Artificial intelligence-based Language Tools (AILTs) are being increasingly used in essay writing in higher education. Its application promotes global and multicultural perspectives in education and plays a critical role in advancing scholarly communication and research dissemination. However, these benefits cannot be measured without also considering student perspectives. This study analyzes the positive and negative aspects identified by students regarding the use of AILTs in their written texts at university. A total of 314 undergraduate and graduate education students were surveyed, and results were analyzed using the Reinert method. The results show that positive aspects are linked to the three pillars of text construction (planning, textualization, and revision). The negative aspects highlight concerns about academic integrity and student competencies. These findings can help guide teachers on how they can promote the responsible and beneficial use of AILTs.

All writing involves complex linguistic knowledge and thoughtful decision-making. But where do students acquire the linguistic tools needed to write effectively? Many students come from diverse backgrounds and may need additional support and/or instruction in language and grammar. In order to better understand this situation, we conducted a qualitative multiple-case study to examine the experiences of 12 students in a first-year university-level composition course to understand the extent of their diverse learning backgrounds and language needs and expectations. We synthesized information from surveys, interviews, and written texts into narratives about each student's attitudes toward language and writing and also examined the actual language in their texts. The findings reveal wide diversity in linguistic backgrounds and experiences and that students need and want attention to their language skills in first-year writing. Findings further suggest that instructors should consider the backgrounds and abilities of individual student writers and listen carefully to students' perceptions about their own writing and language needs in order to build students' writing self-efficacy levels.

It is widely assumed that by identifying spelling errors and suggesting replacement words, spellcheck allows writers to revise spelling errors even if they do not have the necessary spelling knowledge. However, there have been no studies evaluating the efficacy of modern spellcheck tools for students with spelling difficulties, such as dyslexia. In fact, the very limited and dated research into use of spellcheck by writers with dyslexia indicated that, even when using spellcheck to revise spelling errors, this group left many misspellings in their texts. The current study is the first to investigate whether a modern spellcheck program allows college students with dyslexia to produce texts that are as free from misspellings as texts by their peers, and whether this affects the quality of the text in other ways.College students with dyslexia (n=18) and a control group of peers (n=18) wrote two short essays using Microsoft Word, one with spellcheck active and one without spellcheck active. Spelling accuracy and overall quality of the texts were measured. Without spellcheck, students with dyslexia made more misspellings than the control group, however, with spellcheck active students from both groups left almost zero misspelled words in their texts. Text quality was not affected. Results demonstrate that spellcheck helps college students with dyslexia to overcome the limitations that poor spelling knowledge imposes. Importantly, results indicate that spellcheck does not lead to improvements in text beyond spelling accuracy, or lead to poorer quality texts, indicating that it is suitable for use in exam conditions.

This research was funded by The Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (TEKES) project RYM Indoor Environment (462054) and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (CSO2013-41108-R).

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 effects of writing format (handwritten (HW) versus word processor (WP)) were examined in a sample of college students with and without learning disabilities (LD). All students wrote two essays, one in each format, scored for quality and length. Groups did not differ in age, gender, ethnicity, mathematical calculation, writing fluency, essay length or essay quality. The "interaction hypothesis" was not supported, in that the use of a word processor as a writing accommodation did not provide a differential boost to students with LD. Both groups produced longer essays in the WP versus HW condition. The best predictor of essay quality was essay length regardless of writing format. Most students in each group preferred the WP format. Interestingly, a smaller percentage of students in the LD group (72%) than NLD group (91%) used the available time for writing. Keywords: accommodations, learning disabilities, college students, writing, word processor

Girls are more likely to outperform boys in the development of writing skills. This study considered gender differences in language and working memory skills as a possible explanation for the differential rates of progress. Sixty-seven children (31 males and 36 females) (M age 57.30 months) participated. Qualitative differences in writing progress were examined using a writing assessment scale from the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP). Quantitative measures of writing: number of words, diversity of words, number of phrases/sentences and grammatical complexity of the phrases/sentences were also analysed. The children were also assessed on tasks measuring their language production and comprehension skills and the visuo-spatial, phonological, and central executive components of working memory. The results indicated that the boys were more likely to perform significantly less well than the girls on all measures of writing except the grammatical complexity of sentences. Initially, no significant differences were found on any of the measures of language ability. Further, no significant differences were found between the genders on the capacity and efficiency of their working memory functioning. However, hierarchical regressions revealed that the individual differences in gender and language ability, more specifically spoken language comprehension, predicted performance on the EYFSP writing scale. This finding accords well with the literature that suggests that language skills can mediate the variance in boys' and girls' writing ability.

This article maps the diverse theoretical disciplines that inform writing research and in particular, how these disciplines have researched the relationship between writing and gender. This is presented against the background of a changing theoretical landscape in research in gender. In particular, it will consider the paradigm shift from discourses of difference and disadvantage to discourses of diversity. Research on writing has not always acknowledged this changing lens, and gender research rarely focuses on writing. The aim therefore is to map out these different approaches, explore how they have impacted writing classrooms and to add to the call for a reconfiguring of gender in writing research as a complex and diverse category rather than as a fixed and essential characteristic we each possess.

A significant percentage of students who attend secondary schools in the United States do not acquire the basic writing skills required to gain admission to four-year colleges and universities. In the present study, participants were 41 low-income, multi-ethnic 12th-grade students, 19 of whom received instruction on specific genre features for writing college admission essays. The other 22 12th-grade students formed the comparison group and received instruction as usual in their regular English class (mostly on literary analysis). The students who received instruction on genre features of the college admission essay scored higher on a rubric-based rating of the pre and post test essay writing and on writing self-efficacy surveys associated with the genre. Findings yielded from this study point to the merit of using a features-based genre instructional approach to teaching college admission essays to low-income, multi-ethnic high school students.