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This article deals with creating writing opportunities for ESL/EFL students so that they can feel confident in their writing abilities. The author talks about developing meaningful writing task. Writing about cultural,social and emotional experiences are critical on building confidence in the students writing. When ESL students see that their life is related to meaningful issues of the world that can be portrayed in writing, they become more engaged;Their confidence in writing begins to build.

Exploring the Role of Reformulations and a Model Text in EFL Students' Writing Performance Yang, Luxin ; Zhang, Ling The article by Yang and Zhang shares the results from a study of a three-staged writing task by ESL students in a Beijing university. The three stages are composing, comparison (of the reformulation), and revising. The students were asked to study and compose, in English, a narrative of a short picture prompt. The short narratives were then reformulated by a native English speaker, but still maintained the student's original meaning. The students then compared the two to "notice" the differences. The article clearly explains the many types of differences between the two texts; mainly language-related episodes (LRE) and content-related episodes (CRE). The students were also asked to compare their narratives with a model narrative. Though the students tended to focus more on the lexical issues, they were able to more clearly relate their current stage of English language learning with that of a native English speaker. This helped them to "notice the gap". I would recommend this to anyone focusing their attention on ESL learners.

From Tong: This paper is and interview from the teachers who teaches academic writing to post graduate students and EFL students. It provides the teachers methods to bring up an academic piece to the students so that the student will understand the purpose of the paper. Through a series of lectures and example, the teacher works on having the student find evidence and state their point of view. It's mostly on the things that most of us should know, such as a paper should start with an introduction, have body paragraphs and conclusion and don't use the word I think, I believe etc. in an academic paper, but us quotes and supporting evidence.

This paper is and interview from the teachers who teaches academic writing to post graduate students and EFL students. It provides the teachers methods to bring up an academic piece to the students so that the student will understand the purpose of the paper. Through a series of lectures and example, the teacher works on having the student find evidence and state their point of view. It's mostly on the things that most of us should know, such as a paper should start with an introduction, have body paragraphs and conclusion and don't use the word I think, I believe etc. in an academic paper, but us quotes and supporting evidence.

In this article, the author interviews a several instructors and examines the different types of assessment based on the information from the instructors and students. The general purpose assessment can have many benefits such as improve students' self-confidence and expressive abilities, check the language style and composing process, and so on. The specific purpose assessment limits individual's development and pushes students focusing on the written text rather than exploring ideas from multiple media. Assessment is also very important for students and instructors because it is closely related to the grades students will get. If the assessment is not appropriate, writing practices and activities will not attract students' attention. Also, this article agrees that general purpose assessment can be more helpful for students; my question is that whether general purpose writing is helpful for students to improve writing.

In this article, Oura discusses authentic materials and task-based lessons in ESL instruction. The more I read about motivation in the classroom and successful skill learning, the more I read about authenticity and  task-based lessons (as well as a couple of other things not explicitly covered in this article). Though I've many authors talk about these two topics, this article stands out for it's clear and concise explanations and included examples. Interestingly, the examples aren't authentic tasks for any class I foresee teaching, but I can see their value in other courses.