In a student-centered classroom, learners have to be actively involved both in learning and assessment, which in itself needs to become a learning tool. Therefore, students need to understand and be given the opportunity to apply assessment criteria themselves. Through self-assessment of their writing, they enhance their self-awareness and become autonomous learners capable of self-improvement and meta-cognition (Liang 2014, Nielsen 2012).Self- and peer assessment are helpful tools that have been discussed in the literature, but the reliability of self-assessment is still debated (see for example Birjandi and Tamjid 2012, Matsuno 2009, Poehner 2012). The present study adds to the existing research by offering data that is not based on observation, but stems from a comparison of self- and instructor assessment where both parties used the same specific assessment rubrics. Assigning numerical values to the rubrics allowed for quantitative results. The data was collected in four classes of students in a course called ‘Introduction to Academic Writing’ at Deree - The American College of Greece. The outcome of the study did not confirm expectations with regard to reliability of self-assessment, and recommendations for future rubric-based studies are included. Self-assessment should be used as a formative and diagnostic learning tool, especially for weaker students, to foster development of learner autonomy.

This paper outlines the development of the “Reader Engagement framework”, a tool for helping emerging writers understand what might keep readers reading – or stop readers from reading – a text. The Reader Engagement framework has been under development for the past five years, primarily in the context of undergraduate English proficiency classes at a large university in Flanders. Using the principles of constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz 2014), a preliminary framework was sketched using as data the margin comments of one reader who noted points of engagement or disengagement while reading student texts. Additional rounds of data collection included the engagement perceptions of student-readers, as well as those of teacher-readers from various disciplines. Thus far 1087 readers have been consulted, and the categories in the framework seem to be largely saturated. Though further refinement is necessary, the framework has been found successful as a teaching tool, and as an assessment and feedback tool. It also seems to have potential for offering writers a new way of conceptualising writing.

It is a remark credited to several great writers: the admission, ‘I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you this long one instead’. Spilling your guts is easy; being concise takes time. Short is harder; content-rich, succinct writing requires supreme skill and considered application. This short paper argues the case that small is beautiful when we think about setting university assignment word counts.

This paper highlights a rather overlooked area of academic writing: that of publication by teachers of academic writing. The research focuses on exploring UK teachers’ views of the importance of publishing in terms of its impact on their practice, profession, and institution. Interviews were carried out with nine teachers of academic writing who worked within English for Academic Purposes at UK universities and were actively publishing. Data was collected in the form of their views and accounts of experiences of publishing, and the obstacles they had encountered. The study concludes that publishing by teachers of academic writing is considered a valuable parallel activity to their teaching, understanding and support of students with writing. It also seems that publishing could improve both the teachers’ individual reputation in their institutions and the status of their profession. However, it was also noticeable that many barriers to publishing exist, including lack of time, support and mentoring, as well as a more serious problem of hostility from line managers. Networks, collaborative initiatives and more informal writing opportunities may encourage teachers of academic writing to publish more themselves.

What does it mean to take a risk when I write? Can I? Should I? The idea of risk has preoccupied a number of scholars recently, including those interested in discourse, writing and education (e.g. McWilliam 2009 and Thesen and Cooper 2014). This paper attempts to trace a concept of risk in academic writing, by asking questions about what “belongs” in academic texts and making use of bodies of knowledge that seem to be beyond the pale of academic discourse – magic, the occult, exorcisms. By thinking of risk as a side-effect of genres and traditions, I use the language of magic and the occult as a device to apprehend what academic reading cannot usually perceive, when there may be more in a text than academic reading can deal with. I draw examples from three inventive academic writers (Mary Scott, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and Nick Sousanis) to think about the benefits and consequences of risk in academic writing, and the limits of what Karen Bennett (2007) calls English Academic Discourse (EAD). I argue for a kind of writing that might, in the words of Jacques Derrida, anticipate the future ‘in the form of an absolute danger’ (1997: 5).

Due to the internationalisation of universities and the globalisation of academic cultures, academic writing is influenced by several writing traditions, heterogeneous reader expectations, as well as internal and external multilingualism. The programme MultiConText (Multilingual Writing in Academic Contexts) at the International Writing Centre at Göttingen University offers a pedagogical approach which deals with these aspects and aims at fostering writing skills for international, multilingual contexts. Writing workshops within the programme target students of all faculties, especially students of international study programmes. The pedagogical approach takes into account Canagarajah’s (2013) idea of translingual practice and the concept of language repertoires (Busch 2017), encouraging students to use all available language codes as a resource in writing. In order to strengthen this approach’s foundation, interviews with scholars working in international research teams were conducted. These interviews focused on the strategies scholars use when writing for publication, especially those for writing in multilingual contexts. Results from the interviews were adapted for classroom use to show students a variety of possibilities to deal with multilingualism in writing. This article makes a suggestion as to how theoretical concepts of multilingualism may be investigated in interviews and how they might be put into practice in writing assignments.

This research aims to evaluate the impact of an inclusive writing approach, which strives to embed academic literacy into subject curriculum, an initiative that ran across schools at a UK-based post-1992 university in 2015-16. As an exploratory investigation, this research drew on a redesigned social science transitional module, where academic writing provision is closely in line with the subject content and assessments. This project explores student perceptions and experiences of the embedded writing provision and the extent to which the intervention contributed to student attainment. Data were drawn from focus group discussions, where 41 students participated, and from student grades for the comparison of attainment rates across 2014-15 and 2015-16. The focus groups were analysed using NVivo 11 to identify key themes in relation to student views of the embedded academic literacy provision. Student grades were explored using MS Excel for the relative progress across academic years. The findings reveal the positive impact of the provision on students’ attainment and confidence as learners and writers in higher education. This paper concludes with pedagogical implications and a discussion of potential areas for further research to investigate the diversification of support modes as to accommodate different learning styles of students.

Within the Learning Development community there are few professional development opportunities or resources for new entrants to the profession, particularly with regard to conducting individual academic writing tutorials. The current study seeks to address this by analysing the talk of individual academic writing tutorials in order to better understand how tutorials are organised and conducted, how identities and relationships are established and how learning is developed. We analysed the audio recordings of one-to-one academic writing tutorials and used conversation analysis methodology to identify features of effective practice. The analysis revealed an overarching three-part sequential structure to the tutorials and identified several features of effective practice in the middle phase where advice-giving occurs. The key finding was that indirect and complex processes of highlighting problems and arriving at solutions are useful to develop learners’ skills and autonomy. The application of these insights has the potential to contribute to a more evidence-informed reflective community of Learning Development practitioners.

One of the goals for tutors of academic writing is to help student writers tailor their writing processes to different writing projects so that students adapt what they know about one type of writing to another. This ability to write in different contexts can be explained by the theory of transfer of learning, which is generally defined as the ability to take something learned in one context and adapt, apply, or remix knowledge or skills in new contexts, including educational, civic, personal, or professional (Driscoll 2011). The mind, seeing similarities to what is already known, extends what is similar to another activity (Haskell 2001: 11). Tutors of writing need to know about transfer. Six categories of transfer – content, context, genres, writers’ prior knowledge, students’ ability to reflect, and dispositions – offer a lens to help researchers, trainers of tutors, or tutors (whether of L1 or L2 writers) to better identify where and how transfer could happen so that tutors are more prepared to look for opportunities to tutor for transfer. This paper offers insights into how these categories help tutors of academic writing who want to enhance students’ acquisition of academic skills.

Peer review fosters student critical thinking and self-evaluation (Wood and Kurzel 2008). Numerous studies show that peer review is effective in improving student writing (Althauser and Darnall 2001, Bean 2011), and that it benefits the students receiving as well as those giving the feedback (van den Berg, Admiraal and Pilot 2006). However, these issues have not been greatly researched in Greece. Greek culture bestows great authority to the teacher and students are not accustomed to peer feedback.I have embarked on a small-scale, exploratory, classroom-based study conducted at Deree - The American College of Greece where English is the medium of instruction. Data include first and revised drafts of three academic writing assignments, written peer comments, and learner reflections on the peer reviewing experience. To further explore student attitudes toward peer review, I also administered an online questionnaire. Initial quantitative and qualitative analyses reveal (a) in general student reviewers and reviewees alike accept peer review as an appropriate pedagogical activity; (b) students revise their writing taking into account peer feedback and (c) as reviewers, students were not more critical in giving feedback when doing peer review anonymously. Preliminary results are interpreted with an understanding of the limitations of the ongoing study.

After working in Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE) in the United Kingdom for over thirty years, and completing a doctoral thesis on the subject of lecturers’ perceptions of academic writing in HE (French 2014), it became very clear to me that many students and lecturers (although that is a subject of another paper) experience the processes of producing academic writing in very physical and emotional ways. In this paper, I will be discussing how my students often articulated the intensity and emotional nature of their academic writing experiences using words like ‘fear’, ‘frustration’, ‘outrage’, ‘exhaustion’ and ‘yearning’. This emotion and strength of feeling drew me to consider the relationship between the development of a positive writing identity and the affective domain. Subsequently, in my practice as a tutor in HE, I incorporated the affective domain into my work and seek here to stimulate debate with subject lecturers about how important emotions, even negative emotions like confusion and anxiety, can be to the development of a positive academic writing identity for students. The paper argues that, by using the affective domain as a pedagogic springboard, subject lecturers can formulate more collaborative, supportive and emotionally sensitive communities of writing practice.

Writing center directors have to face complex leadership tasks, but often do not have a background in management or administration studies. This study asks how they accomplish this demanding effort. Following a grounded theory approach, 16 writing centers in the USA were visited and expert interviews with the center directors were carried out. In bringing together the emerging concepts of the empirical work with the theoretical framework of the study of institutional work, this article shows that writing center directors transfer the pedagogy of writing centers to their leadership tasks. They use a stance of collaborative learning to deal with the challenges in their everyday work and to institutionalize their writing centers.

Students are expected to write complex text genres in higher education contexts. Such complexity stems not only from the nature of the knowledge they convey but also from the norms and conventions adopted by the academic communities that use such texts. Among those genres, the dissertation seems particularly complex, considering both the set of problems related to its configuration (structure, language, norms of reference), and the factors that constrain its production (methodological procedures, student/supervisor relationship, time management, institutional constraints, individual nature of the writing process). The present study seeks to identify and analyze (i) students’ perspectives and representations of the dissertation writing process, and (ii) the problems that arise in the writing process. It is based on semi-structured interviews with students, at three different universities in the North of Portugal, who recently completed their dissertations in Humanities, Education and Engineering. The analysis is based on the assumption that writing a dissertation involves not only cognitive, linguistic and social dimensions, but also emotional aspects that can condition it decisively.

Previous classroom observations, and examination of students’ written drafts, had suggested that when summarising or paraphrasing source texts, some of our students were using software tools (for example the copy-paste function and synonym lookup) in possibly unhelpful ways. To test these impressions we used screen capture software to record 20 university students paraphrasing a short text using the word-processing package on a networked PC, and analysed how they utilised software to fulfil the task. Participants displayed variable proficiency in using word-processing tools, and very few accessed external sites. The most frequently enlisted tool was the synonym finder. Some of the better writers (assessed in terms of their paraphrase quality) availed themselves little of software aids. We discuss how teachers of academic writing could help students make more efficient and judicious use of commonly available tools, and suggest further uses of screen capture in teaching and researching academic writing.

All across continental Europe and the United Kingdom, academic writing teaching or development is slowly becoming part and parcel of existing institutional frameworks intended to enhance student writing and professional research communication. While more and more universities are investing in such infrastructures of support internally, a relatively new phenomenon is also consolidating: the steady rise of privatised, for-profit writing development businesses that draw their client base from academic institutions. Prompted by EATAW 2017, the conference organised at Royal Holloway, University of London, this think piece raises some fundamental questions regarding the privatisation of academic writing development and invites colleagues to consider its assumptions, emergence and implications in their local, higher education contexts.

English-medium instruction (EMI) in higher education presents challenges at many different levels for educators and students. One of the challenges is disciplinary writing, as students typically study disciplinary content through, and also write in, English as a second or a foreign language. The present, exploratory intervention study uses the redesign of a writing assignment in a Master’s level engineering course at a Swedish university to investigate challenges of disciplinary writing in an EMI context. The study describes how collaboration between content and communication staff helped unpack some of the challenges that students faced. The results show that the students’ texts improved and that the redesign helped them to better adjust to a genre partially new to them. The study also underscores the value for programmes to have a clear plan for writing. The planning is likely to benefit from collaboration between disciplinary and communication faculty, as these participants bring different knowledge to the process.

This paper presents an intervention that was created in a United Kingdom university Classics department where approximately 60% of undergraduate students came from diverse educational backgrounds to study classical Greco-Roman culture, but had not studied it before at school/college. To equip these more than usually diverse ‘transition’ students with a skills base to aid both their academic progress and future employability, a team-taught mandatory module was designed for first term, first-year undergraduates, which embedded two workshops and an assessment exercise on academic writing with eight workshops on other skills, most of which are both discipline-specific and ‘transferable’. The in-term assessments tested understanding of the skills taught, while a final exercise required students to reflect on their longer learning process over the term, evaluating development in their academic writing in the context of other discipline-specific skills. This module serves as a model for adoption both within academic departments and also at an institutional level for early stage academic writing training in a subject-related context, which can serve as a first step on a longer ladder of skills acquisition over the degree for enhancing both academic success and employability awareness.

A Psychology academic skills module and challenges in its delivery are outlined. Adaptations described include embedding specialist support for the teaching of academic writing and linking content to assessments and careers. Increased student satisfaction and qualitative feedback indicated that changes were beneficial. The need for further evaluation is discussed.

Novice tutors often conceptualize learning how to tutor as a kind of metaphorical journey, one with a compelling, but not fully recognized, destination. Cognitively speaking, they are learning how to tutor while at the same time learning what the activity of tutoring means. This paper seeks to position tutor education within the conceptually rich field of teacher education, especially as it is informed by insights from sociocultural theory (SCT). Using tutors’ reflective narratives, the author illuminates how orientation to task, a fundamental concept in SCT, changes over time through frequent and intensive reflective writing, when carried out in combination with practical tutoring activities. Specifically, the data suggests that proleptic engagement (identifying elements of the future expert self in ongoing novice activity) and affective engagement are important signals of development. The journey is particularly challenging because – to interrogate the metaphor – the novice is trying to build the track while riding the train to the terminus.

This paper discusses implementation of blog writing as a formative assessment within a final year undergraduate module. Drawing on students’ perceptions and experiences, it proposes that blogging offers a more inclusive writing genre for Higher Education than traditional forms of academic scholarship.

In a Higher Education environment where evidence-based practice and accountability are highly valued, most writing practitioners will be familiar with direct requests or less tangible pressures to demonstrate that their teaching has a positive impact on students’ writing skills. Although such evaluations are not devoid of risk and the need for them is contested, it can be argued that it is better to engage with them, as this can avoid the danger of overly simplistic forms of measurements being imposed. The current paper engages with this question by proposing the conceptual basis for a new measurement tool. Based on Amabile’s Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), developed to assess creativity, the tool develops the idea of consensual assessment of writing as a methodology that can provide robust data through systematic measurement. At the same time, I argue consensual assessment reflects the evaluation of writing in real life situations more closely than many of the methodologies for writing assessment used in other contexts, primarily large scale tests. As such, it would allow writing practitioners to go beyond ethnographic methods, or self- reporting, in order to obtain greater insight into the ways in which their teaching helps change students’ actual writing, without sacrificing the complexity of writing as social interaction, which is fundamental to an academic literacies approach.

The process of writing has changed due to the increased availability of digital tools that can facilitate the task of writing in one’s first language (L1) or second language (L2). There has been research on the use of tools by students writing in a foreign language, on the impact of digital tools on student writing, and on the use of digital tools for K-12 writing instruction. However, it seems no studies have investigated the use of digital tools by writing professionals. The aim of this exploratory study was to learn about the use of digital tools by writing professionals – researchers and instructors – when writing in first or second language. The results showed that some writing professionals use a variety of tools throughout the writing process, whereas others use very few tools, and that the patterns of use appear to be similar when writing in L1 or L2. The results informed a new categorization of tools, the various types and subtypes classified by purpose. The study offers a fresh perspective on the use of digital tools for writing by writing professionals.DialogueWe invite responses to this study with examples of the use of digital tools for writing and writing instruction. Case studies, short investigative papers and provocations will be collated and published in a future issue of the Journal of Academic Writing, as outlined in the submissions section of the journal. A fuller invitation is framed at the end of this article.

Many students in Germany undertaking academic writing tasks consult one of the numerous German-language books on research writing. Curiously, these works tend to downplay or ignore creativity, compared to their American counterparts. A hermeneutic and rhetorical study that examines the structure, content, and style of 21 German books on research writing with the help of framing theory reveals that, firstly, the rationale given to readers for learning how to do a research project is usually that it enables them to complete difficult tasks and thus to graduate successfully – the potentially fascinating aspects, such as learning through writing, and the possibility of advancing the field are rarely mentioned. Secondly, when defining good academic research, US books stress exploration and invention based on wrestling with questions, while the German ones mostly emphasize rules, correctness within a fixed system, and the mastery of techniques. Finally, in the 21 works, academic work primarily comes across as a solitary, linear process neatly divided into separate phases, not as a holistic, discursive practice that takes place within the research community. The likely reasons for this phenomenon highlight several crucial challenges German writing teachers and consultants are facing: as the rhetoric/composition and writing consultancy scene in Germany is vibrant but somewhat marginalized at universities and relatively new, there is no tradition of mandatory composition courses influenced by writing studies with a creative component, and most guidebooks on research are not by writing experts but by professors in other fields. Moreover, there is still widespread belief that creativity cannot be taught, and that students’ fascination with their chosen field of study should be taken for granted, so that neither need to be mentioned in primers. Terminology might also play a role; the German term for ‘research (writing)’, ‘Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten’ or ‘academic practice’, already appears to emphasize correctness over discovery.

Andrews) is our new Book Reviews Editor, and has launched into the role enthusiastically.We have two book reviews this issue and look forward to expanding JoAW's survey of current Academic Writing literature in future general issues.Mark also brings a new set of connections to the journal, and we hope to increase the breadth of JoAW's engagement with, and coverage of, the field's leading edge.

Although peer review is a common practice in writing classrooms, there are still few studies that analyze written patterns in students’ peer reviews across multiple institutional contexts. Based on a sample of approximately 50,000 peer reviews written by students at the University of South Florida (USF), Malmö University (MAU), and the University of Tartu (UT), this study examines how students formulate criticism and praise, negotiate power relations, and express authority and expertise in reviewing their peers’ writing. The study specifically focuses on features of affective language, including adjectives, expressions of suggestion, boosters and hedges, cognitive verbs, personal pronouns, and adversative transitions. The results show that across all three contexts, the peer reviews contain a blend of foci, including descriptions and evaluations of peer texts, directives or suggestions for revisions, responses to the writer or the text, and indications of reader interpretations. Across all three contexts, peer reviews also contain more positively glossed responses than negatively glossed responses. By contrast, certain features of affective language pattern idiosyncratically in different contexts; these distinctions can be explained variously according to writer experience, nativeness, and institutional context. The findings carry implications for continued research and for instructional guidance for student peer review.

This article focuses on how supervisors and students perceive their responsibilities at the beginning of the thesis writing process. Students in general do little research writing before beginning their Bachelor’s or Master’s programs and they often find academic writing to be a complicated task, which means that many do not complete their thesis writing within the stipulated time. A survey was conducted at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) and the Department of Child and Youth Studies (BUV) at Stockholm University, Sweden. In addition to the distribution of responsibility, participants ranked the importance of four issues: the student’s own collected data in the thesis; language, layout, and correct referencing; the thesis as an excellent product; and the student’s development of his or her competence. In general, students and supervisors agreed on the distribution of responsibilities between them and the importance of some of the issues. The opinions were coherent, considering the survey was conducted early in the thesis writing period. It is suggested that future research includes an in-depth investigation of cultural differences between departments.

This is a review of the book Naming What We Know. Threshold Concepts of Writing Students (Classroom Edition) by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle (Utah State University Press, 2016).

Year in, year out, scholarly and trade presses alike release new books on academic writing for publication, leading Kristin Solli recently to ask, 'Do we need another book offering advice on academic writing?' (2017: 59). These works typically either focus on writing for publication within a particular field or discipline (e.g. Donovan 2017, Egbert and Sanden 2015, Saver 2011) or present the impression of being more broadly applicable, while still being grounded in the author's (or authors') relatively narrow experiences (e.g. Jalongo and Saracho 2016, Johnson 2011, Rocco and Hatcher 2011). Helen Sword, approaching the situation empirically, assesses authors of both types of works: 'Successful academics who have never been formally trained as writers themselves are often eager to relay the "tricks of the trade" to younger colleagues, without realizing that what worked for them might not necessarily work for everyone ' (2017: 75). Oblivious of the genre to which they belong, the least helpful books of this ilk exist in an imaginary vacuum.

Librarians and academic staff suggest a relationship between the quality of references which students use in academic assignments and the marks received. This study tested that assertion by using a citation analysis methodology to assess the quality of bibliographies written by undergraduate nursing students at the University of York.Bibliographies from sixty essays across three modules were analysed, noting the types and quantities of references used and whether references were sourced independently or included in the module’s reading list. Each bibliography was given an overall quality rating: ‘Poor’, ‘Average’ or ‘Good’. This rating was compared with the mark the student was awarded for the essay.Results showed that, whilst students demonstrated the ability to locate items independently, the quality of those items was often poor. Generally, quality of selected sources and bibliographies improved as students progressed through the programme. There was an association between higher quality bibliographies and higher assignment marks.The study concludes that critical thinking skills are vital for nursing students to develop academically, as these skills will be tested within a clinical environment once students have completed their degree. A benefit for students is the conclusion that using higher quality sources results in higher marks.

The use of epistemic markers – words and phrases employed to show differing degrees of certainty and hesitation – is an important element of academic writing. Previous research has suggested that this is an area in which non-native speakers (NNS) struggle. Studies have indicated that NNS are prone to making overly strong statements and exhibit less range and sophistication in the devices that they do employ than native speakers (NS). However, there have as yet been few studies examining the use of such language by advanced NNS students in university academic writing. This corpus-based study examines the ways in which NS and advanced NNS students use epistemic markers in university academic writing. Two corpora totalling 31 659 words were formed from the discussion and conclusion sections of a written university assignment and analyzed for use of epistemic markers. The results indicate that though both groups employ the language at comparable rates and display similar levels of commitment in their writing, these NNS writers display some features of epistemic marker use found to be generally characteristic of other NNS writers.

Writing academic texts in one’s native language (L1) and – even more – in a foreign language (FL) places high cognitive demands on students. In order to cope with these demands, writers should learn to adapt their writing methods flexibly to their tasks, depending on the language and the genre they are writing in. Crucial aspects here are the methods of revising because the need for linguistic revision will be higher in the FL text than in the L1 text; at the same time, it should not be the main or only focus of the revision process. In order to analyse the differences in L1 and FL revision, a study was set up in which ten L1 German students wrote academic essays in German and in English. The production process was protocolled with the help of keylogging, so that the revising processes could be analysed. The results show that the participants revised similarly in both the L1 and the FL. They focussed on the same aspects (content, typing mistakes, and language errors that were not L1 related). At the same time, there are differences in finer grades. These differences in revision do not seem to be a conscious decision, however, but are rather the result of the higher cognitive demands in FL academic writing and the lower degree of language knowledge. Additionally, the analysis of the final FL texts showed that most of the errors that were not corrected were L1 induced. When one looks at the revisions, however, one sees that hardly any revisions were made in these aspects: the L1 influence went more or less unnoticed. For writing pedagogy, this means that one has to put a higher focus on revision strategies during teaching, in order to give students the tools to write successfully in L1 and in FL, and to motivate them in enhancing their papers.

Writing Partners projects have been instituted as ways of providing student writers with audiences other than their classmates and instructors. These projects may take various forms: e.g. high school students are paired with students at another school or with college students, etc. This article outlines a new approach to Writing Partners projects that utilized trained peer review and pairing of students from two successive academic programs related to writing: the English for Academic Purposes Program and the Writing Program. This project was piloted at Deree – The American College of Greece in Spring 2014. The aim of the project was to investigate whether this practice would have an impact on the participants’ writing abilities and attitudes towards writing.The findings of the project suggest that extending a community of writers “beyond classroom walls” (Gillis 1994: 64) and across academic program boundaries, and utilizing trained peer review, may enhance students’ writing skills and positively affect their attitude towards writing. This has been shown through qualitative and quantitative analysis of the students’ revised writing and an examination of their written reflections. The article proposes that similar Writing Partners projects be implemented at different institutions to enhance student writers’ skills.

As part of well-planned formative assessment, feedback can help students to understand the demands of a summative assessment task, evaluate their current level of performance, and then find ways to close the gap. As students take a more active role in this process, their feedback can be thought of as becoming ‘feedforward’ since it serves a specific purpose and drives student action. As the value of formative assessment design is becoming emphasised in higher education, summative assessment practices need to be re-evaluated in terms of how well they support learning as opposed to just supporting valid judgements of student performance. However, despite significant discussion of Assessment for Learning and Learning-Oriented Assessment, resubmission practices are largely overlooked even though resubmission can be a key event in whether students are retained.As part of a learning support department’s effort to provide effective feedback on academic writing, students referred for support were offered two types of feedback: one was simple correction, the other was in-depth dialogic feedback which followed “feedback for learning” guidance (Askew and Lodge 2000). Student engagement with the two types of feedback was analysed by looking at the changes students made to their work and feedback from their subject tutor (including the resubmission grade). The tutor’s feedback was also analysed to see if any intentions for the resubmission task could be inferred.Results suggest that corrective feedback is highly efficient in enabling students to pass resubmissions and that more in-depth feedback is much less efficient. This paper highlights some of the ways in which resubmission practices can unknowingly encourage surface approaches, and suggests some ideas for how learning support can better align with subject tutors to enable resubmission to become more learning-oriented.

This is a review of the book  Writing Your Master’s Thesis: From A to Zen  by Lynn P. Nygaard.

Although writing centers in Germany are among the oldest and fastest growing outside of North America, scholarship produced within them remains largely unknown outside national borders due to challenges inherent in translingual research. This article helps remedy this gap by rendering accessible debates in ‘writing studies’ (‘Schreibwissenschaft’) in German-speaking countries, where a number of projects are underway to define the field at this moment of its maturation. By focusing on one such initiative in Germany, Stephanie Dreyfürst and Nadja Sennewald’s edited collection Schreiben: Grundlagentexte zur Theorie, Didaktik und Beratung (Writing: Foundational Texts on Theory, Pedagogy, and Consultations) (2014), I use the monograph as a case study for investigating larger scholarly conversations about the state of writing studies in the region. In doing so, I propose a new genre for transnational research—the translingual review. More thickly descriptive than the book review, the translingual review situates the edited or authored monograph within local disciplinary and institutional contexts. This particular translingual review adopts a comparative framework, examining how German-language scholarship extends Anglo-American research in innovative ways, particularly in its uses of writing process research.

Inexperienced academic writers often have difficulty understanding and implementing academic intertextual practices, i.e. interpreting, extrapolating and integrating primary and secondary sources into their own texts. To address this need, we developed a workshop with learning stations. We identified five key difficulties students face and created seven exercises that address them. In the workshop, participants move from station to station, working on the exercises at their own pace by using pre-prepared materials at the stations. In this paper, we describe how we devised the workshop based on analysis of both the problem and the contexts in which the workshop has been carried out. Detailed descriptions for each exercise as well as a dramaturgy of the workshop are included; sample texts and handouts for each station can be found in the Appendix. Based on anecdotal participant feedback, we discuss advantages and disadvantages of the different exercises and of the workshop set-up. With the information provided, readers should be able to replicate this workshop and adapt the exercises to their own educational settings.

This paper concerns the teaching of disciplinary academic writing in Higher Education in the UK and is motivated by the need to identify an EAP instructional design that will facilitate student writers’ engagement with disciplinary writing as a situated social practice. In the paper I describe and critique what I characterise as a ‘text-in-context’ genre-based pedagogy influential in EAP provision in the UK, and then sketch out the broad parameters of a ‘social practice’ instructional design, enactable within the context of UK Higher Education.

Improving postgraduate student writing in English is an ongoing concern in the increasingly internationalised UK Higher Education context. Although the importance of feedback for developing academic writing skills is well-established (Hyland and Hyland 2006), there is still much debate about the components of effective feedback. In response to the call for research investigating teachers’ real-world practices in giving feedback in specific contexts (Lee 2014 and 2012), this article presents an initiative to develop students’ abilities to tackle written postgraduate writing (essays and dissertations) through collaborative on-line academic writing courses. The Grounded Theory-inspired study explores student perceptions of the effectiveness of online formative feedback on postgraduate academic writing in order to identify best practices which can contribute to developing skills in providing feedback. The study analyses tutor feedback on student texts and student responses to feedback. We applied categories which emerged from this data and concluded that the students we investigated had responded most positively when a combination of confidence-developing feedback practices were employed. These included both principled corrective language feedback and positive, personalised feedback on academic conventions and practices. This collaboration between academic writing and content specialists continues to provide further opportunities for embedding practices that encourage the development of academic writing skills on one year postgraduate programmes at the University of Edinburgh.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been touted as alternative approaches to face-to-face teaching and the design of learning spaces. MOOCs allow teachers to rearrange traditional classroom activities and use technologies sometimes in new and different ways to provide new ways of teaching. Recently, they have been implemented for the teaching of writing to provide greater access to these courses. I examine the possibilities and challenges of using these technologically-enhanced spaces for teaching composition. I first discuss the differences in the designs of MOOCs and how these approaches were applied to teaching writing. Based on my own participation in composition MOOCs as well as a variety of other MOOCs since 2008, I introduce three composition MOOCs, which although designed as L1 courses, involved thousands of participants with varying backgrounds from all over the world. I discuss how these MOOCs responded to challenges and how the participants could negotiate their own learning, such as by choosing which assignments they wanted to complete or determining how much peer review they wanted. I conclude that these courses demonstrate how MOOCs have created new learning spaces that can influence face-to-face approaches to teaching writing.

As L2 English writing support services, including writing centers, expand into different linguistic and national contexts, it becomes imperative for literacy brokers (Lillis and Curry 2006) and literacy managers (Bräuer 2012) to reflect on the uses and limitations of existing writing support models and teaching approaches. This paper presents the findings from a project that tracked the growth of L2 English writing centers in German universities from 2013-2015, locating their emergence within changes in the German academic landscape. Using data taken from questionnaires and interviews, this paper locates and explores ten L2 English writing centers in Germany, focusing on their aims; organizational models and teaching approaches; staffing and funding; key university partnerships; offers; and reflections on the future. It is hoped that these collated experiences could be of interest to other L2 English centers developing in different countries and language contexts.

Article abstract in English The article discusses the manifestations of linear logic in text structuring for academic book reviews, a genre in which structuring is both the subject of comment and a writing practice. By studying these two facets, the analysis contrasts two cultural contexts (Estonian and French) in two disciplines (history and language sciences) and observes their evolution on the time scale of the last ten years. The study considers whether the book review follows or rebuilds the structure of the commented book, figures out the maximum number of units mentioned, and analyses the vocabulary and comments which show discursive practices. Regarding the Estonian corpora, the structure of the commented book is often followed in the text reviewing the book whereas in French corpora a more synthesized presentation of books is common. Finally, the article analyses the most salient examples that use linear description in order to criticize and in order not to criticize.Le résumé en Français L’article discute les manifestations de la logique linéaire dans l’activité de la structuration de texte et du propos dans le genre du compte rendu de lecture académique, un genre où la structuration fait l’objet de commentaires et se pratique également dans l’exercice même de la rédaction. En exploitant ces deux facettes, l’analyse met en contraste deux contextes culturels – estonien et français – dans deux disciplines (histoire et sciences du langage) dans la perspective de ces dernières dix années. Par des indices comme le nombre maximal des chapitres énumérés, leur suivi ou leur restructuration dans le texte, le lexique ou les commentaires explicitant des pratiques discursives, le sondage montre un suivi plus marqué de la structure de l’ouvrage-objet dans les sous-corpus estoniens alors qu’une présentation plus synthétisée caractérise les corpus français. L’analyse de quelques exemples saillants discute d’une part l’usage de la linéarité pour critiquer et d’autre part pour ne pas critiquer.

In this article we present a toolbox for dialogic guidance that we use at the Academic Writing Centre at the University of Bergen when guiding students in various stages of the writing process. Our guidance is dialogic which means that we acknowledge that meaning and learning evolve when we interact with one another, when different and divergent voices meet; we let students themselves explore their writing, their writing processes and their texts, and find their own answers, their own solutions and their own ways. We ask open-ended questions, listen, describe and provide tools that meet different needs at different stages of the writing process, instead of judging and ‘diagnosing’ the written texts - and the students - and then proposing a ‘treatment’. Examples of our tools are spontaneous writing, the academic pentagon and the Toulmin model of argumentation. We seek to strengthen the students’ understanding and awareness of their own writing, thereby improving not just the writing at hand, but also the students’ academic writing skills and learning in general, and to develop a reflective and accepting attitude. Our students engage in dialogues with us, the tools we present, with themselves, their texts and their writing, with fellow students, with previous bachelor and master theses, and with the tradition which they are part of.

With the growth of the teaching of English globally and increasing numbers of students in English language medium universities, students in academic English classrooms can be expected to be literate in two or more languages. Multilingual writers in the university engage in high stakes academic writing even as they navigate differences among languages and academic writing systems. While research and pedagogies addressing the question of difference in the writing of multilingual students in English have focused primarily on verbal features, writing has come to be conceptualized in terms of multimodality. Writing is also a visual mode, and multilingual writers draw on their knowledge of different conventions and writing systems as they compose. To reflect on the visuality of writing, this article considers examples of textual difference in the English writing of multilingual university students in Lebanon. Multilingual approaches to teaching writing are developing quickly, but instruction in visual aspects of writing is still predominantly prescriptive. Instructors of academic writing have a responsibility to contextualize visual dimensions of academic writing, especially for multilingual writers. Qualitative studies will help understand the perceptions and experiences of multilingual academic writers as they negotiate all of the modes of writing, including the visual.

Publication productivity constitutes a key measure of institutional and researcher performance, determining success in university rankings and academic career development. To promote such productivity, Aalto University launched the Writing Doctoral Research course for engineers. To build a domain-specific course for doctoral candidates, their needs were examined quantitatively (n=325) and qualitatively (n=74). The aim was to identify pedagogy for raising the quality of publications and expediting doctoral degree completion. These investigations showed that 1) in the absence of sufficient supervision, engineers require more support in writing-related mental processes, 2) the mechanics of writing needs to promote argumentativity, 3) researchers lack precision when describing their research aims, 4) articulation of causality in data commentary requires more accuracy, and 5) instruments must be provided for writer self-correction.Instead of taking the lexicogrammar approach, the course was designed in a way that aligned with the principles of enculturation, assisting researchers in scientific positioning and socialization into their fields. Such an approach emphasizes reporting and structural conventions in engineering and the field-specific academic style.

This paper aims to propose a theoretical framework for investigating L2 speaking scholars who successfully write in English for publication. The theories brought together – which are associated with third space, hybridity, funds of knowledge, intertextuality, heteroglossia and multivoicedness – form a nest of interrelated theories which proved useful for examining writing for publication by non-native English speaking (NNES) academics in our own work (Barbosa-Trujillo 2015, Barbosa-Trujillo and Keranen 2015). The paper first orients the topic within the field of NNES scientific research writing then discusses the theoretical framework presented, first by pulling the strands apart to briefly describe each, then by showing how each strand works within the framework as a foundation for research.

Research-based learning is an approach that lets students conduct research to develop content knowledge. This article gives insights into a seminar that followed this approach. It was a collaboration between the writing center and the linguistics department at European University Viadrina in Germany with the aim to explore new ways of combining the learning of content knowledge and writing. In accordance with the stance of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL), this collaboration was meant to be a pilot to generate experiences and knowledge about this approach and its potential for combining discipline-specific learning and writing.

Smith, J. and Wrigley, S. (2016) Introducing Teachers’ Writing Groups: Exploring the Theory and Practice. Abingdon: Routledge, pp.150, £95.00, 9781138797420
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\nIntroducing Teachers' Writing Groups: Exploring the Theory and Practice, by Jenifer Smith and Simon Wrigley, is co-published by Routledge and the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) as the latest offering in a collaborative series. The Association is the professional body in the UK for all teachers of English in primary and post-primary schools and their series with Routledge is intended to promote ‘standards of excellence in the teaching of English’ by disseminating ‘innovative and original ideas that have practical classroom outcomes’, as well as supporting teachers’ own professional development. In this latest addition to the series, Smith and Wrigley address a key underlying question – indeed challenge – for English teachers: how can you teach students to write if, as a teacher, you can’t, or don’t, or won’t, write yourself? The authors introduce us to teachers’ writing groups as one compelling way to meet this challenge; such groups, the book demonstrates, encourage and support teachers as writers. Similarly, writing groups can also be of value in higher education settings for colleagues (Grant 2006, Badenhorst et al. 2013 and Geller and Eodice 2013), and for students (Aitchinson 2009), and it is the application of the book’s theory and practices in these contexts that may prove most useful for readers of the Journal of Academic Writing.