Methods: First, we constructed a questionnaire based on the descriptors collected from various sources in order to elicit university teachers’ views on the importance of these descriptors. A revised version was produced based on the feedback from the initial questionnaire survey. In order to further investigate what level or levels these remaining descriptors would fall into, 35 university teac...

The study examined how literacy portfolios were used as tools in a college developmental English class in which deaf students assessed their reading comprehension as well as their writing processes and products. The students' reading and writing assignments involved reflective thinking and were grounded in authentic tasks. Immediate feedback was provided. The study was multidimensional, longitu...

Writing style allows NLP tools to adjust to the traits of an author. In this paper, we explore the relation between stylistic and syntactic features and authors’ age and income. We confirm our hypothesis that for numerous feature types writing style is predictive of income even beyond age. We analyze the predictive power of writing style features in a regression task on two data sets of around ...

Writing is a form of communication. Writing together is a process of negotiating for content and meaning of a text. Tools to support collaborative writing must take into consideration the communication which takes place both around and through the text. An extended field study of two groups of four grade six students was carried out to explore the impact of a shared text editor on communication...

Wikis are promoted as collaborative writing tools that allow students to transform a text into a collective document by information sharing and group reflection. However, despite the promising collaborative capabilities of wikis, their pedagogical value regarding collaborative writing is still questionable. Wiki alone cannot make collaborative writing happen, and students do not automatically b...

Suzanne Lane directs the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program (WRAP) at MIT, is a Senior Lecturer in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing department, and teaches communication in many engineering departments She also directs the associated lab, ArchiMedia, which studies how new media are shaping professional communication practices, and designs new digital tools for teac...

We consider ideas for a tighter integration of searching a digital library while writing a paper. A prototype system based on web services is described which allows us to explore the design space of ambient search tools to support and inspire the writing process.