The proliferation of AI tools for text editing and generation has raised challenging but also interesting questions for writing classes. In this paper, we report on our experiences with an exercise exploring the use of AI in an academic writing class. We first outline our conceptualization of the writing process, breaking down the skills that students need to master the complex task of writing, visualized as a ‘writing pie’. This breakdown allows us to critically assess the capabilities of AI tools against our understanding of writing as a human process. We then share our experiences with an exercise with ChatGPT in an academic writing class, where students evaluate a text with respect to its academic style and suggest improvements. Students then compare their own suggestions to those made by ChatGPT and critically evaluate the output. We include both instructors’ and students’ evaluations to reflect on whether the inclusion of such exercises can aid in achieving the course’s learning outcomes. We share three key takeaways: (1) there is value to having students work with AI; (2) critical evaluation of AI output is key; (3) activities with AI should be evaluated against learning goals.

This teaching practice paper shows how students may choose to work with ChatGPT, generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce essays and written assessment solutions in a manner that may be considered as either acceptable or as a breach of academic integrity depending on individual and institutional views. Following a brief introduction to how chatbots work, case study examples show how modified prompts can be used to generate writing in alternative styles, how a writing tutor review can be simulated, and how LLMs can be run locally and without Internet access. The paper is intended to inform academic writing tutors, instructors, and assessors what is possible using generative AI for writing as of January 2024. It is not positioned to make a judgement regarding what is acceptable, but rather to illustrate how technically proficient users can accomplish more than is often indicated by writing beginner level prompts for a chatbot. Such techniques are accessible to many students and the Academic Writing Development community will need to consider its response.

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.

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.

This article provides insights into how writing a Master’s thesis in pairs affects students’ development and identity construction as academic writers (Burgess & Ivanič’s, 2010). Data consist of self-recorded dialogues between four pairs of Danish Master’s thesis writers at the start, middle and end of their thesis writing process. Data were coded thematically using grounded theory methods (Charmaz, 2006) and the resulting empirically grounded themes informed a discourse analysis of the material (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001). The findings suggest that those writing a Master’s thesis in pairs negotiate and assign largely fixed writing identities at an early stage that serve as a way of creating boundaries and building trust, allowing the students to write, provide feedback and revise text in shared documents. Each pair develops a set of writing strategies focused on setting and maintaining boundaries, thereby ensuring that the joint pair writer identity is not threatened. The article discusses how this strategy is embedded in a wider Master’s thesis discourse that draws heavily on concepts such as autonomy and independence and thus might not lend itself easily to the articulation of a joint identity as a writing pair.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

This research aims to analyse the situation of the multiliteracy of natural sciences students in their academic writing in the German university context and to identify students' awareness and applications of their multilingual writing competence as well as how they make use or not of it in their academic writing process. English has the status of lingua franca in this context and German is used in informal settings. Minutes, reports, reviews, Bachelor or Master theses have to be written either in English or German, depending on the study programme. As Canagarajah (2013) has pointed out, multilingual scholarship offers huge resources in terms of diversity of thinking because language carries with it a system of knowledge and thinking from which both their representatives and the writing scientific community can benefit. The empirical, qualitative study of this paper is based on interviews conducted with participants of the course 'Akademisches Schreiben fur Naturwissenschaftler/innen' (Academic Writing for Natural Sciences Students) offered by the International Writing Centre at Göttingen University. The qualitative content analysis is based on portfolio activities and interviews conducted with students. This paper presents the first results of our data analysis.

This article reports on a case study evaluating lecturers' experiences of their own affective writing process using a reflective critical incident analysis. While the cognitive-affective focus of academic writing has been explored previously from a collaborative perspective (Benton et al. 1984), this current study takes the individual writer as the unit of analysis. There are several reasons why lecturers need to write. Foremost among these should be that when they write, they are providing a positive model for students, and are helping to demystify the act of writing. Scholarly writing can be a struggle, and by doing so ourselves, we learn empathy for our students. In reality, many lecturers are facing the need for increasing their publications output. In terms of writing for publication, Murray (2013) has advised that busy academics must develop productive writing processes, and this may mean changing writing behaviours.Affective conditions such as sense of class community, self-efficacy and writing apprehension are known factors affecting writing behaviour and performance. A blended accredited professional development module entitled ‘Writing and Disseminating Research’ is discussed as a way to afford lecturers opportunities to develop writing skills that may also promote positive affective conditions. Data suggests that the pedagogic intervention resulted in greater confidence in terms of participants’ critical writing skills and provided a suitable environment for affective conditions to flourish. Four themes emerged from the analysis of the critical incidents on writing apprehension: self efficacy, the role of external sources on affective writing, peer feedback and class community. Future research would explore the sustainability of the process extending into the lecturers' own practice with their students.

The pivotal role of writing centers in improving the quality of academic writing has been well documented by research. Although writing centers are commonplace in many countries, it appears that none existed prior to 2008 between South Africa and the Sahara. This article reports on the writer's assignment to start one in Namibia. The expectations of the challenges in this task, centering on training staff and tutors and acquiring resources, did not resemble the realities experienced, involving infrastructure, matrix management, hierarchy, and bureaucracy. Various paradigms for deconstructing these experiences, such as post-colonialism, culture clash, and ‘contact zone’ theory, all only partially explain the challenges encountered. These experiences in Namibia provide a case study of the politics of collaboration involved in implementing a writing center, and a microcosm of the challenges one might face anywhere. This account is thus 'glocal'; that is, locally derived but with global applications. Eleven specific guidelines can assist anyone contemplating a similar administrative assignment.

This contribution focuses on classroom discourse, and student evaluations thereof, in a specific tertiary EMT (English-medium teaching) setting. This is done by drawing on a rich, triangulated and longitudinal data base, comprising classroom interactional and ethnographic data that cover the whole duration of an international, four-semester English-medium hotel management programme (HMP) set in Vienna, Austria. On the basis of the discursive nature of learning it is argued that, in spite of the absence of any explicit language learning aims, the classroom discourse affords (language) learning spanning the functions of English as language for international hospitality purposes and of English as the lingua franca of the HMP community. Building on the recent discussions of EMT instructional types and of English used as a lingua franca in the international classroom, it is argued that the HMP represents a case of ‘implicit ICELF (integrating content and English as a lingua franca)'.

This paper discusses the results of a reflective case study involving academic writing within an undergraduate programme at a British university. Specifically, the study focuses on the positioning of the students’ central claims within their essays – and subsequent essay structure – and how this differs from a specific structure often taught within the US Freshman Composition class. Coming from this teaching background in the US, I made the assumption that such pedagogy would be transferable when I began teaching academic writing in a UK university in 2003; however, from my experience students have tended to resist placing their central claims within the introduction and this study might therefore illustrate a potential pedagogic issue that US trained writing professionals could face if teaching academic writing in Britain. The analysis of 535 essays from all three years of the programme, in addition to questionnaires completed by staff, students, and members of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW), help to shed light on the nature of the thesis statement in the British academic writing context.

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.

This article reflects upon the experiences and perceptions of feedback practices that five students who spoke English as an additional language (EAL) engaged with as part of their one-year taught master's course at a major UK University. During writing processes and after the submission of assignments, participants received support in a wide range of modes: tutors’ oral, written, and electronic feedback and peer feedback. The paper outlines the key difficulties students encountered when engaging with and responding to feedback. Findings suggested that although students expressed satisfaction with feedback practices provided over the course of their master's degree, instances in which these events constrained their understanding of writing conventions have been documented. Such factors as appropriate timing, the nature of feedback, the type of language tutors employed when providing feedback, variation in tutors’ preferences for marking, as well as students’ individual and cultural differences, sometimes limited students’ understanding and use of feedback.

This article presents a qualitative case study of feedback practices in the first year of a two-year master's programme. Writing and feedback are viewed as contextualized cultural practices shaped by factors at macro, meso and micro level. The empirical data consists of a text corpus of students’ essays and teachers’ comments, supplemented by interviews. Initial findings showed a discrepancy between the considerable amount of comments given by the teachers and the students’ lack of use of the feedback they received. The text analysis, based primarily on Hattie and Timperley’s (2007) model of feedback revealed several features of the feedback that counteracted learning, but a major problem was unclear goals for the writing combined with a study design that did not include revision of student texts.

In the UK higher education context, central services such as writing centres are coming under management scrutiny and writing developers are being asked to demonstrate the impact of their work. This article discusses one way in which writing centres can evaluate their provision for evidence of effectiveness and to gauge their potential for expansion. Taking as a case study the development of the Coventry Online Writing Lab (COWL) at Coventry University, England, the article reports on the use of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) technique (Kaplan and Norton, 1992) to examine how extending one writing centre‘s provision through the development of an online component has been considered and justified. The BSC is an evaluation tool that takes into account stakeholders‘ perspectives, internal institutional processes, finance and budgets, and staff development needs, and sees these as integral and important drivers of an organisation‘s results (Grayson, 2004: 1). The article discusses the benefits and limitations of such an approach within this case study and its implications for strategic planning for writing centres and other forms of university writing provision.

Peer assessment has been used increasingly in English writing instruction in the past two decades. This has given rise to research on peer assessment in developing English learners’ writing proficiency. However, few studies have exclusively examined student variables in relation to peer assessment and, in particular, how students’ English language proficiency affects the use of peer assessment in English-medium writing classrooms. The case study research described in this article examined, through the employment of students’ learning diaries, how Chinese university English- learners’ language proficiency affected the use of peer assessment. Ten second-year English majors at a university in Southern China were asked to keep diaries of their experiences of being involved in peer assessment over sixteen weeks. The diary data showed that the students viewed their English language proficiency as a salient variable influencing the focus, the type, the appropriateness, and the impact of peer feedback on learners’ redrafts.

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.