This article examines how students use and perceive digital writing tools, including chat platforms and generative AI, within academic writing environments. It describes a qualitative study of 15 undergraduate students in guided focus group discussions. In a grounded theory analysis of focus group transcripts, the researchers explored undergraduates’ sense of copresence—their perception of support through both human interaction with both peers and instructors and AI technologies during their writing processes. Findings reveal that students’ trust in both peer feedback and AI assistance plays a crucial role in their writing, shaping their decisions about which tools to use and how they integrate human and AI feedback in the development and revisions of their writing. The study sheds light on students’ nuanced understanding of the affordances and limitations of multimodal chat platforms and generative AI technologies. We conclude by highlighting the need for pedagogical practices that support students’ choice of tools when collaborating in digital spaces. We suggest future research directions that will enable us to better understand how copresence and trust influence students’ writing in these contexts.

This article offers insights into elementary-aged students’ perspectives as they embark on composing collaborative multimodal narratives. Contributions from research literature on the writing process, conference practices, and multimodality situate the study. Analysis of students’ responses on a retrospective interview protocol that focused on students’ recollections of the experience, illuminated three findings that may be used to generate questions for effective writing conferences for multimodal compositions. Questions can be asked to support students as they navigate technology, gain insights into modal selection, and determine their collaborative approach to the composing process. Moreover, learning more about students’ decisions as they compose multimodal texts leads to a richer understanding of the affordances of multiple modes in writing and recommendations for creative effective writing conferences.

This article offers insights into elementary-aged students’ perspectives as they embark on composing collaborative multimodal narratives. Contributions from research literature on the writing process, conference practices, and multimodality situate the study. Analysis of students’ responses on a retrospective interview protocol that focused on students’ recollections of the experience, illuminated three findings that may be used to generate questions for effective writing conferences for multimodal compositions. Questions can be asked to support students as they navigate technology, gain insights into modal selection, and determine their collaborative approach to the composing process. Moreover, learning more about students’ decisions as they compose multimodal texts leads to a richer understanding of the affordances of multiple modes in writing and recommendations for creative effective writing conferences.

This paper aims to validate scales for the early development of writing proficiency based on a framework used to linguistically describe multiple dimensions of writing development in 6–9 year-old Danish-speaking students and to lay the statistical foundation for empirically describing proficiency levels in emergent writers. The analysis is based on the Rasch model and was conducted on texts (n = 803) written by Year 0–2 students using the computer app WriteReader. The paper introduces both the model and the theory behind it, including the rationale for using this model, and it presents the main analytical steps taken and decisions made in the study, which is part of the large-scale Danish research project entitled Teaching Platform for Developing and Automatically Tracking Early Stage Literacy Skills (ATEL, 2018–2023). The results show that it is possible to identify detailed levels of early writing development in four dimensions: 1) text construction, 2) sentence construction, 3) verbals, and 4) modifiers.

Expanding Literate Landscapes: Persons, Practices, and Sociohistoric Perspectives of Disciplinary Development by Kevin Roozen and Joe Erickson (2017) Computers and Composition Digital P/Utah State UP, 2017. Web.

This article aims to engage specialists in writing pedagogy, assessment, genre study, and educational technologies in a constructive dialog and joint exploration of automated writing analysis as a potent instantiation of computer-enhanced assessment for learning. It recounts the values of writing pedagogy and, from this perspective, examines legitimate concerns with automated writing analysis. Emphasis is placed on the need to substantiate the construct-driven debate with systematic empirical evidence that would corroborate or refute interpretations, uses, and consequences of automated scoring and feedback tools intended for specific contexts. Such evidence can be obtained by adopting a validity argument framework. To demonstrate an application of this framework, the article presents a novel genre-based approach to automated analysis configured to support research writing and provides examples of validity evidence for using it with novice scholarly writers.

The importance of digital literacy becomes increasingly apparent as we move farther into the 21st century. As the digital world becomes an increasing part of our everyday lives and an important aspect of many professions, the need to instruct students on how to publish their thoughts digitally is ever more apparent. As technological proficiency becomes increasingly expected in many employment settings, it is vital that students are able to make their thoughts clear electronically. Blogging in a safe environment is one way that educators may blend young students’ writing skill, their awareness of the purposes for writing, and digital-age technology. This article describes the work of one primary grade teacher at an urban high-needs school’s use of blogging in conjunction with writing workshop. Use of blogging to publish students’ writing increased students’ writing engagement, improved their knowledge of how to navigate and use computers, and increased their understanding of the potential benefits and dangers of writing digitally.

Process writing instruction is an influential paradigm in elementary classrooms, but studies of its effectiveness are mixed. These mixed results may occur because teachers implement process writing in vastly difference ways, which makes it difficult to assess the effectiveness of process approaches broadly. Therefore, this literature review examines the features of the process writing instruction are effective. Drawing on empirical evidence, it answers the question: What practices within process writing have evidence of effectiveness? A literature search was conducted and 93 studies that met the inclusion criteria were found. The studies were coded thematically and indicate seven categories of effective practices: writing strategy instruction, computers in the writing process, talk during the writing process, play during the writing process, including children’s ways of knowing, flexible participation structures, and mentor texts. Evidence about the effectiveness of these features and directions for future research are discussed.

This study examined the impact of different forms of feedback on the writing of a group of 82 adolescent students in secondary English classes. During a 6-week intervention, students were randomly assigned to one of three feedback groups: peer feedback on pen-and-paper drafts, teacher feedback delivered electronically through a course management system, and automated feedback generated through computer-based writing evaluation software. Pre- and post-measures of student writing quality, length, and correctness were analyzed, and survey data explored student perceptions of their experiences. Findings indicate that all students, regardless of which form of feedback they received, wrote longer essays and scored higher on holistic ratings at post test than they did at pretest. Neither language status nor group assignment had a greater or lesser impact on performance on length or holistic quality. However, differences between feedback groups spiked on the proximal measure that examined mastery of particular aspects of the genre being taught. Both peer feedback and teacher feedback delivered electronically had a statistically significant impact on student performance in the genre of open-ended response. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for future research and instruction in the secondary context.

The use of online course or learning management system (LMS) tools proliferates as writing instruction grows online along with administrative concerns to improve teaching efficiencies and program assessment. While many institutions use the template feature in LMS systems (e.g. Blackboard Vista) to generate a location for teacher resources, some institutions are using LMS tools to standardize course content, delivery, and pedagogy to varying degrees. However, digital literacy issues that affect both teachers and students can negatively impact teaching and learning with LMS tools, especially in Web-based settings. It is important to understand how such tools may or may not be used effectively in standardizing writing pedagogy, particularly how designers’ unfamiliarity with course content and their own and their students’ inexperience with the tools can negatively affect pedagogy and learning with such tools. I describe a specific example of problems encountered within an extreme form of standardization in a Web-based writing course delivered via WebCT/Vista, identify implications of such standardization, and suggest considerations that educators should be aware of in their efforts to standardize writing pedagogy through LMS tools.

This article introduces teachers to some freely available online resources designed to help writers – those of all skill levels, especially language learners – with collocation. It shows how wildcard searches in search engines, online corpora, and concordance tools can be used to check and explore collocations in writing.

Advances in computer coding and Internet technology are drastically redefining publishing and literature itself. This article examines how e-literature, literary texts dependent on code, differs from and works to supplement traditionally printed literature. In particular, e-literature alters traditional concepts of authorship and readership. A coded interface requires the input of a reader to generate a text; the resulting text is therefore a collaboration between the reader and the author, resulting in a change each time the text is read. . The article examines how hypertext pioneers have explored the possibilities offered by computer coding and the Internet, expanding the limits of literary creation and altering the very definition of literature itself.

This essay focuses on the implementation of a multimedia writing course and, in particular, a techno-literacy memoir project, which asked students (advanced undergraduates and graduate students) to use their creativity in choosing digital environments, such as podcasts, blogs, and wikis, for sharing their memories of gaining literacy through technology. What the students learned from this project was an ability to fluidly transition between print and digital literacy, along the way strengthening their ability to engage their audiences, and a recognition of their own cyborgian writing skills; indeed, they saw how various communication technologies were extensions of themselves. Through this project, they understood that they had been “cyborgs” since childhood (growing up with, for example, seemingly primitive Speak’N’Spells and Commodore 64s), and this realization helped them transition into a new repertoire of composing skills essential for 21st century student writers.

This article illustrates how freely available computer tools can be used for academic writing. It presents a series of tools and functions from the area of corpus linguistics, and shows how these can be used by students and teachers when working on dissertations and theses or when exploring conventions of academic writing and of writing in specific disciplines.

In setting forth the intended philosophy of the eSphere column, the column’s editor introduces what is possible in the teaching of writing in today’s technological climate as compared to the much less connected era when he started teaching several decades ago. At that time, computers were viewed as tools supporting behaviorist and algorithmic training philosophies, whereas current perspectives regard them more as adjuncts to constructivist and connectivist methodologies, and where writing is concerned, as a means of promoting authentic communication enhanced by social networking. Technology is now seen to facilitate most aspects of each step of the writing process. The eSphere column intends not only to document developments along these lines and to shed light on their impact on teaching writing, but to foretell them, following and extrapolating the trends and paradigm shifts as teaching practitioners utilize and adapt the affordances inherent in modern technologies. The column aims to encourage teachers to experiment and become familiar with the new tools and the most appropriate methodologies for their use. It is hoped that the eSphere column will become part of the conversations among teachers promoting informal learning with one another, which in subsequent stages can be applied with transformative effects in classrooms.

The teaching and learning of writing was examined in ten diverse K-12 schools in which all of the students in one or more classrooms had individual access to laptop computers. Substantial positive changes were observed in each stage of the writing process, including better access to information sources for planning and pre-writing; easier drafting of papers, especially for students with physical or cognitive disabilities that made handwriting laborious; more access to feedback, both from teachers, who could read printed papers much more quickly than handwritten ones, and, in some schools, by automated writing evaluation programs; more frequent and extensive revision; and greater opportunities to publish final papers or otherwise disseminate them to real audiences.

Most writing teachers make use of pens/pencils or computers as a tool to provide their students with written feedback. This article recommends a range of feedback modes for writing teachers, including (1) pen-and-paper, (2) insert comment/track change (giving comments by deleting and adding), and (3) insert audio (recording your voice). Advantages and disadvantages of each feedback mode, based on teacher’s observation as well as students’ preferences, are discussed to help writing teachers consider how different commenting modes might facilitate their feedback process.