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 writing has always posed a challenge to university students, regardless of the language they are writing in (first, second or foreign language) or the amount of digital support they have access to – for example, online dictionaries, thesauruses, or new generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) software such as ChatGPT. With the rise of GenAI as a legitimate digital tool in higher education, it is crucial to identify the professional development needs of teaching faculty in order to ensure quality teaching. Based on factors such as digital literacy, or access to digital tools, these needs might differ in various geographical regions. Within the context of the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu), this paper aims to provide a differentiated, international student perspective on the use of GenAI in the academic writing process, identifying professional development needs for faculty. We developed an online questionnaire that was filled out by 192 university students from 15 different countries. In addition to their academic and linguistic backgrounds, the respondents answered questions about their own experiences and competences with the use of GenAI within academic research. Results highlight clear discrepancies between geographic regions, for example, in their self-ranked digital proficiency or in what GenAI tools they use. This, along with further results from the analysis, provides the basis to identify some professional development needs.

GenAI has demonstrated functionality that seems, uncannily, to parallel reading and writing by identifying/reformulating information from source texts and generating novel content and argumentation. These skills are essential yet challenging for many students tasked with producing literature reviews. This study takes the first steps to investigating the feasibility of a GenAI-facilitated literature review. This investigation starts from the ‘human-in-the-loop’ position that complex processes can be deconstructed and compartmentalized, and that component functions needed for these processes can be delegated to machines while humans contribute to, or control, the overall process. We explore the hypothesis that certain functions of the literature review process, such as information extraction and content classification, might be able to be automated. Prompts modeled on recommended practices for research synthesis were designed to identify and classify particular types of content in research articles. Outputs produced by two GenAI models, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o, were assessed for reliability with a human coder. Overall, the results posit concerns about the models’ performance on this task, cautioning against direct uses of GenAI output as learning scaffolding for students developing literature review skills.

This symposium is an extension of a plenary forum on generative AI (hereafter GenAI) held at the EATAW Conference at Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Winterthur, Switzerland, in June 2023. Since the conference, AI – particularly the large language models (LLMs) shaping GenAI such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT – continue to develop rapidly with extensive integration and usage across disciplines and career sectors with educational and societal impacts. Given these developments, we recognize the central role that writing instruction has in fostering critical literacies and engaged usage and, at times, non-usage of GenAI. Just as we have adapted our teaching and learning to other technological developments, so too are we now at a time of transition and adaptation. Our initial discussion at EATAW was wide-ranging, intentionally so because (1) there is so much to explore in relation to GenAI, and (2) the EATAW membership is diverse, coming from a range of academic backgrounds. Thus in our original plenary and here in this symposium we have raised issues ranging from specific pedagogical approaches to questions of program and institutional administration, to broader public issues and conversations about the relationship of humans to machines. Here in this written symposium we each raise a different issue related to GenAI and writing with the aim to foster dialogue and discussion about GenAI in writing-related contexts.

Editorial for the issue. Addresses the themes of the articles along the lines of situating and contextualising academic literacies.

Richmond’s Academic Literacies Programme (ALP) is a content-based form of instruction for university students which teaches critical reading, research skills, content synthesis, and writing and presentation skills. It is designed to empower all students to research and write effectively throughout their undergraduate studies. This article is a quantitative case study review of a British-American university’s ALP, examining student feedback across academic disciplines on specific taught ALP skills and comparing their improvement from 2014 to 2022. Chi-squared goodness-of-fit tests showed students valued research, critical reading, academic writing, essay structure, understanding academic honesty, using tutor feedback, and referencing skills; however, survey development and recommendation reports were not meeting student needs in their majors and so were removed from the programme. In comparison, in a follow-up review conducted in 2022, the skill of identifying research gaps was not effectively used or applied. However, independent group testing found the usefulness of skills at the lower learning level improved from 2014 to 2022, as did the application of skills at the higher level. This study concludes that ALPs are valuable for all university students beginning higher education research, regardless of first language or degree course.

Academic literacies refer to academic writing as social practices. This study describes first-term nursing students’ perceptions of the academic literacy education provided and its significance for their forthcoming training and clinical practice. Nine student nurses at the Swedish Red Cross University participated in semi-structured interviews. Data were analysed using latent content analysis. Two categories were identified: A challenging but rewarding step focused on the students’ struggles to become academically literate. A professional outlook targeted the students’ perceptions of the requirement to acquire academic literacies for their training and future clinical practice. The results provide insights of dichotomous perspectives among nursing students regarding their need to acquire academic literacies. Some of the students convey a resistant and sceptical view of adding academic education to nursing training. Others acknowledge the requirement of being academically literate, a competence sometimes hard-won. However, in their struggles, teacher guidance was requested; an appeal that needs to be met with creative solutions. Repetitive approaches by teachers combined with the use of student initiatives are proposed to enable improved academic literacy levels among the students.

The use of digital tools in academic literacies remains an emerging field, having advanced greatly in recent years. This dialogue responds to Schcolnik (2018), by arguing the benefits of considering the use of such tools in light of advances in digital pedagogies and applied linguistics. Going beyond understanding how academic writing developers engage with digital tools, an important next step is to consider whether their use of such tools is effective.

This dialogue responds to Neculai (2018) and argues for the need to recognise the character of academic literacies development and the policies governing that development as always emergent. It also reflects on the contributions that all, including students, make toward that development through their written work, as opposed to accepting the treatment of academic literacies development as a commodity to which access is given.

Literacy support in an EMI university in Central Asia (CA) helps students with the challenging linguistic demands of tertiary study in a second (foreign) language (L2). As Kazakhstan's post-Soviet education system (Yassukova, 2020) lacks significant first-language (L1) reading-to-write education (Keck, 2014; Friedman, 2019), English L2-literacy development has become even more difficult when compared to other regions of the world. Students’ literacy capabilities need to be investigated by L2-literacy tutors in order to scaffold learning better. Questions emerge as to whether it would help that the tutor had developed her L1 literacy through the same (but chronologically-earlier) system. To unpack this question, research can draw on perspectives in language socialisation (LS) (Duff, 2012), which sees learning environments as dynamic socially/culturally situated processes. To this end, this study looks at one L2-English literacy tutor's (author 2) experiences in a tertiary Foundation writing course. The goal was to see how the tutor’s interpretations of classroom literacy problems could inform the teaching of low L1-literacy students’ writing and metalanguage. For this purpose, we studied the reflective journaling (Burton, 2005) of the tutor who wrote reflective journals during a semester-long course in early 2020. The findings indicate that reflexivity can help a tutor find solutions, and that a similarity of background seems to help a local literacy tutor understand, and respond to, many of their students’ needs.

This is a book review of Creating Digital Literacy Spaces for Multilingual Writers by Meghan Bowling-Johnson.

This paper builds on a discussion launched by the EATAW 2021 conference panel, ‘Writing Tutor Development: Challenges and Opportunities in the Current State of the Art’. As a critical discussion of the panel’s themes, the paper engages with academic writing in times of crises by zooming in on infrastructures of writing support, namely the complex system in which Academic Writing Tutoring takes place, contextualised within the Centre for Academic Writing (CAW) at Coventry University, UK. Beginning with a consideration of what constitutes a ‘writing tutor’ in contemporary contexts and at CAW, the paper outlines a range of academic writing support identities and roles, unravels the institutional drivers that shape them, and offers perspectives on reconciling apparently disparate roles. Next, the paper addresses the issue of agency in terms of the challenges of enculturating writing tutors into communities of practice, discourse communities, and research networks. This is done with a view to reflecting on the practices in CAW and beyond, thus demonstrating the need for varied development and support pathways to facilitate the move towards online delivery amid, and after, a time of global crisis, namely, the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion centres on how challenges can be overcome through sustained professional development, focusing on the role of technology in not only refashioning academic writing support, but also the roles and practices of Academic Writing Tutors at CAW. Issues of digital pedagogies, technologies, and digital literacies permeate this discussion of the online pivot and crisis pedagogies, offering analysis, reflections, and questions to guide future directions in (online) Academic Writing Tutor development and Academic Writing (crisis) Pedagogies research.

Informed by writer-identity theory explaining links between emotion and identity, this study explores college STEM students’ feelings of comfort pertaining to math literacy, quantitative literacy, writing in STEM, and writing in general. Survey data from STEM majors (N = 134) was analyzed with Spearman rho tests of association. Results indicated that feelings of comfort working with numbers was significantly associated with comfort writing about numbers (rs = .504, p < .001); comfort writing about numbers was significantly associated with comfort writing in STEM (rs = .265, p = .002); and comfort writing in STEM was significantly associated with comfort writing in general (rs = .558, p < .001). This study suggests links between positive emotional experiences, which are implicated in identity performances, of quantitative writing, disciplinary writing, and writing in general. Future research on emotional experience and writer identity across the curriculum and in the disciplines is called for.

Evaluating Academic Literacies Course Types
 This poster represents a mixed methods study conducted at the University of the West Indies (UWI), which seeks to determine the merits of two types of Academic Literacies (AL) courses in promoting successful academic outcomes. Its focus is the first quantitative research phase in which the grade point averages after the first year of study of Social Sciences students successful either in the general purposes Foun1019 ‘Critical Reading and Writing in the Disciplines’ course or in the faculty-specific purposes Foun1013 ‘Critical Reading and Writing in the Social Sciences’ course are compared. The second, qualitative phase will be presented in future publications. This study is a response to an unimplemented recommendation of an external 2018 Quality Assurance Review (QAR) of the UWI, Mona campus, English Language Section, that students successful in the first semester of Foun1019 switch in the second semester to their faculty-specific AL courses. The QAR rationale for the recommended course switch is that the non-faculty-specific nature of the second semester of Foun1019 is academically disadvantageous to students who have shown promise in its first semester. This study is relevant to the debate over the use of general versus disciplinary AL approaches, one publicized by Jordan (1997) and revived by de Chazal (2012) who makes a pedagogical and practical case favouring a general purposes approach. Underlying the study is the premise at the heart of AL courses: that by preparing incoming students, supposed novice writers and readers at the tertiary level of study, these courses serve to maximise their academic performance. Indeed, this is the premise upon which the required pursuit by university students of AL courses is based.
 This Foun1019 general purposes course, introduced for students from all faculties who fail an English language proficiency entrance test (ELPT), places emphasis in the first semester on developmental reading and writing in English as well as on overcoming writer apprehension. Furthermore, a dual language identity – Standard Jamaican English and Jamaican Creole – is conferred on students. This is because whereas English is Jamaica’s sole official language, Jamaican Creole – which has an English lexicon but distinctly un-English grammar, syntax and phonology – is the first language of most of the students. The work undertaken in the first  semester functions as a bridge for students, building their linguistic self-esteem and improving their English language proficiency in order to ease them into what is considered the bona fide AL focus of the second semester: ‘Writing from Sources’. This latter focus is shared with one-semester, faculty-specific purposes AL courses, populated by students who pass or are exempt from the ELPT. These courses seek to respond to the AL development needs of individual faculties’ constituent departments. To do this, they employ as much of a specific purposes AL approach as is possible given the wide range of parent disciplines involved. The Foun1013 course featured in this study, which is pursued by Faculty of Social Sciences students exclusively, falls into this faculty-specific category of UWI AL courses.
 The Foun1019 and Foun1013 Year 1 student groups being compared have both been certified at the end of their first year of study to possess a satisfactory level of English language proficiency on the basis of attaining passing grades at the end of Semester two in their final and major AL assignment: a 1200-word documented expository essay scored via a common holistic rubric. To ensure further comparability of the two groups, control of the potentially influential independent variables of Socioeconomic Status (SES), Gender, Intellectual Aptitude (as estimated via matriculation qualifications) and other selected variables is accounted for by the multiple regression analysis component of the overall study design. To address the unevenness of the size of the two study populations, that is, the relatively small number (51) of Year 1 Foun1019 Social Sciences students versus the high number (630) of their Foun1013 counterparts, the Tukey test of statistical significance for unequal group sizes will be applied.
 To assess the groups’ relative academic performance, the official UWI measurement standard, Grade Point Average (GPA), is used. This measurement shows the typical course result of a student for a semester or year, and ultimately determines the quality of degree awarded (for example, First Class Honours, Lower Second Class Honours, Pass). This measurement encompasses nine bands ranging from 0.00-1.29 to 4.00-4.30 points. The points in question represent the numerical value given to letter grades, e.g. C+ (55-59%) = 2.30 points, F2 (40-44%) = 1.30 points. Grade points are determined by multiplying the points earned by the credit weighting of the course, which is based on the duration of the course (whether one or two semesters). Students earn three credits for one-semester courses, and six credits for two-semester ones. 2.00 is the minimum grade point deemed acceptable (University of the West Indies, 2014). 
 The investigation reveals that the overall Year 1 student pass rates for Foun1013 and Foun1019 at the end of the second semester of the 2017/18 academic year were 60.2% (630/1047) and 62.2% (51/82) respectively. Preliminary findings on the GPAs of the passing groups are as follows: 1) Foun1013 students’ GPAs are more widely spread across the band ranges than those of Foun1019 students; 2) The modal band range of the two groups is 2.30-2.99: 42.6% (269/630) of Foun1013 students versus 54.9% (28/51) of Foun1019 students; 3) The GPAs of 41.9% (264/630) of Foun1013 students fall into the four highest band ranges (3.00-4.29) versus 25.5% (13/51) for Foun1019 students; 4) The GPAs of 10.6% (66/630) of the Foun1013 students fall into the 2:00-2:29 (just acceptable) band range versus 15.7% (8/51) for 1019 students; 5) The GPAs of 4.9% (31/630) of Foun1013 students fall into the three lowest band ranges (0.00 -1.99) versus 3.9% (2/51) for Foun1019 students. Thus, overall, the Year 1 Foun1013 specific purposes students outperformed their Foun1019 general counterparts with respect to their higher band ranges, but the modal range of scores for both groups (a low but acceptable one) was the same; in addition, the Foun1019 group had slightly better outcomes in terms of its lower proportion of students with poor GPAs (under 2.0). Therefore, this cross-tabulation of the two groups’ GPAs reveals that student success in the general purposes course is not more highly correlated with Year 1 academic failure than student success in the faculty-specific purposes course, but it may hold implications for the passing grades received. Corresponding results for Year 2, 3 and 4 students, along with these Year 1 results, will be subjected to the finer-grained statistical analysis needed to reach definitive conclusions, while the qualitative phase of the study will use course content analysis and questionnaire and interview data from students and academic staff to seek explanations for the conclusions drawn.
 References 
 de Chazal, E. (2012). The general-specific debate in EAP: Which case is the most convincing for most contexts? Journal of Second Language Teaching and Research, 2(1), 135–148. http://pops.uclan.ac.uk/index.php/jsltr/article/view/90/37
 Jordan, R. R. (1997). English for academic purposes: A guide and resource book for teachers. Cambridge University Press.
 University of the West Indies. (2014). Grade point average regulations (Internal document). UWI. https://www.uwi.edu/gradingpolicy/docs/regulations.pdf

This paper outlines the educational benefits of creating digital stories for a variety of academic purposes as well as the professional need for students to develop and showcase digital proficiency. Digital stories fall under the category of multimodal composition and new media studies, and they encourage students to expand their digital literacy skills while reconceptualizing ways in which traditional writing projects can appeal to a broader audience. The article also addresses some of the classroom challenges teachers may face when trying to implement the practice and some practical resources that might assist teachers to integrate digital stories into their classrooms.

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.

In the UK, HE practical writing support has not kept pace with advances in our understanding of how students learn to write in their disciplines or greater comprehension of the nature of these discourses they are acquiring. Current institutional provision can be still be characterized as fragmented offering generic, deficit focused, skills-based instruction, despite such approaches being theoretically discredited. One alternative means to develop academic literacies in more inclusive and nuanced ways is to embed this work at a disciplinary level; while long recommended this model is unusual in the UK. This paper reviews approaches to embedding academic literacies work and reports on our attempts to embed writing development work within a social science department through an extended action research project which aimed to increase student mastery of academic literacies within one department. We focused on building opportunities for engagement using Writing Exemplars, Retreats and Writing Circles. Key features of our work are identified that appear transferable and may further facilitate successful interdisciplinary collaborations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Academic writing courses and subject-matter courses have been taught independently to a large extent at many European universities following a ‘study skills model’ (Lea and Street 1998). An integrated approach, however, both in students’ L1 (or their language of instruction) and in English (if this is not their L1), in accordance with Lea and Street’s ‘academic literacies model’ has a number of advantages. Introducing an academic literacies model, however, is difficult to implement since it requires the joint effort of both subject-domain teachers and language teachers and involves deviating from familiar teaching methods. To implement the changes required, a three-level approach has been developed at Justus Liebig University (JLU), Giessen/Germany, as one of several measures in a university-wide project. In this approach, the university’s writing centre and teaching centre take over the role of ‘motors’ of literacy development in all disciplines. The macro-level of this three-level approach encompasses central services provided by these centres as well as university-wide literacy development policies. The meso-level addresses programme development, and the micro-level, curriculum and syllabus adaptations for individual courses. The article provides insight into the measures to be taken at each of these levels based on a review of prior research on Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education (ICLHE) (Gustafsson 2011, Gustafsson and Jacobs 2013 and Wilkinson and Walsh 2015) and the central role that writing centres and teaching centres can play in this process.

The Writing Centre in Maynooth University, Ireland, is proud of its learner-centred approach (Biggs 1999, Lea et al. 2003). In the Centre we begin where students are, by asking them about their writing concerns. We also appreciate the need to recognise and build on their approaches to writing, their effective writing processes and their writing achievements. We see this under the broader heading of ‘writing transfer’. In this article, we outline our strategies to promote transfer and thinking about transfer with students before and after one-to-one appointments. In a small-scale research project we conducted, our research questions accentuated two potential principles of transfer, as noted in the Elon Statement on Writing Transfer, that ‘[s]uccessful writing transfer occurs when a writer can transform rhetorical knowledge and rhetorical awareness into performance … [when they] draw on previous knowledge and strategies … [and] … transform or repurpose that prior knowledge, if only slightly’, and that University programs can ‘teach for transfer’ (Perkins and Salomon 1988) through the use of enabling practices (Elon 2013: 4). Our work suggests that highlighting transfer in the writing centre context reinforces our learner-centred approach while also acknowledging the literacy archives with which our students present.

In her recent article 'Re-integrating Academic Development and Academic Language and Learning: a Call to Reason' (2014), Alisa Percy describes the historically separate trajectories in universities (in Australia but also more widely) of professional expertise in academic (educational) development and academic language and learning. She argues that this separation (in which, broadly, the former is staff-facing whilst the latter is student-facing) is unhelpful and calls for a reintegration of language and literacy expertise with academic development work in order to 'promote the development of students' language and learning simultaneously' (2014:1203). Percy's analysis and her conclusions are convincing to me. If I'm asked at a party what my job is (groan), I'm never quite sure which professional title to adopteducational developer, writing developer, learning developer, academic developerand, similarly, as its chronic institutional grumblings attest, the university in which I work is also never quite definitively cured of its anxieties about where the work I do should belong (historically over here, logically perhaps over there?). Conveniently sheltering under the nonpindownable, un-institutional, and non-generic name, 'Thinking Writing', the team in which I work has always taken the view that language and learningand knowing and being and doingare intimately connected, and that attention to language (writing specifically) isat least in principleas much the responsibility of disciplinary academics as is the teaching and learning of disciplinary content; the two, that is, can't really be separated.

In Portuguese higher education, teachers from different scientific areas recognize that their students have difficulties with writing. Nevertheless, preparing students for academic writing is not a priority and any intervention depends more on the interest of particular teachers than on any institutional policy. The development of a more institutional approach to academic writing in Portugal will imply a deeper knowledge of the multifaceted reality of the students’ situation, involving identification of their own perceptions of their writing processes and of the academic writing practices they are subject to. This is the aim of our study, based on 1150 students’ answers to a questionnaire about literacy practices in Portuguese higher education.Our results show that students seem to be conscious of the procedural nature of writing and of the role and importance of planning, composing and reviewing in the course of their writing processes. As for their perceptions about institutional interventions aimed at fostering writing abilities and teacher feedback on their written work, the answers to the questionnaire allow us to conclude that such support is not frequently offered. There are, however, some differences in the way these issues are considered across the various fields of study.

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.

This article analyses two examples of embedded academic writing and language provision within Art and Design (A&D) degree programmes in Animation and Fashion Textiles. The provision took the form of interventions to develop the students’ writing as part of their studio practice, specifically to help them generate concepts and develop studio-based design work. As such, the writing in these interventions formed part of a repertoire of strategies or tools for the development of design, and so was not focused on traditional academic writing (in the form of essays). The interventions were the product of close collaboration with specialist lecturers from the degree courses and were co-taught with them. We drew on practices and priorities from the studio disciplines and were informed by broadly Academic Literacies and Critical Pedagogy approaches, as well as ideas from Bakhtin (1981) and Freire (1996) on dialogue, and Medway (1996) on writing in art and design. This article finds that in terms of engagement and confidence with studio-based writing, the interventions had a transformative impact on the students. It also finds that where the interventions were most successful, dialogue played a number of key roles. The paper highlights the value of working on a form of studio-writing that is relatively unexamined; the transformative potential of embedded work like this; and the benefits of dialogue and collaboration inherent in this kind of intervention.

Comparatively little research has been done on students’ perceptions of communication and communication activities in integrated content and language (ICL) environments. In the present study, student statements about communication and communication activities have been collected via interviews and surveys from students attending a mechanical engineering programme in Sweden. These statements are compared with statements from content teachers at the same programme. Results suggest that students and teachers share a common perspective that communication activities should address a couple of apprenticeship genres that students will use in their future professions. Consequently, there seem to be good reasons for identifying and practising the use of apprenticeship genres. However, the focus on a few genres is problematised as some students show frustration when encountering unfamiliar genres. The article therefore also discusses the potential need for a role where communication teachers facilitate communication activities such that students enhance their perceptions of communication and communication activities in order to better prepare themselves for addressing various types of communicative situations.

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.

Joan Turner (2004) suggests that for some students language only becomes ‘visible’ as a problem. With the expansion of UK higher education, more students will be discriminated against as their written language becomes visible. Recent scholarship recognises different literacies that students bring to higher education (Lea and Street 2000) and advocates moving away from a skills approach towards one which centres on how writers make meaning. This article endorses this positive progression from the ‘student deficit’ model but argues for an honest assessment of how students who do not already produce Standard Written English (Elbow 2000) can make their writing invisible so that readers are not distracted by ‘surface’ elements of the writing. Using empirical evidence and Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘cultural capital’, it addresses a reluctance or inability to develop pedagogical solutions to a problem which is rooted in a persistently elitist and gate-keeping model of higher education.

Much recent discussion of ‘academic literacies’ has focussed upon the ways in which students are accultured into appropriate discourses and genres in the academy. This may be particularly true where a discipline has a very strong sense of lexicon and content. In awareness of this, semi-structured interviews were carried out in the spring of 2009 with three highly experienced academic writers in the department of Accounting and Finance at the Manchester Business School. The main focus of this paper is on academic literacy practices. The results of the interviews are discussed in this paper, which examines the relationship between experienced writers and their discourse community, the norms within which they work, the place for creativity, and the extent to which each of these may be negotiated. It will firstly consider the concepts of ‘discourse community’ and ‘Community of Practice’ (CoP), before discussing notions of creativity and ideas-generation as a means of informing the academic work that these writers develop.

Given the diversity of types of writing instructors in US and UK tertiary education and the range of their scholarly backgrounds, the likelihood is that most instructors have not participated in research in composition theory or pedagogy, rhetoric, academic literacies, or writing studies. The four projects reported here highlight the research opportunities and capacities of this diverse group, reflecting different types and levels of teacher or practitioner inquiry that involves teachers in studying significant questions arising from their own contexts. The article offers a brief history of practitioner inquiry research in its various forms and traditions; presents the projects themselves, including their aims and framing; and offers specific recommendations for the future of this invaluable form of inquiry. Definitions of action research vary greatly. The term in its broadest sense refers to research conducted in a field setting with those actually involved in that field, often along with an ‘outsider’, into the study of questions influenced by practitioners, rather than solely by ‘experts’ (Noffke 1996: 2). At the end of the day as teachers, we are often left wondering: Are we doing enough? How do we know? These are the essential questions that occupy the hearts and minds of so many of us as we walk into our classrooms (Goswami, Lewis and Rutherford 2009: 2).Teacher research just isn’t like other forms of research, in part because there is no blueprint for how to do it (Goswami, Lewis and Rutherford 2009: 1).

The difficulties students face when writing academically in an L2 have been widely acknowledged (Dudley-Evans 2002 et al., Paltridge 2001 and Swales 1990). While many higher education institutions in English-speaking countries have started to offer modules that support non-native (and native) students in their academic writing, very little is being done in this respect in developing countries, for example in Latin America (Carlino 2007 and Vargas 2007). In this paper, a project will be presented that aimed at fostering academic literacy in an M.A. course on research methods in a Mexican public university. Different pedagogic strategies, such as a needs analysis, explicit instruction on the target genre (the literature review), collaborative writing, a research journal, peer-reviews and group discussions were combined in order to achieve rapid improvement in this resource-poor environment. Through constant mutual feedback from, and communication with, peers, this transitional discourse community (Bruffee 1999) of twenty-four students moved towards the norms and conventions associated with the respective genre. The strategies employed might be of interest to instructors in academic writing who work under similar difficult conditions and/or time constraints.

The study reported here is based on an extensive questionnaire distributed to about 650 students at three French universities and one Belgian university in five disciplines. The main objective of the study was to describe the links between university writing and the disciplines by inventorying the kinds of university writing students do (academic and scientific/research-based writing) and identifying the thresholds they cross. The main result was that the pieces of writing considered as representative varied considerably according to the university discipline. We found both a pronounced disciplinary specificity with regard to the writing cited as being representative of their courses by the students, at degree level, and a clear dichotomy between the pieces of writing required at degree level and at master’s level. From these two main results, it can be verified that the disciplines are frameworks for the students’ perceptions of university writing practices. Our findings argue for the learning of writing at the university as an ongoing activity at liminal points, as students negotiate in between secondary/post-secondary, in between earlier and later years of the undergraduate cycle, in between that cycle and the master’s cycle, in between disciplines, and in between internalized personal norms and norms (perceived) of faculty.

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?’

The following set of three papers, ‘University Literacies: French Students at a Disciplinary “Threshold”?’ by Isabelle Delcambre and Christiane Donahue, ‘Modeling Multivocality in a U.S.-Mexican Collaboration in Writing across the Curriculum’, by Mya Poe and Jennifer Craig, and ‘Perceptions and Anticipation of Academic Literacy: “Finding Your Own Voice”’, by Claire Woods and Paul Skrebels, represents some of the ongoing practice-oriented research of the ‘Antwerp Group’, so called because the members came together as teacher-researchers with shared interests in student writing in Antwerp in 2006.

Reviewing keynotes and papers presented at the 2005, 2007 and 2009 EATAW conferences, and subsequent academic and digital literacies research, this paper considers the current agenda for academic writing teachers. It discusses pedagogic issues arising, for instance, from research on genre, multimodality, online communities, and the challenges and resources for the generation of students problematically called the ‘net generation’. Looking at two wings of academic writing research, those focusing on the ‘textual’ and those on processes and contexts, it raises the question of a common agenda for disciplinary writing studies, one exploring the transformatory processes and effects of disciplinary meaning making in ‘the digital university’.

This paper reports on a small-scale study in a post-1992 UK University that set out to explore how lecturers were approaching the challenge of developing first year undergraduates’ writing. It approached lecturers’ everyday writing practices from the perspective of literacy as social practice (Barton 2007, Barton, Hamilton and Ivanič 1999, Gee 1996 and Street 1984). Data collection focussed on the different ways the participating lecturers had tried to support students writing development as well as the extent to which they felt responsible for developing writing as part of their specific subject teaching. This study concludes that it may be beneficial for higher education institutions to provide opportunities for lecturers to develop their own academic writing identities in higher education, as well as supporting them to work more effectively as writing developers within their subject specialisms, or collaboratively with specialist writing development staff.

For over fifty years, US writing centers have been helping students, with writing centers found in approximately 90% of American universities and colleges (Eodice 2009). Because those who direct and tutor see student writers struggling with every kind of assignment, writing centers are important resources for anyone teaching writing or writing-intensive courses.Ironically, though, writing centers are an overlooked resource on literacy. As Eric Hobson and Muriel Harris argue, writing centers should share with those who teach writing to larger groups what writing center professionals have learned about the writing process. Based on four years of systematic research interviewing experienced writing center tutors, this article presents teachers of academic writing with valuable insights into how students misunderstand the writing process and how teachers of academic writing can improve their teaching of writing.

Today’s engineers are expected to be versatile, necessitating a bold shift in the direction of Australian undergraduate engineering education. Alongside the capacity for technical analysis, core engineering graduate attributes emphasise non-technical skills: (i) the ability to communicate effectively, (ii) the ability to function as reflective practitioners on multidisciplinary teams, and (iii) the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions within a global, economic, and environmental context. Increasingly, students are coming from a diversity of backgrounds – academic, cultural, and professional – and academics are being required to meet the complex professional demands they bring. Recognition of the need for literacy support where cohorts comprise a high percentage of students from a non-English-speaking background with strong science/math competence, yet little experience of writing academic English, is challenging. Effective literacy support requires early identification of problems in large undergraduate cohorts. Evidence demonstrates that literacy support is most effective when closely integrated with core assignments and relevant to dynamic professional practice.