Drawing upon cognitive writing process theory and research, this study investigates the influence of language of writing, foreign language (FL) proficiency and gender on the revision processes of 77 undergraduate students studying at an English-medium college in Oman. Their first language (L1) was Arabic and their FL was English. The participants produced two argumentative authentic texts, one in L1 and one in FL. Their proficiency in English was assessed using the Oxford Placement Test (OPT). Participants’ revisions were recorded and analysed, according to the measures amount, location and type, via keystroke logging. The results showed that the vast majority of revisions in both languages were immediate, i.e. at the point of inscription, and focused on language rather than content. In addition, there was consistent evidence that participants made more revisions in the FL than they did in L1. For ‘total amount of revision’ and ‘immediate revisions’, there was a consistent interaction between gender and FL proficiency. The pattern of the interaction indicated two conflicting tendencies: (a) female participants appeared in general to be more motivated to make revisions in both languages than males, and (b) the less proficient they were in FL the more revisions they made. By contrast, the number of revisions made by the male participants did not depend on their FL proficiency. For ‘distant’, i.e. already written text, and ‘end’, i.e. after producing the first draft, revisions the amount of revision depended solely on the language of writing and gender. Furthermore, the results revealed that when writing in the FL, students with greater FL proficiency attended to content revision more than language revision. Findings are discussed in light of process-oriented writing research and implications for writing research and teaching are suggested.

PhotoVoice is a community and participatory action research method based in grassroots empowerment education, critical feminist theory, and documentary photography which enables people with little money, power, or status to communicate needed changes to policymakers. Prior to this in-school research project, studies of PhotoVoice in the United States focused on adolescents in out-of-school educational settings (Chio and Fandt, 2007; Strack, Magill, and McDonagh, 2004; Wilson et al., 2007; Zenkov and Harmon, 2009; The Viewfinder Project, 2010). In this study, teacher participants found that English language learners and resistant writers were motivated to identify the impact of personal and political realities in their lives in order to question existing structures and to imagine alternative futures. The use of PhotoVoice in K–12 classrooms offers an accessible, motivating, and technologically rich entry point and an authentic forum for emerging young writers to share their photos, their writing, and their stories with others to create powerful visual representations to transform existing conditions in their communities.

This study investigates English language learners’ writing strategies with reference to their gender and year of study at a university in Iran. To this end, a writing strategies questionnaire was employed to tap into the memory, cognitive, compensation, metacognitive, social, and affective strategies of 230 participants. Semi-structured interviews with participants were also conducted in addition to the questionnaire. Participants’ perceptions demonstrated no significant differences in writing strategy use for either gender or year of study. Metacognitive and cognitive strategies were found to be the most frequently used strategies by all writers, and both the low- and high-level male and female learner-writers used writing strategies with approximately the same frequency. Interviews identified sociocultural and contextual differences in students of both genders and years of study which reflect the challenges foreign language learner-writers of English face in an academic context. Further research on writing strategies taking more specific variables, task settings, and contexts into consideration is necessary to shed more light on EFL writing strategy use.