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The prewriting phase is essential for academic writing since it sets a foundation for quality research and effective writing. This study aims to boost student engagement and improve academic writing skills through the panel discussion strategy. Traditional instructional methods and specific prewriting techniques appear insufficient for capturing students’ attention. Furthermore, lecturing frequently appears didactic, leading to limited constructive feedback because of large class sizes, with activities typically perceived as passive. This study explores students' focus and responses during discussions and writing research papers to improve their referencing skills and the quality of their arguments. It also assesses the participants' preferences and interactions in panel discussions during prewriting activities. The sample for this study consisted of 73 students enrolled in the ENG 102 course at General Education Department, the Modern College of Business and Science, utilizing the convenience sampling technique. The data collection tools included presentations, observation checklists, and surveys. The findings highlight the effectiveness of panel discussions as an innovative instructional strategy, fostering a more supportive environment among peers that encourages students to build confidence as researchers while adhering to academic standards. However, the variability in the sources consulted and the overall referencing quality indicate a need for further guidance. This research further confirms that panel discussions enhance students’ abilities, particularly in citing and producing more organized work, ensuring better feedback, exploring additional sources, assisting with citations, and conducting peer reviews.

Social media can benefit English as a foreign language (EFL) learning, but learners need a deliberate approach to pursue deeper learning. To this end, the aim of this study was to design a prewriting activity using a mobile-based concept map to assess participants’ writing performance in different aspects of writing. The designed prewriting activity comprised (1) structuralized private knowledge, (2) explicit knowledge affordance, and (3) consolidated social activities. To evaluate the effects of the prewriting activity, an EFL prewriting experiment was conducted. In this experiment, 80 participants in a high school in Taiwan were evenly assigned to a control or experimental group. The participants’ writing essays and learning perceptions were collected, and the analysis results indicated that (1) a significant difference was found in the aspects of communicative quality, linguistic accuracy, and linguistic appropriacy, and (2) the questionnaire statistics aligned with similar findings that the prewriting activity helped learners’ writing from communicative quality and social collaboration perspectives.

To motivate learners to engage in writing courses and help to improve their writing performance, a mobile-game-based collaborative prewriting approach was proposed in this study. A quasi-experiment was implemented by recruiting two classes of non-English major students from a university in northeastern China. Class 1 learned to write under the guidance of the mobile-game-based collaborative prewriting method, while Class 2 in the conventional teacher-centered approach. Their writing performance was measured to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. By analyzing the scores of students’ writings in pre-test and post-test and the content of student discussions in prewriting activities, it was found that, the students in Class 1 who focused on content talk in group discussions improved more in organization of content, originality, fluency, and elaboration than those in Class 2 in post test. In addition, the findings showed that the incidence of different types of idea units in collaborative prewriting discussions had significant correlation with the ratings of different dimensions, respectively, in individual writings. Furthermore, the majority of volunteer students who finished the questionnaire endorsed the mobile-game-based collaborative prewriting approach.

Using a smartphone is a very convenient way to learn languages in modern life. To understand the impact of the immersive environment created by a smartphone on essay writing in Chinese for second language learners, a study was conducted on 36 Vietnamese students in their first year at a university in Taiwan. This study adopted an experimental research design that lasted for 4 weeks. The participants were randomly divided into control and experimental groups. Two essay writing activities were conducted. All of the research elements, including the teacher, teaching process, learning duration, and writing topics (except in the prewriting stage) were identical in the two groups. Writing ideas were collected within 20 min, and the control group looked at pictures before writing, while the experimental group used the Google Cardboard device with a smartphone to watch 360° videos before writing. After the prewriting stage, both groups wrote an essay about a topic based on what they had planned during the prewriting stage. The results indicated that the experimental group had significantly higher composition scores than the control group. Interview results also suggested that most students were glad to have tried using Google Cardboard to watch 360° videos, and were also highly willing to continue using it in future writing classes.

Situated within the historical and current state of writing and adolescent literacy research, this systematic literature review screened 3504 articles to determine the prevalent themes in current research on writing tasks in content-area classrooms. Each of the 3504 studies was evaluated and coded using seven methodological quality indicators. The qualitative synthesis of studies is organized by the overarching categories of context, cognition, and content. The studies are further grouped by relevant themes to explore how the incorporation of writing tasks into content-area instruction benefits the secondary students' content-area learning and knowledge acquisition. Primary themes include the elements of explicit strategy and inquiry-based instruction, the impact of prewriting models, the role of metacognition and journaling, and the writing-related implications for content-area assessment. Recommendations for future research are offered. Additionally, practical implications for secondary contentarea teachers are presented.

Numerous studies have investigated the effects of prewriting tasks on writing quality and language (e.g., individual vs. collaborative planning, text‐chat vs. face‐to‐face [FTF] discussion, etc.). Recent meta‐analyses have found a small advantage for text chat on writing, but no studies involved logographic languages, for which character learning may limit and tax language production. In this study we explore this issue, as university learners of Chinese (N = 10) engaged in prewriting discussions orally and via text chat followed by a timed‐writing task. Results show that during FTF planning, students engaged in talk that was greater in terms of discussion length and number of turns; in students' writing, FTF planning resulted in increased lexical complexity and syntactic richness. Our results contradict theoretical perspectives suggesting that text chat might be more advantageous, as well as one empirical study by Liao. Finally, we discuss the implications for learning to write in a non‐alphabetic language. The Challenge Researchers have explored the effects of pre‐task planning modes (e.g., face‐to‐face versus text chat) on learners' writing performance, finding advantages for text chats.  However, English has traditionally been the L2 investigated rather than logographic languages (e.g., Chinese).  Do such findings hold true with non‐alphabetic languages?  Which pre‐task planning mode is more beneficial?

This study explores the dynamic, interactive nature of digital drawings and writing in a knowledge building community in which students used a multimedia online environment—Knowledge Forum—to represent and advance ideas in the field of optics. The research employs a mixed-methods case study to collect and analyze multimedia notes created by 22 fourth-grade students. Graphical notes—notes containing drawings—included more idea units and more sophisticated ideas than non-graphical notes. Quality of drawing also correlated with idea improvement in Knowledge Forum notes, with ratings of idea improvement based on conceptual understanding of optics. Overall, findings revealed significant advantages of online drawing for Grade 4 students, with case-study analysis revealing the many ways in which graphics complement writing and contribute to knowledge building.

Little is known about the effects of various planning and revising conditions on composition quality in experimental or TESOL education research. This study examined the effects of planning conditions (planning, prolonged planning, free writing, and control), subplanning conditions (task-given, task-content-given, and task-contentorganization-given), and revising conditions (initial-essay-accessible and initial-essay-removed) on the text quality of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' argumentative writing. Participants were 108 19-year-old Chinese EFL learners. The researchers assigned the participants to the experimental and control conditions through stratified random sampling. Results show that the free-writing condition enhanced the quality of the learners' writing; the task-contentgiven condition and the task-content-organization-given condition produced significantly better quality texts than the task-given condition; and no significant difference in the text quality between the initial-essay-accessible and initial-essay-removed conditions was found. Free writing facilitated content retrieval, which enhanced the overall text quality. The task-content-given condition and the taskcontent-organization-given condition successfully reduced the cognitive load of the task on the EFL writers' working memory resources. The initial-essay-removed condition resulted in better quality final drafts, albeit with no statistically significant difference. Implications for further research are discussed.

This article examines how a high school English language arts teacher fosters argumentative writing skills in a culturally and linguistically diverse classroom by leveraging students’ dialogic strengths, framing argumentation as a social and critical process.

The study investigated how different prewriting instructions support English as a Foreign Language student writers in their generation of arguments and therefore improved the quality of text and self-efficacy in writing. Participants included 142 Vietnamese students at the upper-intermediate level in English. Three forms of prewriting interventions including focused freewriting, Tchart, and group debate were examined on five argumentation strategies, text quality, and writing self-efficacy. In a three-group pretest-posttest design with three experimental panels, one prewriting intervention was tested in comparison to the other two interventions, and the sequence effects of the order of the three prewriting instructions could also be tested. Mixed model analyses yielded two main results. First, global quality and writing self-efficacy were significantly influenced by the type of prewriting conditions. Second, about the sequence effect, an individual-based prewriting instruction, if placed after a group-based instruction, could consistently support students in global quality and variation of types of argumentation strategies. We discuss the questions of the pros and cons of the research design and the scaffolding function of the prewriting instructions in the last part of the paper.