Within response scholarship, although there is some literature addressing response in the context of thesis projects, the student perspective is notably absent. This article brings the students’ perspectives into focus as it is collaboratively written by three thesis students and their adviser. Three main findings are presented discussing the relationship between the thesis adviser and student and the feedback provided throughout the process. First, context plays a critical role in the manner in which the relationship is viewed by both the thesis adviser and student, with factors such as age, prior coursework and supervision of the student, the thesis adviser’s knowledge of the topic, IRB protocols, etc. playing an important role in how both the student and adviser perceive the relationship. Second, written and verbal feedback each play crucial roles in the feedback process, with their relationship often being reciprocal as the written feedback plays an agenda-setting role for verbal exchanges. And, lastly, students’ emotional responses to their thesis adviser’s written feedback are often directly related to the labor that the feedback will create rather than the tone or focus of the feedback itself.

The positive effects of dynamic written corrective feedback (DWCF) on linguistic accuracy are well-documented (Evans et al., 2010). However, studies on DWCF without exception have adopted a pretest-posttest research design; therefore, they were unable to explore the dynamics of development (Larsen-Freeman, 2006). In addition, all of the previous DWCF studies exclusively provided indirect feedback to students. Consequently, our knowledge is limited as to whether a modified version (providing direct feedback) of DWCF would be effective. To address this issue, in this study 24 university undergraduate students composed a total of 288 essays and received modified DWCF (direct feedback) on a weekly basis in two advanced writing courses over 12 weeks. The essays were analysed by applying both pretest-posttest and time-series analyses. Statistically significant differences were found in the linguistic accuracy indices (errors per words, errors-free clause ratio) in the student’s data between the pretest and posttest. The time-series analysis showed dynamics of the development of linguistic accuracy. This study showed that a modified version of DWCF is also effective and provides deeper insight into the dynamic processes of linguistic accuracy development.

Although writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) programs have been commonplace since the 1970s, the focus has largely been at the level of assessment and programmatic development and less on the instructors, particularly graduate teaching assistants (TAs) who adopt these practices. In this article, we describe a pilot WAC graduate-level course in writing pedagogy that our institution developed as part of our recent membership in the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL). We also share how one science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduate student revised her approach to assignment design, feedback, and assessment for a general education course and deepened her understanding of herself as an instructor as well as her students. We end by reflecting on how training in writing pedagogy can support graduate student identity development and improve student learning.

The relationship between tutoring and teaching has been a recurrent topic of interest among writing center directors and writing program administrators. While scholarship agrees tutoring experience aids composition teachers with implementing process pedagogy and fostering a collaborative classroom, the relationship between tutoring and assessment of student writing is less clear. This qualitative study uses interviews with eight graduate teaching assistants with tutoring experience to examine how they transfer and juxtapose knowledge, practices, and values for response between the writing center and classroom. Like previous scholarship, this research finds writing center tutoring contributes to teachers’ enactment of constructivist, student-centered pedagogy and enhances their understanding of students’ relationship to writing and feedback, standard language ideology, and systemic inequities in education. However, evaluation led these instructors to experience tension between their values and preferred respondent roles, with many reporting anxious grading processes and some experimenting with alternatives to traditional grading. The article concludes with suggestions to build bridges between tutoring and teaching contexts, particularly through explicit attention to antiracist pedagogy and alternative assessment practices.

This study explores how paraphrasing transforms and integrates meaning from reading into writing. Findings are based on interviews with 27 professors who commented on 8 paraphrases written by graduate students. Both student writers and professors were selected from across cultural (Chinese and North American) and disciplinary (soft and hard) contexts. Results indicate that the participating professors tended to accept paraphrases that involved a selection or interpretation of the original source that accurately represented the source text, rather than those that contained a misunderstanding or additional ideas. The professors also suggested that students could add an explanation for the content transformation so the paraphrase would be transparent for readers. The study highlights how important it is for student paraphrasers to provide guidance for readers so they can follow student content transformations. It also suggests that paraphrasing should be taught explicitly at the graduate level by responding to students’ writing while it is in process. Acknowledgement: This study is part of a larger project funded by an Insight Grant of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Grant number: 435-2013-0527). I thank the students and professors for their participation, and Yanning Dong and Ismaeil Fazel for their help with data analysis.

Academic socialization has been a common framework in writing studies for decades. Recent scholarship on rhetorical genre studies and feedback on writing can develop this paradigm in generative ways. In particular, examining how writers take up feedback as they write in genres can inform how writing pedagogy understands such activities. This study examines and interprets the case of a graduate student as she works with in-person and textually mediated feedback in research group meetings and reviewers’ letters. Approaching graduate students as advanced academic writers—simultaneously performing the role of expert and learning the content needed to be a full member of a discourse community—enables the identification of genre competencies that are needed for such activities in students’ socialization. The article concludes with a discussion of the potential insights these genre competencies might provide for instructors who teach and mentor student writers.

Despite a large body of research into the benefits of corrective feedback (i.e., teachers’ reactions to students’ incorrect use of the target language), little is known about how new and experienced second-language (L2) teachers supply feedback to writing and what factors guide their decisions. This paper is a collaborative effort of 1 teacher-educator and 4 graduate students to examine the process of providing written corrective feedback (WCF) to university-level L2 learners. Findings point to complexities involved in WCF provision and the importance of examining CF holistically, as preservice teachers’ corrective choices and learners’ responses to them are often interlinked. Acknowledgments: We are grateful to the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions. Any remaining errors are ours alone.

Although international/English as an Additional Language (EAL) doctoral students bring unique academic, professional, cultural, and linguistic strengths to the university setting, for many students, requirements to produce scholarly writing in English is a source of stress. This case study examined how a writing feedback group supported the language socialization of four international/EAL doctoral students into scholarly writing through a qualitative research design framed in participatory action research. Three primary themes emerged from the data: (a) the writing feedback group became a social, collegial, and supportive space contributing to international/EAL doctoral students’ evolving development and persistence as doctoral students and scholarly writers; (b) participation in ongoing feedback loops as both an author and a reader provided students opportunities to advance in their writing skills and mature in their persistence; and (c) feedback loops facilitated appreciation for the scholarly writing process. Findings highlight the need for institutes of higher education to diversify international/EAL students’ doctoral experiences.

This article expands composition research on response by examining how Dweck’s theory of mindsets impacts graduate writers’ ability to process critical and praise-oriented teacher response, apply critical and praise-oriented teacher response in revision, and ultimately, develop as learners and transfer knowledge from these experiences. We conducted this examination through in-depth case studies of two writers over a six-year period that spanned undergraduate and graduate education. The case studies included interviews, teacher response, and writing to develop thick descriptions of graduate writers’ experiences. We demonstrate how students’ mindsets intersect with processing and applying both critical and praise-oriented response throughout their academic careers, which ultimately helps or hinders opportunities for learning transfer and writing development. The implications of this work apply to how teachers respond to writing and how they teach graduate students about processing and applying teacher comments.

As recent studies have shown (Ferris, 2014; Reid, Estrem, & Belcheir, 2012), formalized types of pedagogical instruction may be less effective for new instructors than previously thought. As new instructors form beliefs about responding to student writing through their first years of teaching and training, they may continue to rely heavily on knowledge from various communities of practice (Wenger, 2000) outside of their current programs while shaping their beliefs about feedback. This study examines these informal influences on the feedback beliefs of first-year writing instructors. Specifically, this study uses both surveys and interviews with teachers in their first 2 years of teaching at a university in the United States to uncover influences on these individuals that result from informal training. The purpose of this study is to examine how personal experiences, values, or beliefs based on their own lives might affect the beliefs with which instructors respond to their students’ writing in the classroom. Findings suggest that informal training is a valuable tool to new teachers for motivating them to respond to student writing and should be taken into account in teacher training.

An important drawback of peer response in L2 writing classes is a reluctance to be sufficiently critical of a classmate’s writing, particularly with students from cultures that value group harmony. Anonymization of peer response is commonly proposed as a means of overcoming this problem. The current action research project examined the effect of anonymizing the peer response process on the number of proposed revisions made by students from eight undergraduate writing classes at a private university in Tokyo. It also examined the students’ attitudes towards the peer response process. The findings revealed that the anonymization of the process had significant impact on the less proficient students’ propensity to recommend revision; however, this was not the case for students of a higher proficiency level. Students at both levels felt more comfortable with the peer response process when it was anonymized. The pedagogical implications of anonymizing the peer response process are discussed.

Although peer review as a method of writing response has been examined extensively, only limited research exists on peer review at the graduate level. This study examines graduate students’ peer review interactions in a writing workshop in which first- and second-language students from different disciplines were enrolled. The researchers focused on how students engaged with language and disciplinary differences as they peer-reviewed. Data were collected from two separate writing workshop classes over two semesters and included video recordings, observation notes, writing samples, and end-of-semester surveys. The researchers found that some students could provide only limited assistance when working with peers from different fields. The peer review groups’ effectiveness was strained when there were large gaps in academic levels. However, peer review groups were generally productive when students from different language backgrounds worked together. The peer reviews were effective in raising students’ rhetorical awareness and strengthening their understanding of genre conventions. Students showed an openness to language differences, and in their discussions they helped each other navigate the challenges of graduate school. Implications for using peer review in writing interventions for graduate students are discussed.

We are thrilled to introduce and welcome you to our fourth volume year of Journal of Response to Writing. This is the seventh installment of the journal, and we are encouraged by JRW’s growing readership and increasing dissemination of scholarship internationally. As we continue to offer a shared venue for practitioners and researchers of English composition, second language writing, foreign language writing, and writing center studies, we hope that you will kindly share this open-access, online resource with your colleagues and students who are interested in issues of response to writing. In this issue, we are pleased to introduce a range of fascinating articles that offers important insight into response practices across multiple formats, programs, and student backgrounds. In our first article “Peer Reviews and Graduate Writers: Engagements with Language and Disciplinary Differences While Responding to Writing,” Kate Mangelsdorf and Todd Ruecker examine the efficacy and potential of graduate L2 peer review sessions. This under-researched area of inquiry is meaningful given the assumptions many teachers and graduate students share that feedback on graduate-level writing is best provided by content experts with native language proficiency. This study followed 12 graduate students (nine L2 writers) over a 16-week peer review course to examine the impact of language background and discipline on peer review interactions. From their investigation, the authors argue that “students’ attitudes toward language difference. . .played a greater role in making successful peer reviews than students’ categorization as L1 or L2 students.” Manglesdorf and Ruecker further arranged students in peer review groups by similar disciplines, yet they still found that differences in education level (M.A. vs. Ph.D.) could interfere with helpful peer reviews. Nevertheless, the authors indicate that regardless of linguistic or disciplinary differences, all graduate writers can increase their r

We are pleased to share with you our latest issue of the Journal of Response to Writing. Although not intentionally planned, this issue’s three feature articles all explore the affective dimensions of response, considering both learners’ and instructors’ views on aspects of response practice. The authors point out that just as important as examining what happens when responding is knowing how the people involved experience response. We are pleased to welcome back JRW’s founding editor, Dana Ferris, whose article “‘They Say I Have a Lot to Learn’: How Teacher Feedback Influences Advanced University Students’ Views of Writing” presents the findings from a large-scale longitudinal study investigating how upper division undergraduate students remember the feedback they received from previous teachers. Ferris surveyed 8,500 students across five years to find out how their affective perceptions of teacher feedback corresponded to their views on writing. With both qualitative and quantitative data, Ferris argues that students who report having received more negative feedback also have less positive feelings about writing in general. Multilingual writers in particular remember more critical feedback and find less enjoyment in writing overall. Ferris suggests that these findings should be a reminder to teachers to pay attention to how they respond to students’ texts, as instructor comments can have a lasting impact on learners’ feelings about writing for academic purposes.

This study examines the relationship between students’ memories of teacher feedback and these students’ writing and attitudes toward and enjoyment of writing. More than 8,500 survey responses were collected from advanced undergraduate students in a large university writing program. A question about the characteristics of teacher feedback received by student respondents was examined both quantitatively and qualitatively. Second, responses to a different survey question about students’ attitudes toward writing were statistically compared with their reported memories of teacher feedback. Responses to the teacher feedback and writing attitudes questions from different student subgroups (analyzed by first language backgrounds and by when they matriculated at the university) were also compared statistically. Results showed that students had a wide range of reactions, some positive and some negative, to teacher feedback. There also was a strong relationship between their self-reported enjoyment of writing and how they have experienced teacher feedback. Further, it was clear that multilingual students expressed more negative attitudes toward writing in general and reported less positive experiences with teacher feedback. The study suggests that students attend to and have a range of reactions to teacher feedback and that teachers should be self-reflective and sensitive about their response practices, particularly when responding to multilingual students about language issues.