused on early literacy, while Part II focuses on later literacy development. This review is organised in two parts. The first part aims at presenting the book, by briefly describing each chapter and showing their specificities and similarities. This part will allow the reader to appreciate the book’s richness and diversity in terms of linguistic contexts, participants’ characteristics, levels of language investigated and methods of analysis used. In our second part, we discuss the book’s contents in relation to Liliana Tolchinsky’s career, by linking the chapters to her main interests and contributions to the field of language development.

The purpose of this study was to examine how six middle-school students used Automated Essay Evaluation (AEE) technology to revise their writing. Students in a combined 7th and 8th grade Literacy class at one school participated in two in-depth think alouds and semi-structured interviews as they used AEE technology to revise their writing on two separate writing tasks. Constant-comparative analysis of data, including think alouds, semi-structured interviews, and student writing along with a separate quantitative analysis of student revisions revealed themes in three areas: (a) student use of AEE feedback to make revisions; (b) student motivation to revise their writing when using AEE technology; (c) and student understanding and application of AEE feedback during revision. Findings indicated that students who received low scores used AEE feedback to prompt non-surface revisions whereas students with high scores did not. Further, students who used AEE feedback to prompt non-surface revisions made more overall non-surface revisions, revised for different reasons, made more t-unit level revisions, and had more revisions rated as major successes than students who did not use the feedback. Students who used the AEE feedback, MY Editor, were often confused by the grammar and punctuation feedback and had a low success rate using it. However, students were more successful with the spell checker only feedback. In addition, findings show that students were motivated to revise because of the numerical scores the technology assigned their writing. Moreover, knowledge that they would receive a score prompted students to do extensive revising prior to submitting their writing for scoring. Finally, student understanding of the AEE feedback was varied. Implications for classroom use of AEE technology and directions for future research are discussed.

The aim of the present study was to improve learning from texts via strategies that train students how to process synthesis texts. Processing such texts requires goal-oriented interaction between reading and writing activities. The participants were 62 sixth-grade students, 33 in the experimental and 29 in the control group. In a pretest-posttest design –with a control group- the effects of an experimental programme were tested on (a) the level of learning achieved, (b) the quality of the written texts produced, and (c) the synthesis text-processing activities (in a sub-sample of 32 participants). The experimental group was trained in the processes involved in writing a synthesis using two expository texts about history via a strategy-oriented programme, while the control group worked on the same content using the more conventional tasks in their regular text book. Findings show that the experimental group outperformed the control group on a deep-learning content measure, wrote better texts, and exhibited more sophisticated text-processing activities.

We examine the explanatory weight of child-related and contextual factors on first graders’ achievements in spelling and separation between words. The participants were 215 kindergartners, 113 boys and 102 girls (M = 5 years 4 months, SD = 4 months) from both monolingual and bilingual communities in Spain. They were native speakers of Spanish in the monolingual communities and bilingual Spanish/Catalan or Spanish/Basque speakers in the bilingual communities and had Catalan and Basque, respectively, as the language of instruction. The three languages have shallow orthographies. Children were first examined in kindergarten in a number of literacy related abilities (e.g., knowledge of letters, writing) to detect predictors of spelling and separation between words that were, in turn, evaluated at the end of first grade of elementary school. All the participants were assessed in their language of instruction. The best explanatory models were those including interactions among child-level factors and between these factors and contextual variables. Only knowledge of writing in kindergarten appeared as the common explanatory factor for first graders’ attainments. Attainments in spelling were predicted by children’s level of literacy and knowledge of letters moderated by parent’s education; performance in word separation was predicted by phonological awareness and vocabulary knowledge moderated by parental education. Teaching practices affected spelling performance but not learning to separate between words.

The contribution of linguistic, reading, and transcription processes to writing in kindergarten English as a second language (ESL) children and their native-English speaking peers (EL1) were examined. ESL and EL1 performed similarly on one of the two measures of phonological awareness (PA) and on measures of early reading, spelling, and writing. EL1 outperformed ESL on a pseudoword repetition task and on the English vocabulary and syntactic knowledge tasks. ESL outperformed EL1 on a writing fluency measure. Correlation and hierarchical regression results varied as a function of the writing tasks (procedural or generative) and language status. Across language groups, writing tasks that captured children's developing graphophonemic knowledge were associated with a breadth of cognitive, linguistic, and early literacy skills. PA, reading, and transcription skills, but not oral vocabulary and syntactic knowledge contributed the most variance to writing irrespective of language status. The results suggest that parallel component skills and processes underlie ESL and EL1 children's early writing when formal literacy instruction begins in kindergarten even though ESL children are developing English oral and literacy proficiency simultaneously.

This study of 29 teachers from four states in the US investigated teachers' orientations towards writing and the influences on their beliefs. Through interviews about writing instruction, the researchers found significant differences between teachers in high and low-income schools. While teachers in high-income schools valued rhetorical style, developing voice, and reading-writing connections, teachers in low-income schools focused on grammar, mechanics and sentence structure. Teachers in high-income schools appear to be exercising more choice in curricular materials and valuing quality of writing beyond grammar and mechanics, whereas teachers in low-income schools are using specific curriculum mandated by the districts. Influences on teachers' orientations included school context, programs and materials, and assessments. The study raises concerns that students in low-income schools are missing out on authentic, challenging, and meaningful writing opportunities since the focus is on skills-based instruction. The findings point to the need for teachers to provide all students with opportunities to develop rhetorical style, voice, and reading-writing connections in addition to grammar, mechanics, and sentence structure.

In this introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Writing Research, we review four decades of research, bringing writing to the forefront in conversations devoted to gender and literacy. We identify the impetus for much of the research on gender and writing and situate the four articles in this special issue within three themes: gender patterns in what and how students write, cognitive and socio-cultural factors influencing gender differences in student writing, and attempts to provide alternatives to stereotypical gender patterns in student writing. These interdisciplinary themes, further developed within the four articles, underscore the need to consider gender as a complex social, cognitive and linguistic characteristic of both reading and writing.

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.