This paper reports on how undergraduate students evaluated writing outputs created with and without generative artificial intelligence (AI). The paper focuses specifically on two aspects of writing and AI: how prior writing knowledge influenced students’ thinking about AI tools, and how the writing skills to which they were exposed in the writing classroom helped them work with AI-generated materials. This research builds upon Bearman et al.’s (2024) work on evaluative judgement as a pedagogical tool to support learners as they work with AI-mediated texts. The paper uses this lens to identify challenges that learners have in applying writing knowledge to AI-mediated situations and to devise pedagogical means to support student learning in these contexts. We found that, while students could typically evaluate structural components of writing, they struggled to evaluate conceptual ideas both for AI and human generated texts. The findings speak more generally to the need for students to develop their evaluative abilities, as well as ways that AI may reveal and amplify existing challenges that learners have with evaluating the quality of writing, engaging with source materials, and applying genre knowledge to create meaning.

Doctoral education often treats academic writing as a solitary, human-centered activity, guided by conventions that emphasize structure, clarity, and discipline. These frameworks rarely consider how other-than-human entities shape the writing process. This article explores how multispecies assemblages inform doctoral writing, proposing that knowledge production can be understood as an eductive process – an unfolding of latent ideas through relationship with the so-called “natural” world. Drawing on examples from my own work, I share an excerpt from a multispecies duoethnographic project that seeks to recognize and incorporate other-than-human perspectives. I reflect on how these encounters have shaped my scholarly voice and academic identity, challenging dominant assumptions about writing as an isolated human endeavor. Reimagining writing as a relational, evolving practice, I offer reflections for integrating multispecies sensibilities into doctoral training and invite educators, researchers, and students to view academic writing as a collaborative process shaped by entanglements of human and more-than-human life.

This is a book review of Change and Stability in Thesis and Dissertation Writing: The Evolution of an Academic Genre by Paltridge and Starfield (2024).

This article introduces booksprints as an innovative teaching and learning format for academic writing for undergraduate students. Booksprints foster writing with alternative concepts of authorship and enable students to collaboratively go through an almost authentic digital writing and publishing process in a minimum of time, and at the same time facilitate various future skills, such as written communication, coping with change, and digital literacy. Still being in a ‘prototype’ phase, booksprints are only just being tested as a potential educational format that is a bridge between subject matter and writing/teaching methodology. This article, therefore, presents the basic design of booksprints as well as some specific features, such as moderation of the process by the facilitator, explicit role assignments, visualized project management and the use of digital platforms, in order to introduce them as a writing-intensive learning setting for higher education.

Academic integrity continues to concern educators worldwide. Furthermore, general guidelines for ensuring academic integrity do not seem to encompass all the angles that are required to be taken into consideration when exploring the factors that contribute to multicultural students’ decision to adhere to the norms and values of academic integrity.  This literature review focuses on how academic values can be unified through academic integrity, and specifically explores factors and perspectives of utilising academic integrity to unify academic values when teaching academic writing. The dimensions of academic values explored in this paper are: a) beliefs and attitudes of multicultural undergraduate students and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), b) the value of academic performance in academic writing classes, c) exploring the development of multicultural students’ authorial voice while maintaining academic integrity, and d) using technology to encourage academic integrity in academic writing classes. Over 56 identified sources were chosen carefully to ensure unbiased approaches to the issues of academic integrity and development of academic writing skills. The authors explored the issues from a variety of perspectives. The gap noticed in the review of literature is the disconnection between academic values and academic integrity. The authors make recommendations for future research.

Here we report a teaching practice exploring integrity issues related to the use of images in scientific and/or academic writing or, more broadly, in communication. The practice is intended to raise students’ awareness of the need of complying with research integrity principles/norms. It is targeted at undergraduate students in the molecular biosciences, more specifically, to students enrolled in a First Degree in Biochemistry course. It has been implemented in the context of a course unit in which the students perform laboratory work – within a small project – usually originating data that is reported as graphs or as pictures in their laboratory reports. These visual representations are also normally used in articles published in scientific peer-reviewed journals. We implemented a group assignment based on the analysis of guidelines of different journals regarding the preparation of figures, including acceptable image processing and manipulation, as well as on the application of these guidelines on both written and oral reports. We could observe that the students performed the proposed activity with commitment and interest in the aspects explored. Moreover, the exercise improved their critical thinking ability as demonstrated through in-class discussions. In the present work, we discuss challenges of including illustrations in scientific texts in view of science teaching.

The ability to carefully craft writing for an intended audience is crucial in creating persuasive rhetorical arguments. Learning to do so requires knowledge beyond IMRaD (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion). Many graduate students learn by mimicking this structure, yet lack audience awareness and overuse jargon, producing low-readability texts. What is more, they increasingly rely on AI-based writing tools that mimic the same structures that are already often poorly written. The results are too often uncommunicative articles that fail to persuade the intended audience. Therefore, we suggest writing pedagogy includes a deeper understanding of effective written science communication using the rhetorical triangle. As graduate students most readily understand the importance of logos, i.e., the scientific content, our job as writing instructors should be to emphasize the role a carefully aimed pathos and ethos plays in producing highly readable, persuasive, publishable articles. To this end, this paper first presents a brief background on the IMRaD structure before outlining the much-overlooked role of the rhetorical triangle in scientific writing. Specifically, we offer a detailed table for graduate students to use in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

This study examines how learners’ perceptions of their academic writing difficulties changed over the course of a four-week intensive English for Academic purposes (EAP) programme at a British university. The participants of this qualitative study were 14 Chinese undergraduate students who engaged in interviews and completed learning journal entries. The results of the thematic analyses indicate that vocabulary which constituted the biggest perceived challenge in Week 1 was no longer mentioned in Week 4 as a source of writing difficulty. Another finding is that after four weeks, students felt they had a better understanding of argumentation in a UK academic context and were not facing major difficulties with using sources and the understanding of argumentation in a UK academic context; they also reported that they were not facing major difficulties with using sources and understanding plagiarism in written assignments. Upon completion of the EAP course, students also reported that they tended to experience noticeably fewer challenges with academic reading. This qualitative study provides insights into the contribution of pre-sessional programmes in the development of learners’ writing as they transition into the academic community.

In writing groups (WGs), participants exchange drafts so that their partners’ feedback can be used to improve writing. These groups accompany participants while they face authentic dissertation or publication writing projects, are linked to situated and real demands, and promote participants’ engagement. Nevertheless, this type of pedagogical initiative continues to be uncommon, especially in Latin America. This qualitative exploratory study analyses participants’ perspectives about the benefits and drawbacks found in joining doctoral WGs in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It focuses on three separate sets of doctoral writing groups implemented and facilitated within the last eight years in Argentina. Despite some drawbacks, participants considered these groups as valuable not only for the advancement of dissertation and publication writing, but also as horizontal spaces to develop as scholarly writers. Higher education institutions worldwide could benefit from similar pedagogical initiatives to enhance and promote research writing at the graduate level.

If writing pedagogy aims at writer development rather than text fixing, understanding how the writer sees that development is a key element of our skillset as writing teachers. In this article, we argue that a writing manifesto is a way for academic writers to express their development – one that, crucially, draws on semiotic resources outside the usual palette of academic writing. We situate this argument in the literature about reflective writing, which sees reflection as key in writing development, but which also points to the limits of certain kinds of reflective writing. Specifically, several scholars have noted how the reflective essay, traditionally conceived, tends to be constructed of formulaic mappable moves that can obstruct meaningful reflection. By analysing a corpus of manifestos created by doctoral writers, we show how the writers’ use of distinctive semiotic resources – irony, parody, font choice, layout – allow the writers to position themselves as agentive, and present themselves as the makers, not the recipients, of rules about writing. The manifesto, then, is a useful genre for enabling reflection and development because it can create space for writers’ agency and text ownership. Our analysis highlights the value of further discussion about alternate modes of reflective writing.

This study uses both qualitative and quantitative research methods in a mixed-methods approach to investigate whether the principled use of author-devised cover letters (CLs) within doctorate writing groups can result in more useful reviewer feedback comments than would be attained through the use of instructor-devised writing assessment rubrics. In this context, CLs are self-devised written documents that help the reviewers give the author useful and critical written feedback comments. Twenty participants in different discipline-specific writing groups were given explicit instruction about the importance and content of CLs during the peer feedback process. Their perceptions of a useful CL were obtained from post-course questionnaires and analysed qualitatively. In addition, their CLs at various stages of the feedback process were analysed quantitatively for genre, social presence, and evidence of teaching instruction, and compared to the CLs produced by 20 PhD students in similar writing groups who received minimal CL instruction. The study found that author-devised CLs, as opposed to instructor-devised rubrics, can allow the authors the flexibility of providing text-specific background details, requesting reviewer help on specific textual aspects, using social presence to develop a sense of writing community, and provide reflection upon their own writing.

This study examines second language (L2) learners’ perceptions of their writing strategies on an intensive English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programme at a British university. The participants were 14 Chinese pre-undergraduate students who engaged in interviews and completed reflective journal entries. The results of the analyses indicate that after four weeks of studying on the EAP course, students believed that they started to apply a broader range of writing strategies, such as reading extensively, using exemplars of student writing to inform their own assignments, revising in a more focused manner and appreciating tutor feedback on their writing. Thus, the perceived increase in the use of various writing strategies is indicative of the potential effectiveness of a short EAP pre-sessional course.

The construct of identity in the space of English as an Additional Language (EAL) Higher Degree by Research (HDR) writing has been widely researched with studies exploring students’ identities as constructed through and in the process of writing. However, these studies are often presented in ways that focus on the challenges the writers face citing language barriers and cultural differences and ascribing these students “closed subject positions” with “limited ways of talking about themselves” (Koehne, 2005, p. 118). In response to such deficit views, various studies have explored the multiple and varied identities of HDR EAL as evident in their written reflections and other work, offering a wider range of views. We argue that there is a need for additional nuanced views of these student identities and how they are formed. In this paper we demonstrate how these can be gained by examining student identities as they emerge through spoken interaction. Applying a sociocultural linguistic framework that understands identities as emerging, situationally and relationally dependent (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005), we report how two students formed identities for themselves by talking to us about their experiences of writing using EAL. Our analysis provides nuanced understandings of the multiple identities of EAL HDR students that move beyond the deficit ones we were, and still are, frequently hearing in institutional discourses and demonstrates how the application of this framework can help articulate richness, variety and resourcefulness and challenge essentialised identities of EAL doctoral student writers.

Collaborating between Writing and STEM: Teaching Disciplinary Genres, Researching Disciplinary Interventions, and Engaging Science Audiences
 This poster describes a multi-pronged effort to build a writing curriculum in Physics and other STEM fields at the George Washington University, USA. These efforts include curricular collaboration, a research study conducted by the Physicists and Writing Scholars, and external funding initiatives.
 This project first began as a curricular collaboration through our Writing in the Disciplines (WID) curriculum, initiated by observations among Physics faculty that undergraduate students lack Physics specific writing skills. Writing faculty responded to this observation by introducing Physics faculty to the idea that writing can and must be taught, that the genres of Physics can be taught by Physics faculty, and that a focus on the writing process can improve student writing. Our curricular goal was to demonstrate to faculty who are unfamiliar with writing studies that writing is a means to learn in Physics (Anderson et al., 2017).
 The first phase of our effort was to persuade Physics faculty that writing contributes to learning in Physics; we describe a collaboration between Physics and Writing faculty that developed assignments and made curricular interventions. This collaboration built upon scholarship in writing studies that argues genre instruction develops capacities and skills for student writing (Swales, 1990; Winsor, 1996). While genre is not a new concept in Writing Studies, for many Physics faculty the idea that they can teach – and have students learn – how to write in disciplinary genres is novel. Collaboration around curricular revisions enabled Writing and Physics faculty to teach students that learning how to write in a new genre is a skill that can be practiced (Ericsson, 2006; Kellogg & Whiteford, 2009). We developed a process for students to follow when faced with types of writing common to Physics, but potentially new to them, such as the abstract (written), lab research notebook (written), article summary (oral), letter to colleague (written), cover letter and resumé (written), elevator pitch (oral), proposal (written and oral), presentation on issues of ethics and equity in STEM (oral), research presentation (oral), poster (written), poster presentation (oral), final research report (written), and Symposium presentation (oral). The collaboration thus created pedagogical exchange between faculty as well as scholarly synergy between the disciplines of Physics and Writing Studies.
 Physics faculty have observed that the curricular collaboration has had measurable results for students. Physics student participation in the campus research day has increased dramatically. We attribute this rise partly to the increased, explicit attention in classroom settings to how to engage with Physics genres of writing, especially abstracts and research posters.
 While the collaboration successfully brought together a small but solid group of Writing and Physics faculty, it also raised questions about how to persuade a broader range of Physics faculty, and other science faculty, that teaching disciplinary genres can improve student writing, and that writing is a means of learning. Given that faculty in STEM disciplines find empirical research persuasive, our next step was to undertake a collaborative research project to measure the impact of the teaching of writing in Physics. The new curricular focus on genre asked students to conceptualize themselves as scientific writers in relation to specific Physics or STEM audiences. The collaborative research therefore investigates if teaching Physics genres improves writing and enables students to conceptualize themselves as emerging scientists engaged in professional communication (Poe et al., 2010; Winsor, 1996). Our longitudinal analysis of student writing in Physics evaluates writing from three sequenced courses, the first before faculty-developed genre assignments, and then after genre assignments. We developed a rubric that evaluates general outcomes – audience, genre, structure, style – and a rubric that evaluates specialized learning outcomes – acknowledgement of past scholarship, working with models, incorporating scholarship, articulation of research questions, working with graphs, and articulation of methods. Preliminary research analysis shows that explicitly teaching Physics genres increases student’s abilities to write successfully in Physics, enabling students to understand how knowledge is communicated persuasively to audiences. Our goal with this research is to show STEM faculty through research by Physicists and Writing Studies scholars that teaching writing socializes students into the discipline of Physics, leading them to identify as professional scientists (Allie et al, 2010; Gere et al., 2019). This increase is exemplified by the large number of students volunteering to present a poster during the University wide research day, giving them experience presenting to an educated audience outside of Physics.
 Thus, a combination of strategies – curricular collaboration and intervention, collaborative research from within the discipline of Physics, and successful external funding – are what demonstrate to scientists that teaching genre and teaching writing are central to science education. Based on this experience, our contribution is that shared pedagogical and research collaborations, and funding, are what make the knowledge of Writing Studies persuasive to scientists.
 We have seen success with these efforts. At George Washington, other STEM faculty have observed successes in the Physics curriculum, and have joined efforts to bring writing more explicitly into their curriculum. This year, we began a Writing in STEM symposium that has grown to include faculty in Chemistry, Systems Engineering, Mathematics, Geography, Mechanical Engineering, and other fields. We have also seen an uptick in STEM courses in the WID curriculum. The Physics and Writing research collaboration has led to a National Science Foundation (NSF) submission on genre, and an NSF award for a study of writing and engineering judgement, being conducted by Writing faculty and Systems Engineering faculty.
 References
 Allie, S., Armien, M.N., Burgoyne, N, Case, J.M., Collier-Reed, B.I, Craig, T.S., Deacon, A, Fraser, D.M.,Geyer, Z, Jacobs, C., Jawitz, J., Kloot, B., Kotta, L., Langdon, G., le Roux, K., Marshall, D, Mogashana,D., Shaw,C., Sheridan, G., & Wolmarans, N. (2009). Learning as acquiring a discursive identity through participation in a community: improving student learning in engineering education. European Journal of Engineering Education, 34(4), 359-367. https://doi.org/10.1080/03043790902989457
 Anderson, P., Anson, C. M., Fish, T., Gonyea, R. M., Marshall, M., Menefee-Libey, W Charles Paine, C., Palucki Blake, L. & Weaver, S. (2017). How writing contributes to learning: new findings from a national study and their local application. Peer Review, 19(1), 4.
 Ericsson, K. A. (2009). The Influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance. In K. A. Ericsson, R. R. Hoffman, A. Kozbelt & A. M Williams (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance (pp 685–705). Cambridge University Press.
 Gere, A. R., Limlamai, N., Wilson, E., Saylor, K., & Pugh, R. (2019). Writing and conceptual learning in science: an analysis of assignments. Written communication, 36(1), 99–135. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088318804820
 Kellogg, R., & Whiteford, A. (2009). Training advanced writing skills: the case for deliberate practice. Educational psychologist, 44(4), 250–266. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520903213600
 Poe, M., Lerner, N., & Craig, J. (2010). Learning to communicate in science and engineering: Case studies from MIT. MIT Press.
 Swales, J. (1990). Discourse analysis in professional contexts. Annual review of applied linguistics, 11, 103–114.
 Winsor, D. A.(1996) Writing like an engineer: A rhetorical education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

The present study revisits writing retreat participants who have spontaneously formed writing groups before or after attending a retreat hosted by the Unit for Academic Language at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. All in all, 11 doctoral students and 1 post doc were interviewed using a semi-structured interview model. The answers were thematically analysed based on Murray’s (2014) concept of coherence in writing groups as well as parts of Aitchison and Lee’s (2006) key characteristics of writing groups. The two main research questions posed concern (i) whether the informants have changed their writing practice and/or the way they think and feel about writing since joining a writing group, and (ii) whether possible changes have aided the development of their identity as academic writers. Results show that the informants have indeed changed central aspects of their writing practice and that this in turn has positively influenced how they now think and feel about writing. This has to some extent contributed to the informants’ development of their writer identity; however, the present study also sheds light on the fact that more needs to be done at departmental levels across the university to make academic writing visible.

New students struggle to develop academic writing skills during transition to university. To meet this challenge, the Humanities department at the University of Southern Denmark implemented a research and development project to increase feedback to student writers. In the project, graduate students were trained as disciplinary writing tutors, and subsequently provided feedback on undergraduates’ assignments. The study presented in this article examines the feedback offered by the disciplinary writing tutors. As researchers, we ask, “What characterises the feedback offered by the disciplinary writing tutors?” The study is positioned in a sociocultural framework that draws on theories of disciplinary and academic literacy. Data was collected in four bachelor’s degree programmes and consists of the feedback given by the tutors and interviews with the tutors conducted at the end of the tutoring. Principal results indicate that the feedback on the students’ texts is distributed at the text layer of content and structure and the text layer of formalities. Feedback at the text layer of sentences is almost absent. Feedback on the writing and learning processes is limited. The discipline-specific feedback occurs as indications in the feedback to the BA students and is made clearer when comparing feedback in different programmes. The feedback the writing tutors provide demonstrates an understanding of academic writing as academic socialisation.

Contributing to the literature on translingual pedagogies outside the US or Canada, this article discusses the design of a hybrid instructional format for advanced multilingual doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers offered by a bilingual writing center at a mid-sized university in Germany. Meant to prepare for future careers in academia and professional demands in different national, cultural, and linguistic environments, this format gives participants the opportunity to explore academic genres that tend to receive less attention in graduate education than journal articles, book chapters, or others needed to complete degree requirements. By the end of the course, participants will have a submission-ready portfolio including an academic CV, a job letter, a (sample) letter of recommendation, and teaching and diversity statements. To achieve these specific outcomes and to develop the advanced professional academic writing competencies needed in multicultural and multilingual contexts, participants will have to draw on their diverse linguistic backgrounds and prior experiences in these kinds of settings. Informed also by other recent theoretical and empirical work on translingualism and translingual pedagogies in global contexts, this format adopts the use of translation proposed by Horner (2017) to move beyond the monolingual and, to a lesser extent, the multilingual paradigms. While it has yet to be tested empirically, the design represents an alternative to more traditional (and usually monolingual) modes of instruction. This article concludes by discussing limitations and implications of the approach to translingual pedagogies taken here.

Supporting Academic Writing and Publication Practice: PhD Students in Engineering and their Supervisors
 This poster documents the bottom-up efforts leading to the establishment of an academic writing support program for doctoral students at an engineering university in the Czech Republic (CR).
 To defend their dissertation, by law Czech doctoral students have to have published their research. Moreover, many faculties require their doctoral students to publish in prestigious English-medium journals, which is a challenge even for the students’ supervisors. Although publication requirements prior to dissertation defence are becoming common in many countries (Kamler and Thompson, 2014; Kelly, 2017), Czech students often face a challenge of writing in the absence of any prior writing support, where insufficient knowledge of English only adds an extra hurdle to the already difficult task of argumentation absent in Czech schooling. CR has a comparatively high number of doctoral students, but also alarmingly high drop-out rates with more than 50% students not finishing their studies (Beneš et al., 2017). In part, this is due to the students’ difficulties to publish (National Training Fund, 2019). This challenge could be addressed with systematic writing development, but Czech educators and dissertation supervisors are not commonly aware of composition being teachable as we learned from our preliminary study on writing support in doctoral programs in several Czech universities (Rosolová & Kasparkova, in press). While supervisors and university leaders tended to see writing development as a responsibility of the students, the doctoral students were calling for systematic support. 
 We strive to bring attention to the complexity of writing development and introduce a discourse on academic writing that conceives of academic writing as a bundle of analytical and critical thinking skills coupled with knowledge of rhetorical structures and different academic genres. We show how these skills can be taught through a course drawing on the results from a needs analysis survey among engineering doctoral students, the target population for this course (for more information on the survey, see Kasparkova & Rosolová, 2020). In the survey, students expressed a strong interest in a blended-learning format of the course, which we base on a model of a unique academic writing course developed for researchers at the Czech Academy of Sciences, but not common in Czech universities. Our course is work in progress and combines writing development with library modules that frame the whole writing process as a publication journey ranging from library searches, to a selection of a target journal and communication with reviewers. Because we are well aware that a course alone will not trigger a discourse on writing development in Czech higher education, we also plan on involving a broader academic community through workshops for supervisors and a handbook on teaching academic writing and publishing skills for future course instructors.
 Colleagues at EATAW 2019 conference commented on the poster sharing their difficulties from the engineering context and for instance suggested a computer game to engage engineers. This resonated with our plan to invite our engineers into the course through a geo-caching game – for more, see Kasparkova & Rosolová (2020).
 References 
 Beneš, J., Kohoutek, J., & Šmídová, M. (2017). Doktorské studium v ČR [Doctoral studies in the CR].  Centre for Higher Education Studies. https://www.csvs.cz/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Doktorandi_final_2018.pdf
 Rosolová, K. E., & Kasparkova, A. (in press). How do I cook an Impact Factor article if you do not show me what the ingredients are? Educare. https://ojs.mau.se/index.php/educare
 Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2014). Helping Doctoral Students Write (2nd edition). Routledge.
 Kasparkova, A., & Rosolová, K. (2020). A geo-caching game ‘Meet your Editor’ as a teaser for writing courses. 2020 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm), Kennesaw, GA, USA, 2020, pp. 87-91. https://doi.org/10.1109/ProComm48883.2020.00019
 Kelly, F. J. (2017). The idea of the PhD: The doctorate in the twenty-first-century imagination. Routledge.
 National Training Fund. (2019). Complex study of doctoral studies at Charles University and recommendations to improve the conditions and results. Report for the Charles University Management. Prague.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Based on Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura 1986) research in academic writing and self-efficacy has shown that there is a relationship between students’ performance and their belief in their writing abilities (Matoti and Shumba 2011, Shah et al. 2011, Prat-Sala and Redford 2012). Using questionnaires, interviews and an assessed written task, this study seeks to contribute to this research by exploring the relationship between writing proficiency and self-efficacy beliefs of undergraduate students taking an Advanced Writing Skills course. The aims of the study were to find out a) what the writing proficiency self-ratings of students doing the Advanced Writing Skills course are like b) their writing self-efficacy beliefs c) what they perceive to be problems related to their writing skills and d) whether there is any relationship between performance level of the students and their self-efficacy beliefs. An analysis of the results reveals that although students’ self-rating was high, their efficacy beliefs were moderate. The results of the present study also reveal that there was no relationship between students’ essay writing performance and their self-efficacy beliefs in the context of this study. This article argues that although self-efficacy beliefs need not be high for students to be motivated to perform better, boosting these beliefs can add to students’ tools for developing their writing competence.

Critically evaluating research papers is an important vehicle for promoting acculturation into a scientific discipline. As science students progress through their undergraduate studies, their critical abilities are expected to become heightened, and research papers are read and cited in order to support a variety of assignments, such as essays, critical reviews and presentations, progressing to shaping laboratory research projects and dissertation-writing. This article describes the process of designing a modular online resource. The resource is aimed at familiarising students with the structural conventions and argumentative devices used in research papers and supporting them in deep-reading a research paper in life sciences or chemistry. The modules employ audio- and video-recorded extracts from interviews with a key author to provide a context for the origins, motivations and processes behind the writing of a specific paper, plus scaffolded questions to encourage critical evaluation of the paper. Notable features of the project were the employment of a multi-disciplinary team of staff and research postgraduates coupled with the developmental testing of the resource by undergraduates. Lessons learnt from the project are considered, including the resource’s integration within the curriculum and the challenges of writing such interactive resources for different disciplines.

One basic skill of academic writers is to be able to locate their claims within a disciplinary framework. However, undergraduate students find it difficult to integrate sources into their own writing successfully, which often results in inappropriate textual borrowing and poor referencing. The aim of the research reported here was to identify problematic or inappropriate use of sources in texts produced by undergraduate Spanish students and examine the reasons for these unacceptable citation practices. For this purpose, I analyzed a learner corpus consisting of 35 literature reviews written by students of an EAP subject in the third year of a Bachelor's Degree in English Studies. The results suggest that their inappropriate use of sources arises mainly from three factors: (i) an unawareness of the dialogic nature of academic texts and of the functions of citation in these texts; (ii) low linguistic level and low level of academic literacy regarding the procedures involved in paraphrasing and synthesizing; (iii) lack of familiarity with the language of citations.

Writing in higher educational settings is regarded as problematic for all but the most dedicated people (Silva, 2007). Many of the problems come from psychological states (internal-censors, fears, perfectionism, procrastination) deeply rooted in writing experiences (Boice, 1990). However, the literature addressing this is generally missing. A survey of writing-books, manuals, and research studies indicate that most approach writing from linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical perspectives (Silva, 2007). This study attempted to fill this gap by examining a group of graduate students attending a writing workshop which specifically addressed psychological barriers to productive writing (Boice, 1990). The eight-week workshop consisted of classroom sessions in the first week and then moved to an online course management platform. The primary aim of the study was to note the changes in the students using data from their weekly writing reflections and discussion board comments in several forums and 8-month follow-up interviews. Findings indicate that the workshop had immediate effects on the writers but as the time passed the effects faded. The study looked to Threshold Concepts Theory (Meyer & Land, 2005) as a possible theoretical explanation for the loss of the temporary positive workshop results.

High-achieving students are not often the focus of studies in academic transition. In the UK, the driver has frequently been the widening participation and retention agendas, resulting in an emphasis on supporting the ‘non-traditional’ student. This exploratory case study based in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the <University> took academic writing as one aspect of transition and compared two transition points for undergraduate students of Modern Foreign Languages (MFL): from school or college into the first year and then into the year abroad as students adapt to expectations for dissertation writing. In a context where weekly tutorials arguably offer the ultimate space for development of student writing, the study unpacks students’ interpretations of institutional, disciplinary, tutor and genre-based expectations. The study drew on theories of academic literacies (Lea & Street 1998, Lillis & Scott 2007 and Russell et al 2009) by viewing writing as socially constructed and ‘literacy’ as dependent on disciplinary context. Findings revealed the significance of the multi-disciplinary nature of the MFL course to students’ ability to adapt to writing at university. It is suggested that a focus on the end product rather than the writing process might hinder the students’ ability to adapt to new expectations and make the most of their tutorial time.

In this article we analyse Portuguese postgraduate students’ problems and difficulties when performing written tasks in the context of postgraduate programmes. The data presented are the result of a study based on two different data collection procedures: a) the analysis of students’ written work, organised in a portfolio; b) a questionnaire focussing on the difficulties encountered when performing different tasks involving writing: note-taking; planning a text; writing and editing a text (a literature review); and referencing and quoting according to a reference style (APA). The analysis of students' work revealed problems and difficulties in different areas, namely with selecting information, planning the text, and writing the literature review using academic writing conventions. When asked about the reasons for those problems, students often referred to the difference between the literacy tasks they were used to performing in their undergraduate studies and those that they are requested to develop at the postgraduate level. These differences seem particularly relevant when those tasks are related to assessment practices. At undergraduate level, assessment is often based on examinations while at postgraduate level, it is more dependent on the production of other genres such as literature reviews or essays.

The study investigated Japanese and Taiwanese postgraduate students’ perceptions of summary writing. Eight Japanese and eight Taiwanese students who speak English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at a university in England participated in the summary writing task in English, questionnaires, and follow-up interviews. The questionnaire and interview data were analysed in terms of (a) students’ background knowledge on summarising and (b) educational background regarding experiences of summarisation and summary writing instruction taught in classes. The results revealed that the Japanese and Taiwanese students shared similar opinions on definitions of summary writing. The students in both groups tended to be self-taught in L1 summarisation due to little L1 summary writing instruction. ESL/EFL writing teachers should note that students from different countries may have culture-specific summary writing conventions and that students from the same country may have different summarisation experiences and perceptions of textual features.

Based on data gathered via survey questionnaire and follow up in-class discussion, the paper explores the ways undergraduate students think of themselves as writers and readers. Data drawn from a pilot survey in 2007 and a second in 2009 provides the impetus for discussion of issues of literacy and identity in a digital world. Of interest is 1) what first-year students anticipate they need to do and know, and 2) how final-year students reflect on what they have learnt in terms of academic literacies and related skills. A key issue is the way students bring a particular identity as readers and writers to university, and how this is transformed and re-inscribed through their studies. The importance of teaching for the development of rhetorical dexterity in a digital environment is highlighted because students’ digital literacy is a core element in their literacy identity. The paper also asks ‘how far should educators go in working into the space of digital literacies?’

This action research study reports on Kosovan, English as a Foreign Language, undergraduate students’ perceptions of the usefulness and effectiveness of class activities that promote the panning for gold approach (Browne and Keeley 2004) in the process of argumentative writing. The data obtained from a questionnaire, essay evaluation and a focus group, reveal that students show interest in the approach though they do not feel at ease when required to take a decision that calls for systematic evaluation of their thinking in a quest for new answers. It is apparent from the study that, in order for students to think critically and write argumentatively, the panning for gold approach and the principle of inquiry should be integrated across the curriculum or, in a better case scenario, should be an integrated part of daily life. The results have implications for syllabus and classroom practices.

Critical reviews allow access to the critical thinking abilities of their writers, especially with regard to analyzing and synthesizing ideas. In most institutions of higher learning, critical reviews are assigned as coursework, and the general assumption is that students would know how to produce a ‘good’ review, one that meets its readers’ expectations. Is this a fair assumption? If not, which particular skills and strategies do we, as academics, teach them? This study was undertaken to find the answers to these questions and focused on the critical review writing of postgraduates. A mixed methods approach was adopted incorporating questionnaires, interviews and critical reviews of articles written in English by ESL postgraduate students at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya. The critical reviews were analyzed from two perspectives (contents and presentation) using a checklist devised by the researchers. The findings revealed that most of the students lacked the skills and strategies for writing effective reviews.

As one of the productive skills, writing is among the most challenging for language learners. Increased opportunities for study in European universities through Erasmus programs and in Anglophone tertiary institutions has made it necessary to place more emphasis on writing skills in Turkish universities. This has made it inevitable that Turkish universities include academic writing as part of their curricula. Considering that even non-native speaking (NNS) scholars have been reported to face challenges with academic writing not usually experienced by native-speaking (NS) writers (Gosden 1992), it is not surprising to see that this activity causes a great deal of anxiety for undergraduate and graduate students. This paper explores the effects of using a multiple-draft process approach on reducing the students’ anxiety levels, as they relate to the academic writing process. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and written reflections by students.