Not all students who enroll in postsecondary institutions have the skills needed to be successful in higher education in reading and writing. At a for-profit, online university in Minnesota, many students were not completing 4 weeks of a remedial writing program, Intervention Editing (IE). According to internal surveys and personal communications, students' struggles to complete IE were partly due to academic entitlement (AE). AE is defined as students placing the responsibility for their academic success on third parties rather than on themselves. Using the theory of self-efficacy as a framework, the purpose of this intrinsic case study was to determine the editors' best practices for addressing student AE and the additional training that they needed to mentor students who exhibited AE in IE. Data were collected using semistructured interviews with a purposeful sample of 5 editors who had completed at least 1 year of IE, a semistructured interview with the IE manager, and a document review of the IE application and university student handbook. The data from the semistructured interviews and archival documents were coded for emergent themes. The following best practices emerged on mentoring students with AE in IE: exhibiting a respectful tone with students, outlining student responsibility, stressing student personal agency, and refusing unreasonable student demands. The editors also outlined the following training needs: assistance in revising the mission and application for IE and professional development on identifying student AE. A white paper was written to document and improve editors' pedagogical strategies for mentoring AE students. This study provides editors with best practices for helping AE students in IE reclaim their self-efficacy, which may lead to improved quality of capstone writing at the local study site and reduce time to degree completion.

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Teacher quality has been identified as the most crucial factor in raising student achievement. In order for teachers—and consequently their students—to be successful, teachers must participate in life-long career development. For this reason, a great deal of time and resources are spent on professional development. However, professional development for teachers is not always effective. This study was aimed at identifying those elements that led to success in professional development conducted in one rural Utah school district. The study operated within the theoretical framework of Appreciative Inquiry, which consists of collecting evidence by interviewing successful participants to gather stories that reveal what works best in an organization. For this study, four elementary teachers in the district were identified as having made positive changes in their classrooms as a result of participation in the professional development. These teachers were interviewed and their stories were recorded. Then, their stories were analyzed and the following common themes emerged: validation, modeling with children, "doable" practices, reanimation of previously learned content and desire to learn more. These themes were then categorized into two sections that represent instructional strategies used by the presenter and teacher behaviors that were influenced by the identified instructional strategies. While research has identified many elements of quality professional development programs, these additional elements that emerged deserve further investigation. Results may provide useful information when designing professional development that will encourage teachers to take up promoted practices.

This dissertation investigates the challenges faced by learners of English for academic purposes (EAP) when required to complete writing assignments that use source texts. In order to address this problem, I explore the issue from the perspectives of applied linguistic researchers, writing program administrators, and classroom composition instructors. These three perspectives are highlighted in distinct articles that build on one another to create a more complete understanding of the challenges that EAP students face when writing from sources. The first article contains a literature review of relevant studies that explore the reading-to-write construct. Experts suggest that unintentional plagiarism, or patchwriting, can be attributed to a lack of cultural and linguistic competence. In order to address these limitations, researchers identify several reading and writing subskills that are integral to success in academic source writing. The literature review concludes with recommendations for teaching and testing contexts. The second article details a rater training evaluation study that resulted in unexpected, but welcomed, recommendations. Teacher-raters provided feedback that influenced how the institution made use of benchmark portfolios to train teacher-raters as well as inform students about writing achievement standards. The increased use of benchmark portfolios also helped to clarify classroom and program standards regarding citation, attribution, and anti-plagiarism policies. The final article is a practical guide for classroom composition instructors. I outline a recommended curriculum for teaching source writing to EAP students. The guide incorporates the findings of the literature review and the evaluation study into a collaborative and iterative pedagogical model. This recursive approach to EAP writing instruction helps students to diagnose and develop the advanced literacy subskills required for successful source integration into their writing. As a set, the three articles demonstrate that effective solutions to instructional issues can be developed when a problem is approached from multiple perspectives. Indeed, linguistics-based research, program administration, and teacher experience can be combined to produce a model for writing instruction that acknowledges principles of second-language advanced literacy and accounts for learner struggles as students develop source writing skills.

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Students in upper secondary school write in a number of different genres, and do this in school contexts as well as in their spare time. The study presented here is an overview of this activity and the genres concerned. The theoretical framework of the study is that of genre theory whereby genre is understood as a socially situated concept. The study is based on 2 000 texts gathered from students on different study programmes all over Sweden in the school year of 1996-97. The texts were written in different situations. The most important distinction made here is between test texts (i.e. texts from national tests) and self-chosen texts, which may come from schoolwriting or spare-time writing. The texts are categorized according to genre. This text inventory shows a repertoire of 33 different genres in the text material. A small number of genres, such as story, book-review and expository essay dominate the school writing. The test genres differ from this pattern in that they clearly imitate texts with a genuine communicative intent. The most frequent genres are studied further and each of them is demonstrated by an interpretative reading. This reading shows that the genres differ considerably with respect to genre character and stability of text structure. A quantitative study of text length and variation in vocabulary further shows that texts written by two categories of students, those on vocationally oriented programmes and those on programmes preparing for higher education, differ significantly. Reference cohesion is studied in a smaller sample of the texts. This lexico-semantic mechanism of cohesion proves to exhibit an interrelation with variation in vocabulary as well as with text type. One particular cohesive tie, inference, shows different patterns in texts written by the two categories of students mentioned above.

Syftet med min undersökning var att finna hur man kan frambringa goda förutsättningar för elevers skrivutveckling, med utgångspunkt i ämnet svenska med fokus på skrivundervisningen. Undersökningens empiriska material är insamlad genom kvalitativa metoder och kan i viss mån ses som en aktionsforskning. Det insamlade materialet består av pedagogiska planeringar, observationer och kvalitativa intervjuer av och med tre lärare samt elevtexter. Materialet analyserades sedan med hjälp av vetenskapliga modeller. Valet av informanter valdes ut genom att jag kände till dem sedan tidigare via min arbetsplats och från tidigare VFU-skola (verksamhetsförlagdutbildning). Intresset att utföra undersökningen hos de två lärarna på min arbetsplats föll sig naturligt eftersom lärare själva uttryckte att de utgår från samma pedagogiska planeringar men att de arbetar olika. Jag ville gärna kartlägga deras skrivundervisning för att se om deras uppfattning stämde, men främst för att se hur meningsfull skrivundervisning kan formas som jämförelse. Läraren från min VFU-skola är en lärare som ständigt vidareutbildar sig och stärker sin profession som lärare. Hen arbetar även aktivt med att finna strategier som leder till en meningsfull skrivundervisning. Min undersökning visar att elevers utveckling stärks avsevärt av att arbeta i en social gemenskap, både sett till interaktionen lärare-elev eller interaktionen elev-elev. Det framgår i undersökningen att samtliga lärare arbetar med skrivundervisning som förespråkar par- eller gruppskrivande, vilket även framgår i forskningsbakgrunden att vara en positiv effekt för en meningsfull skrivundervisning. / The purpose of my survey is to find ways to create good conditions for students' writing development, based on the subject of Swedish focusing on writing instructions. The empirical data has been collected through qualitative methods and could, to a certain extent, be seen as an action research. The collected material includes educational plans, observations and qualitative interviews with three teachers as well as analysis of student’s texts. The material was then analyzed by using scientific models. I got in contact with the informants through my workplace or from former VFU schools (vocational education school). The interest in conducting the study of the two teachers from my workplace fell naturally because they have expressed that even though their work is based on the same educational plan, their methods differ. I would like to map their writing lessons to see if their own opinion is correct, but also to see how meaningful writing lessons can be formed as a comparison. The teacher from my VFU school is a teacher who continually trains and strengthens the profession as a teacher, and actively works to find strategies that lead to meaningful writing instructions. My study shows that student development is greatly enhanced by working in a social community, both seen as the interaction teacher-student or interaction student-student. It is apparent from the survey that all teachers work with writing instruction that advocates pair- or group writing, which also appears in the research background to be a positive effect for meaningful writing lessons.

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