This study uses student reflections of previous success in academic writing to guide instructors as they design writing assignments. Seventy-one students in five classes responded to a questionnaire designed to help them identify particularly successful writing experiences and reflect on the circumstances, strategies, and methods they believed impacted their success. Student responses to these questions were analyzed to identify broad categories or themes. This process produced an "emic" or insider's view of what constitutes successful writing assignments and writing process. The findings suggest that students self report their writing as successful when the writing assignment engenders engagement, commitment, collaboration, a systematic approach, and opportunities for external confirmation. Instructors can include these considerations as they plan the writing assignments for their courses. Discovering what student writers believe constitutes good writing and what strategies most effectively help them produce high quality writing provides an opportunity to design writing assignments that empower students to join the conversation in their discourse community. If faculty are aware of student perceptions of writing assignments and use those perceptions in assignment design, the products may be more satisfying for both student writers and faculty readers.

This article is a report on the 2006 WAC Conference at Clemson University, written from the perspective of two international friends. We use our reflections on the conference as a springboard for exploring the current state of play of the WAC movement, and for suggesting future areas for development. We noted three common sets of metaphors at play throughout the conference: spatial/architectural; mechanical; and aging. We suggest that these metaphors are triply revealing. They help reveal the healthy and vibrant range of WAC activities; they point towards common problems and shared difficulties; and they illuminate some of our current blind spots about our own practice and our critical understanding thereof. We end with some suggestions relating to the future work we consider significant for the continuing flourishing of WAC, and look forward to WAC 2008.

How to write, and the relationship between images and writing, has been changing within the academy. Some indication of this can be seen in the new composition texts that emphasize reading visuals or teaching students in our largely visual culture (e.g. Faigley, George, Selfe, & Palchik , 2004; Alfano & O'Brien, 2005; Ruszkiewicz, Anderson, & Friend, 2006). However, little account has been taken of students' perceptions of the visual and the written. In order to determine whether such perceptions might alter our understandings of the relationship between the image and the word, as well as revise our pedagogy, we conducted joint research with art and design students in the UK and US. We address here four of the areas of interest that emerged from our data: students' personal relationship with writing/art and design, the role of peers and audience, engagement with process, and conceptions of time. The research supported some common assumptions about teaching writing to students with visual preferences, and challenged others. As a result of these student voices, we offer some reflections that reinforce current pedagogies and suggest changes of our classroom methods.

"Critical Visual Literacy: Multimodal Communication Across the Curriculum" makes the case for expanding the pedagogical space and communication possibilities in undergraduate communication-intensive and linked (learning community) courses by allowing students to create multimodal texts that deal with civic and cultural and/or discipline-specific themes. We argue that, rather than diluting the opportunities for rhetorical education—now comprised of critical literacy, visual literacy, and critical technological literacy in today's increasingly fast-moving visual and electronic cultural environment—multimodal composing more meaningfully reflects the environment in which students receive and generate text today. Using a theory base that draws from the literatures of composition and CAC, visual literacy, new media theory and ecology, and the theory and pedagogy of critical technological literacy, we make a case for this expansion of communication opportunities in undergraduate communication-intensive classes.

Faculty resistance to Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is an issue that has been recognized by WAC program directors and practitioners for decades, yet it remains unresolved. Perhaps the problem is not resistance per se, but how we interpret and react to it. Faculty resistance is typically viewed as an impediment to the pedagogical change WAC programs hope to achieve. Moreover, the label of "resistance" is often used without further examination of the underlying causes. Based on research and experience as doctoral Writing Fellows in the Borough of Manhattan Community College WAC Program, we argue that so-called resistances are often justified concerns in regard to implementing WAC under given institutional, disciplinary, departmental, and personal constraints. We also suggest that if we listen and respond to these concerns, they become means to facilitate faculty engagement with WAC. By working through their concerns and adapting WAC to their context, faculty can take ownership of WAC and further develop the practice. Thus, what at first appears to be an impediment to deep-rooted pedagogical change ”resistance” can be used to encourage faculty to make WAC their own.

International students travel in many ways. First of all geographically: they move from one country to another. Secondly, they travel through their own identities: they have to find a new place in a new context by familiarizing themselves with new values and customs, while making sure they meet the requirements their studies ask of them. Writing an academic text is almost always one of these requirements. Faculty assign their (international) students to write academic texts because they want to know whether or not they comprehend the content of the course they have offered. Some faculty also want to know whether or not students have familiarized themselves with academic genres and conventions, which may vary according to country or discipline. Consequently, when faculty ask international students to write an academic text, they are requiring them to undertake yet a third journey. In the process, international students may travel through a variety of genre conventions, exploring the conventions of their host country in combination with the conventions in their (new) discipline. In addition to these travels, they also have to find their own voices and their own identities while writing a text. Often, when they receive papers that they consider unsatisfactory, faculty assume that international students' capacities in academic writing are deficient. In this article, we will show how the design of two academic writing workshops for an international and interdisciplinary masters' program helped students in their interdisciplinary and international writing processes, not by working from a deficiency model, but by working from a contextual model. We will present the results in the conclusion by way of a pedagogical rough guide for teaching academic writing to international students.

The Faculty of Engineering, University of Melbourne, enrolls a culturally and linguistically diverse group of ESL students into its postgraduate coursework (M.A.) and Ph.D. research programs, many of whom also enroll in a semester-long (12 week) English for Academic Purposes (EAP) class called 'Presenting Academic Discourse--Engineering.' Enrollees include those who do not meet the minimum language requirements and others who are recommended to take the course by their thesis supervisors. During the research period discussed here, a majority of students who completed the classes were from Southeast Asia, and EAP class size averaged twenty five students. Initially most were coursework masters students; as time passed, an increasingly significant number came from research (Masters and PhD) programs. The combination of research and coursework students created a slight tension in that the first group had immediate need to write a literature review and the second did not. These students arrive in Australia with varied levels of English proficiency, diverse cultural backgrounds, and prior educational experiences. Students from Asia often come not only with limited English proficiency but also with other academic practices that may be obstacles to good writing in a Western academic context, including conservative rather than critical learning approaches and issues with establishing an academic voice through writing (Ballard & Clanchy 1984; Ramanathan & Atkinson 1999). Ward (2001) notes that Engineering students in Thailand often learn strategies to avoid reading engineering texts in English in their undergraduate training, a practice which may perhaps extend to other Asian countries. Not surprisingly, a limited ability to read required texts is not conducive to learning to write a literature review. This paper has foregrounded the need for students to understand and engage in critical analysis through an assessment process that culminates in a literature review task and oral presentation based on discipline-specific research sources.