Affect is an important predictor of writers’ performance. Though writing affect has been researched since the mid-1970s, few works have addressed the ways to motivate students to write and/or help them avoid demotivation. This paper suggests some guidelines that teachers can follow to help L2 students overcome negative writing affect. After briefly highlighting the aspects of negative writing affect and describing its causes, the paper provides five main guidelines for helping demotivated L2 students to write. These guidelines are: improving students’ linguistic knowledge, integrating technological tools in writing instruction, nurturing students’ positive beliefs about writing, optimizing teacher feedback, and orchestrating peer assessment activities. The first two pedagogical guidelines are concerned with fostering students’ positive writing affect indirectly through enabling them to overcome their composing problems and write in a supportive environment, whereas the last three focus on enhancing it directly by nurturing their positive beliefs about and attitudes towards writing. Each guideline is rationalized and described in detail.

Interactive Writing (IW) is a powerful support for language and literacy development; however, its emphasis on using oral language to construct written language can present challenges for deaf/Deaf and hard of hearing (d/Dhh) students due to their unique and diverse language experiences. Teachers (n = 14) using Strategic and Interactive Writing Instruction (SIWI) with grade 3–5 d/Dhh students in a variety of settings were observed using a space referred to as ‘the language zone’ to address the unique language and literacy needs of d/Dhh students.  The language zone is the designated space in a classroom where the creation, translation and revision of ideas is made visible.  Researchers developed a flowchart with three tiers to document the three purposes for which the teachers use the space.  Accompanying scenarios provide concrete examples of three distinct ways in which the language zone can be used.  Teachers can use this language zone flow chart as a tool to recognize, analyze and select instructional moves that have the potential to positively impact the language and literacy proficiencies of d/Dhh students.           Acknowledgments: The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R324A120085 to the University of Tennessee. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.

At the comprehensive research university described in this study, some students taking a required, first-semester, composition course in the fall make great progress in their ability to draft and revise the curriculum’s major essays. Yet, they still fail the class. Many of these students are on their way to becoming practiced writers but require additional assistance to move beyond a definition of revision consisting solely of editing and proofreading strategies. To support such students, I created a voluntary, spring-semester, Composition I course foregrounding both lower- and higher-order revision practices in which students could continue to work on previous assignment drafts from fall. In a three-year, mixed methods, case study involving an experimental course-design model, students enrolling in a Composition I class focused on revision strategies demonstrated both positive revision-related drafting and course outcomes, according to findings. This article includes a description of the course’s framework and its assessment practices. The results of this study have implications for teaching revision in first-year composition.

Cognitive dissonance refers to an experience of incongruity between an entrenched understanding of a phenomenon or concept and a new piece of cognition. If unaddressed, dissonance can be at the heart of international students’ unresolved dilemmas, unspoken feelings, and unshared stories, facts and experiences. In response, pedagogy needs to tap cognitive dissonance that issues from cultural diversityinduced viewpoints, cognitive perceptions, and beliefs on the part of international students, enriching and equalizing the learning environment. Within the framework of postmodernism and social constructivism, this paper offers multiple strategies for the utilization of cognitive dissonance. It is based on three data sources. First, following approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) and the informed consent procedure, interviews instructors at a university in a mid-West American city highlight instructors’ experiences with and strategies pertaining to engagement of dissonance. Second, the author’s first-hand experiences of dissonance in the United States have been incorporated. Third, the existing literature relevant to the study has been used.

The importance of writing ability for academic and career advancement is increasingly a focus of education research and policy globally. In response to concerns regarding students' writing competence, policymakers and curriculum designers have begun placing more emphasis on writing in nationwide academic standards. However, given the complexity of writing as a cognitively dynamic and socioculturally situated activity, representing the development of writing competence in standards that vary by grade level is challenging, and little is known regarding how educational systems vary in approaching this challenge. In response to calls for more worldwide writing research, we undertake a cross-national examination of writing standards with the aim of informing policymakers, those involved in the research and development of writing standards, and researchers interested in writing development, by comparing how three educational systems (in Denmark, Norway, and the US) have represented writing development in curricular standards. To that end, we ask: (1) How do the three educational systems variously frame writing development in grade-level distinctions for writing standards? (2) How do the developmental pathways implicated in these grade-level distinctions relate to theory and research on writing competence and its development?

This paper describes developmental writing paths within a Colombian major in Industrial Engineering. The accounts were created through retrospective descriptions of students' writing experiences collected by a qualitative survey and analyzing writing samples. The study shows that writing throughout the major embraces diverse functions (Writing to learn; Writing to apply content knowledge; Writing to research; Writing to communicate ideas), and traces diverse developmental paths (Writing for innovation; Lab writing; Writing for company analysis; Writing for conducting a senior thesis). This analysis also reveals that different types of problems (improving profits in companies or creating new devices) can be treated through different types of genres (research proposals in companies and projects of innovation), despite the fact that the same label (report) is being used by participants to group writing experiences. One of the writing functions in the major that seems overtly identified by the students is conducting a senior thesis. Since there are other writing functions present across the curriculum, further studies and pedagogical debates with faculty members are necessary to define what writing developmental paths are expected from the students and how many curriculum projects (that include explicit teaching on theories of disciplinary writing and genre knowledge) across the curriculum should be undertaken.

This article investigates the learning trajectories of graduate students and early career faculty - a group we refer to as emerging scholars. Taking a developmental perspective, our mixed-methods study employs surveys and interviews to understand emerging scholars' writing needs and experiences. This research is significant because although literature suggests emerging scholars struggle with new writing practices, perceptions, and identities, researchers rarely take a developmental perspective on the learning needs of emerging scholars, which ultimately limits access to the educational enterprise and perpetuates a gatekeeping culture in higher education. Further, no studies that we know of consider graduate student and faculty writers' needs in relation to one another. In this article, we present an innovative method for cross-analyzing data from these two groups in ways that reveal recurring/diverging features of lifelong writing development. Our preliminary findings reveal connections and variations in the needs and experiences of these two groups that could inform pedagogy, programming, and institutional policy geared toward graduate student and faculty writers. Finally, we discuss methodological implications for studying groups of writers with proximate developmental relationships and explain how future applications of our method will contribute to research on writing development across the lifespan.

This exploratory case study investigated an experienced second language writing instructor's written feedback practice in an ESL freshman composition class. The purpose of the research was to explore and examine contextual factors and their impact on instructor written feedback practices in order to provide situated descriptions of relationships between written feedback practices and contextual factors. Data were collected from one experienced ESL writing instructor and one ESL writer in a variety of forms: surveys, interviews, a stimulated-recall task, classroom and instructor-student conference observations, instructional materials, and student written product. The study found that the instructor's decision-making in selecting specific feedback forms was guided by a number of written feedback practice principals in conjunction with other contextual factors such as the instructorperceived level of students' writing proficiency, the availability of writing conference, the nature of writing issues, students' writing performance in the previous writing assignments, lesson history, and knowledge about effective feedback practice. The study suggests L2 writing instructors' written feedback decisions are the product of different combinations of multiple-contextual factors and the nature of the written feedback practice principles is a task-specific manifestation of teacher cognition specifically configured for written feedback practice.

This paper describes the experiences of an international student who moved mid-semester from a mainstream section of a first-year composition class to a 'sheltered' section, comprised of L2 writers and taught by a TESOL professional, because of the difficulties encountered by the student. This pedagogical reflection focuses on the system of support available to the international students of our university and the reasons that the system first failed to help the student in question but, in due course, proved to assist in the student's success. Improved communication between the elements of the support network ultimately made a difference in the experience of the student and led to changes implemented in the support system. Better application of services already in place and additions to the system under discussion benefited the international students at the university. The recommendations developed as a result of this project may be useful to other institutions with similar student populations.

This study investigates the influences of interest and choice on the production of second language (L2) journal entries by first-year students (N = 88, 55 female, 33 male) at a university in western Japan. Between treatment groups and a neutral group, several aspects of writing were examined: total words, words per sentence, grammatical accuracy, and lexical sophistication (K1, K2, and AWL words). Further enquiry into students' preferred choice conditions was conducted with a post-treatment questionnaire. The results suggest that the provision of choice and interestingness of a topic affect some of the variables but not others. Pedagogical implications and suggested future research are discussed.

Perhaps one challenge facing postgraduate students is the writing of essays responding to a specific reading assignment. Such an essay requires students not only to summarize, but to engage in a discussion of the significant points of the article, pointing out its strengths as well as its weaknesses. This paper presents the results of an investigation on criticality in written assignments of postgraduate students in applied linguistics and TESOL. It will discuss: How 'critical' are students when writing their assignments?  What kind of 'critical' comments are they able to offer? Seventy assignments in the form of essays were analysed, using corpora from three universities in Asia (2010-2014). The investigation adopted a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis. In the quantitative phase, the commenting or critiquing sentences were identified and counted vis-à-vis reporting/summarizing information. In the qualitative phase, the critiquing or commenting parts were further analysed, and identified according to their functions or 'moves'. The initial findings from the investigation include: (1) the almost equal proportion of commenting/critiquing and summarizing/reporting information in the assignments; (2) the identification of four broad functions for the commenting or critiquing information adopted by students, each of which has a number of possible specific 'moves' or categories; (3) presence of critique 'nodes' as distinguished from 'support' comments; and (4) the identification of at least four moves as the most recurrent and possibly obligatory categories. This investigation has unearthed issues that are definitely worth investigating as extensions of this research, and will be of interest (most especially) to genre analysts and teachers of writing. Most of all, it will be of interest to postgraduate students in applied linguistics/TESOL programmes who may be wondering about the level of criticality they exhibit when writing assignments for their courses.

This paper aims to investigate how novice EFL writers develop their genre awareness and rhetorical flexibility in a genre-based writing course that incorporates two distinct types of genres (essay and journal writing) for practice simultaneously. Three sets of qualitative and quantitative data were collected: surveys, reflection papers from 40 students, and semi-structured interviews with eight students. Descriptive statistical analysis provides an overview on students' perceptions on the two types of genres and the distinct pedagogies. Qualitative data gathered from the in-depth interviews were used to understand how learners intermingle between two distinct writing pedagogies and what the perceived impact is on students' subsequent functional writing practice. In order to explore how students developed their genre awareness (cognitive) and rhetorical flexibility (metacognitive), we draw on Grabe and Kaplan's (1996) notion of ethnography of writing: (1) the purpose of a certain genre; (2) the criteria for writing; (3) audience; and (4) their goals/expectations. The findings show that most learners attached different benefits to these two genre-based instructions, enabling them to recontextualize their writing performance when necessary. Pedagogically, this study provides alternative pedagogies to the most commonly seen dilemma for L2 writing instruction. Theoretically, this research demonstrates how contested pedagogies can be complementary to enhance our understanding of to what extent cross-genre awareness can be raised and transformed through distinct genre-based practices.

The teaching of composing strategies is acknowledged to be an important area in writing instruction and test preparation. This study presents a small set of data originating from a larger project which investigated the composing strategies reported by 30 international postgraduate students. These students were in their second year of university study and had all volunteered to attempt the TOEFL-iBT writing test. Immediately after completion of each task, they were interviewed about the way they had understood the requirements of the tasks and the processes and strategies they had used in order to complete them. All the students had successfully obtained entry to university and were functioning satisfactorily in their current areas of study, yet the scores they achieved in the TOEFL writing assessment showed considerable variation. Surprisingly, some were well below the benchmark for university entry. In order to investigate this, we revisited and reanalysed the interview data gathered from the three top and three bottom scorers, and examined similarities and differences in the way they approached and undertook the task. The high scorers' goals for task completion focused on the product as well as the process, and in contrast to the low scorers their monitoring strategies involved interaction with the emerging text. While we acknowledge that actual differences in language proficiency may have been partially responsible for the different scores, in this paper we explore the possible role of strategy choice, and we consider implications for test preparation teaching and writing instruction in general.

This case study uses an action research approach to the implementation of a systematic bilingual writing assessment that K-5 teachers administered over a two-year period in an inner-city public school with a two-way bilingual English-Spanish program. The study reflects the importance of developing an awareness of academic discourse over time, as teachers participated in a writing assessment project that included the administration of writing prompts and corresponding analysis of student writing through use of grade level rubrics, three times each year. The instrument was developed by the first author, a participant-observer who in the role of writing coordinator also led professional development workshops, and provided mentorship to teacher participants. The second researcher is an outside expert on bilingual writing who participated in the retrospective interview stage of the study. This paper will focus on insights from semi-structured interviews with teachers that reveal their current views on aspects of the writing assessment project. The questions prompted teachers to review the rubrics and associated assessment materials to garner insights about their participation in the assessment project. Thematic analysis of the interviews indicates that teachers enhanced their awareness of discourse structure and the writing process, as they incorporated the rubrics for several pedagogical purposes: more targeted whole group instruction, strategic and flexible grouping of students, and more deliberate selection of topics to support writers during individual conferences. Furthermore, teachers appreciated the ability to systematically track writing growth across the academic year, an option that had formerly been used solely for documentation of reading development in this setting. The influence of standards in providing goals for instructional outcomes is also discussed. Changes in the form of assessment are unlikely to enhance equity unless we change the ways in which assessments are used: from sorting mechanisms to diagnostic supports; from external monitors of performance to locally generated tools for inquiring deeply into teaching and learning, (Darling- Hammond, 1994: 7)

The author reports findings from two iterations of a formative experiment focusing on improving students' conventional and digital, multimodal arguments. The first iteration of this experiment occurred in a rural school district in the United Sates with an eleventh-grade English/language arts teacher, and the second iteration was implemented in the same school district, but in a different high school with both a ninth- and tenth-grade English/language arts teacher. The findings focus upon obstacles the teachers encountered while implementing an intervention that entailed elements of argument; digital, multimodal tools; and the writing process. These obstacles led the author to make six recommendations for the future professional development of rural teachers integrating digital, multimodal tools into conventional writing curriculum.

The ‘Learner-Driven Feedback’ (LDF) procedure is innovative in its combination of approaches to feedback provision in second/foreign language writing instruction which a) respond to learners’ individual queries and b) employ digital modes of delivery ([anonymised ] 2016). In LDF, formative feedback is given by the teacher, but the learners indicate on what aspects of their writing and in what mode they would like to receive feedback. In this study, LDF was used with 36 postgraduate students of an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) class at a university in Germany. The presented analysis of survey data highlights high levels of receptivity to LDF and reveals students’ perceptions of the affordances of different digital delivery modes for improving their writing. While feedback in the form of margin comment bubbles was perceived to be helpful to foster improvement in general language accuracy, students preferred emailed or audio-recorded feedback for the improvement of their writing related academic skills. The potential applicability of LDF for EAP and other writing instruction contexts is discussed based on these findings.

Given the multimodal nature of new modes of electronic feedback, such as screencasting, there is a need for the application of robust, theoretically grounded frameworks to capture linguistic and functional differences in feedback across modes. The present study argues that the appraisal framework, an outgrowth of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) that focuses on evaluative language and interpersonal meaning, can provide understanding of and discernment between technology-mediated modes of feedback. The study demonstrates this potential through an appraisal analysis of a small corpus of 16 screencast video and 16 text (MS Word comment) feedback files given to eight students over four assignments in an intermediate ESL writing class. The results suggest possible variation between the video and text feedback in reviewer positioning and feedback purpose. Specifically, video seems to position the reviewer as one of many possible perspectives with feedback focused on possibility and suggestion, while the text feedback seems to position the reviewer as authority with feedback focused on correctness. The findings suggest that appraisal can aid in the understanding of multimodal feedback and identifying differences between feedback modes.

This article addresses the challenge of writing instruction in a standards-based environment where students are accountable for mastering different genres and text types. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), now adopted by the majority of states in the USA, provide exemplars of successful papers in the different disciplines, but offer no guidelines for teaching, particularly to inexperienced writers or English language learners. Since a text in any genre can be developed in a limitless variety of ways, students need a methodology for analyzing effective texts, and for developing their own. This article proposes that focusing on grammatical choice offers an entry point into understanding the craft of Explanations and Arguments. To illustrate, four samples of high school writing are analyzed from the published CCSS exemplars: two Explanations and two Arguments, all with very different purposes and development. The analysis demonstrates the central role that grammar plays in constructing these differences. Specifically, the analysis focuses on information management across noun groups for the Explanations, and on verb choice and modality for the Arguments. Drawing on functional grammar insights, this article proposes a pathway for students from the analysis of model texts to the effective construction of their own.

There has been little scholarly work looking at the use of creative writing pedagogy within non-creative writing courses. However, ‘Outside the box: Incorporating high stakes creative writing assignments into non-major literature courses, a case study’ demonstrates promising findings when incorporating high stakes creative writing assignments into the curriculum for core English literature courses. This article gives an overview of the Progressive history of ‘creative’ writing in the academy and then outlines contemporary sources that reference the burgeoning field of Creative Writing Studies and how creative writing pedagogy may be used more broadly in classrooms in a variety of disciplines. Then the case study details the assignments and experience of teaching a high stakes creative assignment in a non-major literature course at an undergraduate liberal arts institution. Using 25 representative student responses from among 50 total students over multiple semesters, the article concludes by asserting the findings that the inclusion of a high stakes creative assignment – in this case an original short story that is workshopped by peers and then revised – results in students who note increased confidence and creativity, and who state making connections between the relevance of writing instruction and workshopping to their lives outside of the classroom. While further, more formalized study would be beneficial on this topic, this study provides a useful perspective not just to teachers within the English department but also has ramifications for interdisciplinary scholarship.

In Hong Kong schools, source-based writing has risen in prominence in recent years with the incorporation of inquiry project-based learning (PjBL) into the curricula. Understanding how school students write from sources in this context will constitute a crucial step toward identifying potential problems and targeting educational strategies. In this paper we report an exploratory study of how junior secondary school (Forms 1–3) students reported sources in their research-based group project reports in the Liberal Studies subject in the environment of a Wiki online platform. Our analyses of a sample of 30 project reports focused on discovering how the students used reporting verbs and expressions to report information from sources, and how they expressed positive and critical evaluation of their sources. Our study addressed a gap in the literature by examining school students’ source-use practices in their first language, with valuable pedagogical insights generated and avenues of future research suggested.

Literacy education, especially writing in US secondary schools, suffers for its detachment from the breadth of social purposes for which literacy is required and in which literacy is developed. Complex forms of cultural communication are best learned in conjunction with creative, productive, action sanctioned through authentic social connections. Orality offers clues to the development of practice-oriented literacy education that can help contextualize emerging interest in disciplinary literacy within broader cultural worlds that give us practical reasons and rules. This paper presents four cases of practice-oriented communication, which encompass a broad set of communities of practice. They offer multiple avenues for thinking about the role of practice and oral communication in teaching writing as a twenty-first-century literacy. Discussion of the cases suggests opportunities for instruction in situated, contingent, and emergent twenty-first-century literacies.

Rosalind Horowitz introduces this special issue of Writing and Pedagogy on "Orality and Literacy in the 21st Century: Prospects for Writing Pedagogy".

The identity of ‘the English writing teacher’ is increasingly important in Asia. Influenced by disciplinary and professional discourses, English teachers in this region tend to develop a monolingual orientation that leads their students towards native speaker norms. However, globalization requires a fluid, less-bounded perspective on nation, culture, and language, that is, a more multilingual orientation to English teaching. This essay argues that an historical perspective on teaching second language (L2) writing in Asia has the potential to reinvent writing teacher identity by challenging teachers’ monolingual assumptions. I will first review historical accounts of teaching L2 writing in Asia, showing that this history is multilingual and transnational. Next, drawing on historical examples related to the teaching of English writing in China, I demonstrate that Chinese students and teachers have struggled with a monolingual ideology endorsed by the state ever since English became a school subject. Recent scholarship in applied linguistics and literacy studies has suggested ways to embrace multilingualism in teaching and research. Coupled with such scholarship, historical knowledge may encourage writing teachers to construct a multilingual, transnational identity by designing teaching materials, writing tasks, and pedagogical techniques in a multilingual framework.

With growing interest in the relationship between translation and language learning, a number of studies have begun to examine the pedagogical value of translation and explore the best ways to utilize it in L2 classrooms. Some may doubt the need to include translation in L2 classrooms when language pedagogy is a far more wellestablished discipline. An answer to this concern requires empirical research on the role of translation in the L2 classroom. To this end, this study compares how L2 learners react to particular translation tasks and writing tasks. The findings suggest that translation tasks can yield better results than direct L2 writing tasks in encouraging and facilitating students to improve their lexis and grammar. The results also suggest that both translation and writing tasks have greater potential to prompt lexical than grammatical improvement. These findings offer new insights into alternative writing instruction and contribute to an increasing body of research on the pedagogical value of translation in L2 classrooms.

Icy Lee introduces Writing and Pedagogy 8.3 (2016)

It has been suggested that oral languaging (e.g., collaborative dialogue, private speech) plays a crucial role in learning a second language (L2). Many studies have shown a positive relation between oral languaging during problem solving tasks and subsequent performance on various post-test measures. The paucity of empirical research on written languaging (e.g., written reflection) prompted this study. The effect of the quality of written languaging by 24 Japanese learners of English was assessed by subsequent text revisions. Both written languaging at the level of noticing only and written languaging at the level of noticing with reasons were associated with accuracy improvement. These findings appear to support Swain’s (2006, 2010) claim that providing learners with the opportunity to language about or reflect on their developing linguistic knowledge in the course of L2 learning mediates L2 learning and development. The pedagogical implications of the study may suggest that L2 teachers should ask their students to reflect, in diaries, journals, and portfolios, on the linguistic problems they have encountered during their classroom activities.

The introduction and tracking of discourse referents is a central feature of discourse coherence, alongside considerations for temporal, spatial and causal features. However, while much attention is usually paid to the management of temporal, spatial and causal language in L2 writing course materials and curricula, it is apparent that the appropriate management of reference in L2 writing is often overlooked. Typically associated with the label of cohesion (Halliday & Hasan, 1976), current research from pragmatics (notably Ariel, 1991, 2008, 2010) suggests that writers and readers are sensitive to the accessibility of referents in extended discourse, which is dependent on a variety of cues including salience, parallelism, number and type of competing referents, etc. The writer’s choice of referring expressions (i.e. full NP, pronoun, zero) at any given time thus reflects their belief regarding a referent’s accessibility to their intended reader. In L1 discourse, accessibility-mediated marking of reference is considered a pragmatic universal, despite different L1s marking accessibility in different ways. Recent research into L2 discourse, particularly Asian L2 discourse (e.g. Kang, 2009; AUTHOR, 2014a; Ryan, accepted, in press) has suggested that the appropriate introduction and maintenance of reference by L2 learners is problematic - despite the universal distribution of form/function found in L1 discourse – with learners often under or over-explicit in their reference management, or frequently miscommunicating entirely. This has serious implications for the overall coherence of the L2 discourse produced. The proposed paper explores the root causes of the failure of Asian EFL students to manage reference coherently in L2 writing, then focuses on how such management can be improved pedagogically. The paper proposes additions to L2 writing materials and in-class activities that would help improve L2 reference maintenance, including picture sequence descriptions, silent film retellings and collaborative writing projects designed to maximise the potential tracking of reference over extended discourse sequences.

To investigate a diverse sample of adolescent writers’ experiences with disciplinary writing, this study compared 66 adolescents’ perceptions of writing through an analysis of interviews as part of a national study. Grounded in a social constructivist framework that stresses the role of agency in the development of writing competence, the study aims to examine factors – including language background and prior writing experiences – that are associated with adolescents’ perceptions of their writing development. The study asked: How do L1 and L2 adolescents’ perceptions of writing development compare? To what extent, if at all, is agency implicated in patterns of variation? Results of the comparative analysis suggest that varying affordances and constraints, and combinations of these, relate to adolescents’ expressed agency toward writing. Affordances include opportunities to select personally relevant subjects and to develop writing through feedback and revision processes; constraints include the use of highly structured writing scaffolds, formulas, and tightly constrained topics. Implications for differentiated scaffolding of writing instruction that might affectively and cognitively engage diverse adolescent learners are discussed.

This study reports on how agency, identity and ideology played out in an L2 writing classroom. It investigated 31 L2 writers’ agency, identity and ideology as they accomplished their writing assignments in a required first-year composition class at a large North American university. The data for the study were collected from four different sources: (a) interviews with each participant; (b) process logs kept by each participant for the entire duration of the assignment; (c) class materials; and (d) classroom observation notes. Findings suggest that L2 writers’ portrayal of selves is not static and that it evolves during the course of the writing assignment. L2 writers’ agency leads them to use various writing strategies; perceive different writing activities to be difficult or easy; and adopt various lived experiences in composing. Their identity and ideology, on the other hand, help writers align with the writing tasks; influence their task perceptions; and mediate writing choices that are both rewarding and self-incriminating. Various implications for pedagogy and research are discussed.

The Pecha Kucha talk is an effective way to encourage the composition process; to promote the use of effective visuals to explain and engage; and to distribute the expertise in the classroom away from the teacher as the central expert and to the students. In this paper, we describe and give an example of what is called a Pecha Kucha (Japanese for ‘chit chat’). When examined within the frameworks of theorists in the areas of composition, pedagogy, and literacy, this emerging presentation genre is promising for both composer and audience. With this in mind, we first discuss ways that the creator of the Pecha Kucha may benefit from the specific composition space. We then share how this composition exercise is an effective teaching tool. Next, we show ways that this presentation style maximizes learning with image and speech coordination and skills of analysis and synthesis. Then we introduce how Pecha Kuchas give students the opportunity to teach and to work with technological tools in authentic ways. Finally, implications for future practice in developing compositions using oral delivery with visuals are discussed.

John Flowerdew introduces the special issue of Writing and Pedagogy on ESAP Writing.

Writing retreats are an invaluable way of providing research students and early career researchers with opportunities for extended periods of time for their writing (MacLeod et al., 2012; Murray, 2013, 2014, 2015; Murray and Newtown, 2009; Murray et al., 2012; Petrova and Coughlin, 2012). This is important both for students who are under pressure for timely completion of their degrees and academic staff in the early stages of their careers who, once they have obtained an academic appointment, need to establish themselves in their fields as well as meet tenure track requirements that have been set by their employing institutions. This is as true for native speaking writers as it is for non-native speaking writers (Habibie, 2015), all of whom have to be able to write academically in English, the international language of research, and often face challenges in doing this. This paper discusses both the nature and benefits of writing retreats. It then provides an example of a writing retreat that focuses on writing for publication that has been on offer for the past four years at the University of Sydney, Australia. It describes how the retreat has evolved, how it is organized in its present form, and how participants have responded to the retreat. The paper concludes by arguing that writing retreats are a valuable opportunity for writing pedagogy, showing how both pedagogy and opportunities for extended writing can be brought together within the context of these retreats.

Producing publishable quality research articles is a difficult task for novice scholarly writers. Particularly challenging is writing the Discussion/Conclusion section, which requires taking evaluative and interpretive stances on obtained results and substantiating claims regarding the worth of the scholarly contribution of the article to scientific knowledge. Conforming to the expectations of the target disciplinary community adds another dimension to the challenge. Corpus-based genre analysis can foster postgraduate writing instruction by providing insightful descriptions of rhetorical patterns and variation in disciplinary discourse. This paper introduces a pedagogically-oriented cross-disciplinary model of moves and steps devised through top-down corpus analysis. The model was applied to pedagogical materials and tasks designed to enhance genre and corpus-based teaching of Discussion/ Conclusions with an explicit focus on rhetorical conventions.

This article outlines a student-centered, ‘hands-on’ approach to the teaching of writing at university level through first discovering and then creating the features of written texts in three dimensions: microtextual (lexico-grammar), macrotextual (rhetoric), and extratextual (context). The ‘3-D’ approach has been designed for novice writers, offering a practical, step-by-step procedure to prepare them to write in specific disciplines and for specific purposes. Though usable with other audiences, the sample material included here is especially appropriate for second-language writers and will be of particular interest to students of science. While the approach is consistent with Systemic-Functional and ESP orientations to text, as contrasted with most ESP pedagogy – especially that geared to students in sciences – the 3-D approach gives particular attention to affect, writer–reader interaction, and shared context. The approach, which starts from analysis of texts and then moves to writing of texts, is first described and then illustrated using several short popular science texts about insects and birds. These texts exemplify lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features of scientific texts while also illustrating other purposes which a writer may seek to fulfill as well as the underlying assumptions and author biases that might exist even in texts which appear to be purely descriptive or ‘objective’. The texts and analyses provided are intended for classroom use to train students in the approach, supplemented by a step by step guide for students to follow. Through the activities provided for the sample texts, students develop awareness of the properties of texts and how these can be discovered through analysis and then written into their own texts.

This article aims to engage specialists in writing pedagogy, assessment, genre study, and educational technologies in a constructive dialog and joint exploration of automated writing analysis as a potent instantiation of computer-enhanced assessment for learning. It recounts the values of writing pedagogy and, from this perspective, examines legitimate concerns with automated writing analysis. Emphasis is placed on the need to substantiate the construct-driven debate with systematic empirical evidence that would corroborate or refute interpretations, uses, and consequences of automated scoring and feedback tools intended for specific contexts. Such evidence can be obtained by adopting a validity argument framework. To demonstrate an application of this framework, the article presents a novel genre-based approach to automated analysis configured to support research writing and provides examples of validity evidence for using it with novice scholarly writers.

Drawing on Shaw and Weir’s theoretical framework for validating writing tests (2007), this paper highlights the issues of the writing constructs measured in English writing tests in university entrance exams, and recommends improvements. The paper analysed the writing response formats of 66 English tests used by Japanese universities and one English test of National Centre Exams (NCE) for 2013 entry. It was found that translation was the most commonly used skill in the writing tests, and accounts for 45% of the total. The most common writing response format used by the state universities was translation, whereas word-reordering was commonly in use at the private universities and NCE. Because word-reordering and translation tasks can assess very limited English grammatical and lexical discrete writing skills, there is no conclusive proof that the task can assess writing skills needed by the applicants to write cohesive texts in English. However, there are potential reasons why indirect writing assessments have remained a key method for Japanese university admission in the system of designing the English tests: the number of applicants and time constraints. Taking these factors into account, alternative English tests should be introduced to Japanese university entrance examinations.

Peer assessment (PA), a process by which students' work (oral or written) is assessed by other students of equal status, has received a lot of attention recently (Assessment Reform Group, 1999, 2002). Using data collected from secondary schools in Cyprus, the current study investigates whether PA can improve the writing skills of adolescent students of English as a foreign language (EFL). The results showed that PA did have a positive impact on students’ writing performance, especially for students who provided peer assessment. The article discusses the important role of PA in the development of students’ writing skills and offers recommendations for the implementation of PA in EFL contexts.

Supported by artificial intelligence (AI), the most advanced Automatic Writing Evaluation (AWE) systems have gained increasing attention for their ability to provide immediate scoring and formative feedback, yet teachers have been hesitant to implement them into their classes because correlations between the grades they assign and the AWE scores have generally been low. This begs the question of where improvements in evaluation may need to be made, and what approaches are available to carry out this improvement. This mixed-method study involved 59 cause and effect essays collected from English language learners enrolled in six different sections of a college level academic writing course and utilized theory proposed by Slater and Mohan (2010) regarding the developmental path of cause. The study compared the results of raters who used this developmental path with the accuracy of AWE scores produced by Criterion, an AWE tool developed by Educational Testing Service (ETS), and the grades reported by teachers. Findings suggested that if Criterion is to be used successfully in the classroom, writing teachers need to take a meaning-based approach to their assessment, which would allow them and their students to understand more fully how language constructs cause and effect. Using the developmental path of cause as an analytical framework for assessment may then help teachers assign grades that are more in sync with AWE scores, which in turn can help students gain more trust in the scores they receive from both their teachers and Criterion.

Although many second language writing classes use a process approach, anecdotal evidence suggests that assessment of writing in such classes often still focuses on the written product alone. This assessment practice continues despite specialists having recommended that both process and product be assessed. This study compares second-year university students in Japan who were assessed on feedback processes and product with others assessed on product alone in terms of perceptions of the feedback received. Perceptions were determined through a post-treatment questionnaire. Neither the assessment of the use of teacher feedback in revisions nor the assessment of the quality and quantity of peer feedback was found to have a clear benefit in terms of students’ perceptions of the feedback received. This finding suggests the need for further research to confirm whether the assessment of both process and product is worth the considerable time investment required.

Information management of discourse – the ability of a writer to use linguistic forms to organize and present information in a written text – is a key component of second language (L2) ability models in the language assessment literature (e.g., Canale & Swain, 1980; Weigle, 2002), but Purpura’s (2004) language ability model developed specifically for assessment purposes is the only one that considers it to be part of the ability to use grammar accurately and meaningfully when producing a text in an L2. The current study investigated whether L2 academic writing teachers consider information management of discourse as an assessment criterion when assessing grammar in L2 academic texts. Fourteen students in an academic English as a second language writing course at an English-medium university in Canada and their teacher participated in this case study. Students’ essay exam scripts were collected, and the Theme-Rheme progression (TRP) patterns and links (Daneš, 1974) as well as the distribution of new and given information (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) in these essays were analyzed. Pearson correlation coefficients between the teacher-assigned grammar grade and the results from the TRP and information distribution analyses were calculated. The findings indicate that information management of discourse indeed forms part of the assessment criteria for grammar in academic writing for the teacher in this study. The implications of this finding for L2 writing pedagogy are discussed.

Screencasting is a technology that enables the user to record screen activity on video while also capturing audio or video narration of the lecturer demonstrating that screen activity. This technology has improved over the years, and has now become streamlined enough to be integrated easily in popular learning platforms like Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Moodle. The technology’s high usability factor and the varieties of screencasting software now available as open source makes screencasting appealing to writing instructors, not only as a means to improve teaching, but also as a tool for students to create and engage with multimedia texts that facilitate the acquisition of contemporary literacy skills. In the United States, the National Council of Teachers of English proposes that 21st century definitions of literacy must, among other things, include the ability of writers and readers to analyze, create, and interact with multimedia texts and to gain proficiency with the use of modern technologies. I argue that screencasting is a practical and creative technology that can be used for a variety of purposes: to address 21st century literacy requirements in writing classes, to improve teaching effectiveness in both online and “flipped classroom” learning, and to enhance the instructor’s social presence in online learning environments. I give examples from my own teaching experience using Camtasia and ScreenFlow software, as well as review some popular applications of screencasting technology currently in use in academic environments.

This article is based on the idea that there is latent storytelling already in proposals. It explores the various ways in which storytelling functions as a pedagogical model of teaching the writing of proposals in business and technical writing courses. The central premise is that stories, like proposals, are forms of discourse that place events sequentially from beginning to end with meaningful and graspable connections in between. Stories take (identified) audiences into account by being selective of events that are carefully rearranged and described through composites of scenarios and characters. This article explores those storytelling patterns in theory and in practice. It aims to enhance the perspective of teaching proposal writing by calling attention to a seemingly inconsequential or unrelated notion – storytelling.

This essay is concerned with contemporary writing center and composition studies and focuses on including fiction in both the theory and practice of writing centers and classrooms. Stemming from contemporary theorists such as Andrea Lunsford and Min-zhan Lu, my work incorporates Sapphire’s (1996) novel, Push, so as to highlight the unique perspectives fiction can give as to how we approach teaching and tutoring students. Offering fiction as impacting both theory and practice – in its potential inclusion within tutor-training syllabi, for instance – I assert that fiction is an untapped resource for writing center and pedagogical studies that is often overlooked or cast aside. By also observing race and education theorists such as Laura Greenfield, Karen Rowan, and Victor Villanueva, my analysis of Sapphire’s work makes evident the potential for fiction to more thoroughly inform our approaches towards past, present, and future writing center and pedagogical studies.

Genre analysis has become an important tool for teaching writing across the disciplines to non-native English-speaking (EL2) and native English-speaking (EL1) graduate students alike. Since the pressing needs of EL2 graduate students have meant that educators often teach them in separate classes, and since genre-based research into teaching higher-level writing has been largely generated in fields such as English for Academic Purposes, we have an insufficient understanding of whether this instructional mode plays out similarly in EL1 and EL2 classrooms. Launching a genre-based course on writing research articles in parallel sections for EL1 and EL2 graduate students provided an opportunity to address this knowledge shortfall. This article qualitatively examines the different classroom behaviors observed in each version of the course when a common curriculum was used and specifically explores three key themes: initial receptivity, nature of student engagement, and overall assessment. Our study shows that although EL2 and EL1 learners have similar needs, the obstacles to their benefitting from genre-based instruction are different; EL2 students must learn to identify themselves as needing writing support that transcends linguistic matters, while EL1 students must learn to identify themselves as needing writing support despite their linguistic competence. Providing the same mode of instruction can benefit both populations as long as educators are sensitive to the specific challenges each population presents in the classroom. The insights gained contribute to the scholarship on genre-based teaching and offer ways of better meeting the needs of EL1 and EL2 students alike.

Writing scholars often note the heterogeneity of the second language (L2) student population in higher education writing courses, but only recently have researchers begun to carefully examine differences in the writing ability of international L2 learners and U.S. resident L2 learners. Most of the empirical research to date focuses on the two groups’ grammatical accuracy to the exclusion of other dimensions of writing ability. Such a limited focus not only underrepresents the multifaceted construct of writing ability, but also overlooks potential areas where noticeable differences across the two groups’ writing ability might surface. Although arguably less salient than grammatical (in)accuracy, and not as prevalent in scoring rubrics, students’ use of sociopragmatic features in writing offers an alternative approach for comparing the two groups of learners beyond their use of grammatical forms. Thus, the current study describes and compares how international and U.S. resident L2 learners used certain sociopragmatic markers in their writing. By focusing on the meanings associated with these markers, the study suggests that students’ use of such markers reflects their sociopragmatic awareness. Findings indicate that the two groups of writers may be more similar than different, contrary to previous research.

This study examined the impact of using a multiliteracies pedagogy and the social networking site (SNS), Ning, to help 6th grade English language learners (ELLs) develop their writer identities, with the purpose of increasing the students’ confidence, sense of self, and language and literacy skills. To this end, we were interested in whether and how the development of a writer identity and an increase in social presence on the Ning would translate into face-to-face connections in the physical classroom and an induction into the academic learning community – a space in which the students may have previously felt intimidated. In doing this, we employed a qualitative case study analysis to investigate the experiences of two ELLs at an elementary school in Toronto, Canada. Our study found that incorporating multimodal tools and an SNS allowed the students to more freely express themselves; to share their work and their personalities with peers, which made the writing assignments more meaningful and engaging; and provided a platform for students to negotiate their values and beliefs. Ultimately, the increased interactions with peers online and the development of this new English-language literate identity translated into the development of students’ individual voices, a sense of ownership of English, and an increased social presence in the classroom.

This article presents research findings from a professional development project initiated by one rural Illinois primary school to improve writing instruction in 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms. During the 2010–11 academic year, the school partnered with a private university to provide customized, year-long professional development that integrated preparation for the state writing assessment and a writing process approach. Simultaneously, a study was conducted to identify and describe teacher thinking and practices related to writing instruction during participation in the project. Data were collected through a pre/post teacher survey and written teacher reflections. Participating teachers indicated 15 improvements in their thinking and practices related to writing instruction. However, confidence in their students’ likelihood to perform well on the state writing assessment decreased during the project, and changes in thinking and practices varied from teacher to teacher, possibly due to varying levels of teacher readiness to change.

Reading response holds a prominent place in the English language arts curriculum. Despite its importance, few studies have explored students’ performance on the task from a linguistic perspective. This article examines a random sample of reading responses generated by students enrolled in a middle school online language arts course using a genre-specific tool that addresses content, logic, stance, and engagement. Results from the linguistic analysis show that the adolescents’ responses typically focused on personal feelings, story retelling, and character analysis, with little evidence of thematic interpretation. This finding is discussed in light of the current literature on response writing and language arts pedagogy.

This reflection on effective writing practice is the result of a university-school partnership focused on collaboratively investigating the work of a successful 5th grade writing teacher. The co-authors collectively present the work of Mrs. Hutchison, a veteran teacher who worked in a predominately low-income school with a high percentage of students labeled English language learners. Mrs. Hutchison’s class was a space where each student was both a learner and a teacher and most students developed a great interest and love of writing. This reflective piece presents data documenting Mrs. Hutchison’s success as well as a collaborative reflection on her work intended to provide a glimpse into Mrs. Hutchison’s commitments and practices, and how these resulted in students’ learning and productive writing activity and achievement. In so doing, we hope to provide some models of effective practices that others may wish to adapt or investigate further.

Process writing instruction is an influential paradigm in elementary classrooms, but studies of its effectiveness are mixed. These mixed results may occur because teachers implement process writing in vastly difference ways, which makes it difficult to assess the effectiveness of process approaches broadly. Therefore, this literature review examines the features of the process writing instruction are effective. Drawing on empirical evidence, it answers the question: What practices within process writing have evidence of effectiveness? A literature search was conducted and 93 studies that met the inclusion criteria were found. The studies were coded thematically and indicate seven categories of effective practices: writing strategy instruction, computers in the writing process, talk during the writing process, play during the writing process, including children’s ways of knowing, flexible participation structures, and mentor texts. Evidence about the effectiveness of these features and directions for future research are discussed.