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.

This paper highlights the importance, when researching writing across the lifespan, of addressing a range of aspects of social context which change over time, particularly focusing on tools, values, relationships and identities. It illustrates this argument by drawing on a range of empirical studies exploring different aspects of writing in university settings, working with adults at a range of levels from Masters through doctoral study to academics' working lives, and reflects on the implications of this research for lifespan writing studies more generally. The projects drawn on include a study of multimodal feedback on postgraduate student writing and students' responses to this; a detailed study of academics' writing practices in the context of structural changes in Higher Education; and an interview study with PhD students participating in writing retreats, reflecting on their writing experiences. Drawing on findings from this work, we argue that shifts in material, social and institutional dimensions of context have a significant impact on what individuals write and on the writing practices that they develop. We particularly highlight the role of changing tools for writing and values around writing, and the importance of transformations in identity and relationships. We argue that the tradition of literacy studies research, drawn on by all the projects described in this paper, provides the theoretical and methodological resources to approach such aspects of academic writing development across the lifespan, by adopting a holistic perspective on writing which locates writing as situated practice and thereby provides insight into these social and contextual influences.

This essay reviews Charles Bazerman, Arthur Applebee, Virginia Berninger, Deborah Brandt, Steve Graham, Jill Jeffery, Paul Matsuda, Sandra Murphy, Deborah Wells Rowe, Mary Schleppegrell, and Kristen Wilcox’s edited volume, The Lifespan Development of Writing.

Studying development of writing across the lifespan contains many challenges, but research is now emerging, starting to fill in a dynamic picture of trajectories of development.  The study is necessarily complex, multidisciplinary, and collaborative. This special issue contributes to this emerging research focus.

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.

Expanding Literate Landscapes: Persons, Practices, and Sociohistoric Perspectives of Disciplinary Development by Kevin Roozen and Joe Erickson (2017) Computers and Composition Digital P/Utah State UP, 2017. Web.

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.

As more classes are moving from the brick and mortar environs to online instructional spaces, the experiences of future teachers with communication technologies in online contexts merit attention. The authors describe the study of an Online Writing Partnership to examine participants' beliefs about the efficacy of online instruction and the quality of student/teacher relationships that are built via online means. Findings indicated four contextual threads of particular salience to the participants of the study, threads which contributed to a general sense of frustration with the online context for teaching: (1) social presence between participants; (2) the nature of relationships established between teachers and students; (3) the role and authority of a teacher in those relationships; and (4) their preconceived expectations of learning environments. Preparing future teachers for experiences in online teaching and learning may require providing avenues for examining their beliefs about the work required to form effective student/teacher relationships in virtual spaces.

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.

Writing about historical change involves advancing causal explanations that show how events impact people and how their emotions contribute to historical outcomes such as wars and revolutions. This study uses Martin and White's (2005) Appraisal framework to examine how the language of emotion (Affect), an overlooked feature of historical discourse, is used by L2 writers of an under-examined genre, the Factorial Explanation. The study was conducted in a content-based, politicalhistory course for 63 upper-intermediate learners of English at a Japanese university. Results show that while writers made extensive use of the Affect categories Positive Inclination and Negative Satisfaction, which were often realized as adjectives and verbs, nominal formulations for building cohesion were infrequent. Writers also tended to intensify Affect resources by construing feelings as static attributes rather than destabilizing forces of change. The paper makes recommendations for teaching genre-specific language features to aid learners in construing the emotion of history.

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 qualitative study investigates peer feedback among adolescent English and Spanish learners writing together in an extracurricular bilingual literacy program. Data sources include audio recordings, writing revision history on Google documents and interviews. This study reveals the complexity of peer interaction, feedback processes, and the potential for mutual growth. Oriented by Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) and informed by the concept of languaging (Mercer, 2004; Swain, 2006), this study conceptualizes peer feedback as acts that students take to mediate the thinking, writing, and communication processes while working together on a language autobiography. Findings show that students strategically used dynamic feedback acts mediating the writing and revising process, such as 'Ask questions', 'Give information', 'Make corrections'. We also found the use of translanguaging in the feedback acts expanded opportunities for learning as linguistically diverse peers were engaged in metalinguistic discussions, text co-construction, and language experiments. This study contributes to a new understanding of peer feedback which leverages the cultural and linguistic resources students bring to school.

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.

Collaborative writing is one of the twenty-first century writing competencies critical for college and career success. Technology-enhanced writing platforms, such as Google Docs, can serve as effective media for written collaboration. Although cloudbased tools such as Google Docs are increasingly used in secondary schools, little is known about how students collaboratively write in these environments, including how feedback sources and types of tasks affect collaborative writing patterns. This study examined the content of feedback and revision in 424 Google Docs written by 145 sixth grade students to understand the variations in feedback and revision patterns across key contextual factors: the source of feedback (i.e., teacher vs. peer) and assigned task type (i.e., argumentative, narrative, report). We conducted a qualitative content analysis of feedback and revision, followed by Chi-square and ANCOVA analyses. With regards to variations across feedback sources, we found that teacher feedback addressed more macro-level features (e.g., content, organization) whereas student feedback focused more on micro-level features (e.g., mechanics, conventions), and neither teacher nor peer feedback led to subsequent revisions. With regards to variations across task types, we found that among the three writing genres, the narrative genre had the greatest number of coauthors and feedback activities, and most of these activities consisted of affective feedback or direct edits. In contrast, in the report genre, the feedback activities tended to focus on content and organization, and the language functions of both feedback (e.g., advice, explanation) and revision (e.g., acknowledging, clarifying) were most evident in the report genre. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design and implementation of technology-based collaborative writing tasks in academic settings, as well as the limitations and directions for future studies.

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.

The use of technology for collaborative writing and the delivery of electronic corrective feedback is becoming widespread in educational settings. However, to date, little research has focused on comparing the suitability of different Web 2.0 applications for technology-enhanced peer feedback. This study explores three free-to-use applications: Google Docs, the Sakai Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), and the Sakai Wiki. The study reports on the practicalities and peer reviewers’ experiences of these applications and, most importantly, compares the electronic feedback comments across applications. Seventy-eight English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students at an Austrian university participated in this counterbalanced, repeated-measures study. Over a ten-week period, participants wrote three draft essays, reviewed a peer’s unique draft using each application, and received peer feedback on their own drafts using each application. Comments were coded for the quantity, area, nature, location, and type of feedback. An entrance questionnaire elicited background information, and an exit questionnaire elicited quantitative and qualitative insights into the participants’ comparative experiences. The findings show that each application supports the exchange of peer feedback and that the applications’ feedback modes influence the reviewers’ comment foci. This study should help teachers make more informed decisions about which application is most appropriate for their desired peer feedback learning objectives.

Spoilt for choice: A plethora of modes for electronic feedback on second language writing

As technology has made a range of modes of communication available and created new ways to integrate these modes, feedback has become increasingly electronic and multimodal. From written to audio, video, and screencast feedback, the multimodal options for electronic feedback (e-feedback) have expanded in such a way that we might speak of a ‘multimodal turn’ in feedback on foreign and second language writing. However, feedback studies on second language writing are just beginning to explore these complex areas. This essay offers a multimodal perspective on e-feedback by illustrating the scope of current research and highlights future research directions. The retrospective underscores the scarcity of research in the area with a specific focus on multimodality and identifies needs for speciality feedback systems that consider practical and contextualized perspectives. We argue that future research should strive for a context-rich description of e-feedback activities, gathering thick data about feedback provision, learner engagement with feedback and uptake through screencasting, eye-tracking, and keystroke logging technologies. These data should be triangulated with information about all factors impacting the feedback activity outcome, ranging from participant variables over modal affordances of the platforms used to environmental factors like institutional support.

The language used in digital communication has erroneously been considered a simple extension of spoken language. However, research has established that writers in digital environments reshape orthographies to construct identities and audiences and with the help of other social-semiotic resources such as images, sounds, and hyperlinks, they create new meanings (Androutsopoulos, 2015; Knobel and Lankshear, 2008; Mills, 2010). Such research has not thoroughly examined bilingual populations, who employ their often vast repertoire of language varieties to similar ends. The goal of this article is to explore a specific case of how orality influences writing in the digital spaces of members of a social network of Mexican bilinguals. By studying how these bilinguals communicate on Facebook, we can observe how in relationship to the semi-public platform, they create new meanings through linguistically innovative audience-based writing. This practice aids them in maintaining their bilingualism and their bilingual identity.

Published writers of fictional or semi-fictional works entering the academy as doctoral candidates express surprise at the requirements of formal human ethics reviews. Admitting an element of the autoethnographic exists in their writing, they may insist that they possess what Freeman called ‘narrative integrity’. This paper considers the ethics of autoethnography as they apply to both the academy, chiefly within the PhD by artefact and exegesis, and the world of published writers, seeking possible solace from such scholarly concepts as ‘relational ethics’, or ‘ethic of care’. Drawing methodologically on our experience as doctoral supervisor and student and with the permission of writer/students whose stories are inseparable from this work, this study unpacks in ethical terms the problems reported by students whose methodology involves evocative or performative autoethnography. As interpretatist methodologists, autoethnographers maintain it provides insights into the interplay between the personally engaged self and mediated cultural descriptions. Methodologically, it enacts the self and others as data. This connection between the personal and the social makes it difficult for autoethnographers to speak of themselves without speaking of others. Examining autoethnography involves a close scrutiny of the boundaries between the self and the other, a process that is both enlightening and essential for supervisory dyads in creative writing methodologically informed by autoethnography. These aspects of the ethics of autoethnography are crucial, but little attention has been paid to the problematic notion that practiceled research is emergent in practice and that its autoethnography requires a retrospective approach, looking backwards as well as forwards. The reality of applying this methodology in practice-led research clashes with the pro-active nature of ethics procedurals required by universities. The paper identifies nine praxical problems that arise from such clashes, and considers best-practice principles for responding to these problems, drawing strongly on indigenous research. Finally, it offers conclusions relating to consent, transparency and the need to open a dialogue around best practice in autoethnographic research in the academic field of Writing.

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.

Humanities departments across European universities have established an increasing number of interdisciplinary, international master’s programmes that culminate in thesis projects. Yet, the challenges of such interdisciplinary research-based writing have been largely neglected in EAP research. This article investigates how postgraduate students in interdisciplinary fields express and develop genre knowledge during an EAP course for Humanities students preparing for their thesis writing. In two case studies, the article qualitatively explores students’ perspectives on their writing along the related dimensions of disciplinary positioning and genre knowledge. Students’ explicit expressions of such knowledge in course tasks and interviews are analysed. In addition, students’ research-based writing is compared to trace manifestations of this knowledge. The results highlight the students’ use of individual reference points to evaluate writing within their heterogeneous research fields. In terms of their research-based writing, the cases illustrate two related trajectories, namely, the development from writer to topic focus and the combination of themes into a coherent argument. Tracing the textual developments reveals the significance of mapping interdisciplinary studies on the interrelated epistemological, thematic and discoursal levels in postgraduate writing. Developing an awareness of these levels requires an understanding of the situatedness of postgraduates’ writing in interdisciplinary, departmental and biographical contexts.

A number of studies have used interviews to find out L2 learners’ perceptions of different feedback practices. Usually, learners who have been interviewed have experienced a number of different feedback practices. The purpose of the present study is to investigate learner revision practices and perceptions of peer and teacher feedback after having received feedback from only one source. In this study, learners received either teacher feedback alone or only peer feedback for one year. Twelve students were then interviewed to investigate their revision practices and perceptions of both peer and teacher feedback. The narrative analysis of the interview data showed that participants were very concerned about ‘correcting’ their drafts. Students in both groups had similar levels of comprehension of feedback; however, those in the peer feedback group were more forthcoming about asking their peers when they did not understand. Students in the teacher feedback group felt that they did not have enough time between drafts for the revisions they wanted to make. It was also found that students in the peer feedback group seemed to benefit more from reading their peers’ writing than from receiving peer feedback.

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.

Grounded in the work of Ong’s (1982) theory of the ‘internalization of the technology of writing’ (p. 437), this study sought to understand the application of oral language skills to writing. Contextualized in a South Texas urban setting, five elementary students participated in an after-school book club over the course of six months. During this time, the participants engaged in discursive activities in the form of response sheets, discussions, communal meaning statements, and reflective journal entries. Using seminal research by Elbow (1985) that supports how writing is similar to speech, findings showed that seven of the nine characteristic features of speech were also evident in the writing acts engaged by the participants. Those characteristics were: spontaneity; responding, replying, and two-way communication; voice, participation in meaning making; and organization and structure. This context for writing removed many of the threats commonly associated with the traditional unidirectional approach to writing. Overall, the participants merged the speech acts into the writing acts, moving seamlessly through the processes of communication.

This paper aims to provide a linguistic analysis of prosodic patterns (especially the complex of suprasegmental phonological features which includes intonation, pauses and stress) underlying use of commas in texts written by Brazilian students. The analysed material consists of texts produced in the last year of primary education at a public school in an inner city of São Paulo State, Brazil. The object of analysis is composed of two kinds of comma use which occur in a simple scheme: unconventional uses and conventional uses of commas, both uses being defined from grammatical rules taught at school. The analysis leads to a theoretical discussion about the importance of orality in the way people approach writing and the relationship between orality and writing in text production practices at school. It is argued that accounting for the relationship between orality and literacy may reveal linguistic phenomena and important symbolic processes which are identifiable in the writing of young students who are going through the learning process of writing texts at school.

Fanfiction is a work of fantasy in which fans write stories based on original books, movies, TV series, and other cultural and artistic forms of expression. This study looks into fanfiction dedicated to the popular TV series Breaking Bad. In particular, it examines how fans construct the (spoken) dialogues of their (written) stories. The article explores the pedagogic value of using fanfiction in educational contexts, focusing on the analysis, creation, and enactment of stories inspired by TV series and movies that feature a combination of narration and ‘written speech’. The article also offers practical recommendations for classroom and online activities that support the development of skills and understandings related to writing and orality. The effort of representing speech in a written form (i.e., writing dialogues and descriptions of conversations) can help students reflect, with the aid of the teacher, on the distinctiveness and specificity of written and spoken communication. By comparing, contrasting, and critiquing audiovisual and written texts (e.g., the episodes of a TV series and the transcriptions of its dialogues), and by creating their own dialogue-rich stories, students can improve their understanding of the idiosyncrasies of writing and orality across modes, thus advancing their literacy and critical skills as creative producers, not just consumers, of popular culture and media.

The multidisciplinary research presented in this paper focuses everyday life and social practices that can be characterized by the use of one (or more) language variety, modality or register. Conceptual ideas that arise from explorations based upon empirical analysis of situated and distributed so called monolingual and multilingual oral talk, written communication, signed interactions and embodiment in and across virtual and in-real-life settings inside and outside higher education and schools are presented and discussed. Using sociocultural and decolonial perspectives on language-use or languaging, analytical findings from traditionally segregated fields of study – Literacy Studies, Bilingualism, Deaf education, Language Studies – are juxtaposed. An overarching concern here is framed by the continuing dominance of structural linguistic positions and demarcated fields within the Language and Educational Sciences that frame didactical thinking. The work presented here highlights concerns regarding established concepts like ‘bilingualism’ and ‘codes’ and suggests more empirically relevant alternatives like ‘chaining’, ‘languaging’, ‘fluidity’, ‘timespace’ and ‘visual-orientation’ from ethnographically and netnographically framed projects where data-sets include everyday life in virtual settings and educational institutions in the global North. Focusing social practices – what is communicated and the ways in which communication occurs – challenges currently dominant monolingual and monological perspectives on human language broadly and oral, written and signed languaging specifically.

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.

Oral traditions have been limited in their ability to present the full range of a character’s experiences, focusing for the most part on overt actions rather than a character’s inner thoughts. The invention of writing has given writers the ability to reach a distant and often unknown audience and the leisure to mold language in new ways. Writers have thus acquired the ability to place a reader inside a character’s thoughts, either as they are experienced from the inside with mimesis, or by commenting on them omnisciently from the outside with diegesis. Examples are provided of each method of presentation.

New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 356 ISBN 978-0-19-982728-2

Safaliba is an understudied indigenous language. Approximately 7–9,000 Ghanaians speak it in a country with a population of about 26.3 million. It is one of an estimated 73 indigenous Ghanaian languages, none of which have a majority of first language speakers. Safaliba speakers are for the most part subsistence farmers, while a minority are teachers, shopkeepers, tradespeople, and craftspeople who often farm too. The purpose of this essay is to share an encapsulated history of literacy of this proud and strong people, as well as document a Safaliba activist’s resistance to hegemonic discourses in Ghanaian language policy. It is a captivating story because of its intergenerational activism, quiet resistance to government materials, and Safaliba materials development from talk to text. The paper frames Safaliba activism as an indigenous people’s late modern resistance to global pressures that are causing languages to disappear at an unprecedented rate. Data are from a larger linguistic ethnography.

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

This article, integrating different lines of sociocultural and critical research, sets out to analyze argumentative writing in a 6th grade Cypriot Greek elementary classroom. Attention is directed to specific strategies used, such as repetition and paraphrase of each other’s words and of text meanings. These strategies are revisited as voicing tools, arising out of students’ engagement with a nexus of reading and writing events and with the ideological positions constituted through them. The analysis traces the bi-directional processes at work in this polyvocal community. Classroom activities, rather than seen as neutral, are redefined as constituents of a deeply dialogic universe, which privileges specific texts and voices and projects various identity positions onto speakers and writers. At the same time, this universe gives rise to specific scaffolds which help students in the appropriation of advanced generic resources. Students’ argumentative texts are shown to arise out of the integration of various dialogically-emergent strategies. Analysis illustrates how students, while drawing from prior texts, and acknowledging genre-related scaffolds, rework and contest social meanings and generic resources as part of their attempt to assert their voice vis-à-vis those populating their classroom community.

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.

In this article, I seek to reflexively examine my practice as an EAP teacher given the task of teaching academic writing to a group of Japanese graduate school students studying for a Master of Arts in English Language Education at a private university in Tokyo. Drawing on Lillis’ (2003) notions of ‘critique’ and ‘design’, my article covers the following areas: (1) student conceptualizations of ‘good’ academic writing; (2) the need for a socially-situated approach to academic writing that takes into account writers’ identities and subjectivities; (3) the manner in which such identities and subjectivities are not static or pre-existent, but are discursively constructed and subject to individual negotiation and agency; (4) student insights into how such negotiated identities and subjectivities can be reified and enacted in written work; (5) the way students can move into a ‘design’ mode through imagining and asserting new possibilities for meaning making. Throughout, I am concerned with how teachers can best help students appreciate the value of discovering the discursive and dynamic nature of their identity-borne narratives. I also argue that such a realization can provide students with a richer understanding of their ontological positioning as writers vis-à-vis writing as a socially-situated meaning making activity.

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)

Studies into multilingual, ‘periphery’ scholars’ experiences of English publication for academic purposes suggest that they face a number of obstacles in seeking publication in EFL and applied linguistics language journals (Belcher, 2007; Canagarajah, 1996). Some journals located outside of the Anglophone center have sought to adapt their review processes to be more accommodating toward these generally less experienced, potentially ‘off-networked’ (Swales, 1996: 45) scholars (Nunn and Adamson, 2007; Adamson and Muller, 2012). Yet the literature to date tends to approach this topic from one of two perspectives; exploring the editorial, journal review process from the perspective of editors (Adamson, 2012; Belcher, 2007) or author-focused explorations of writing for academic publication practice (Lillis and Curry, 2010; Okamura, 2006). This paper seeks to bridge this gap by outlining the efforts of one Asian-based journal, Asian EFL Journal, to raise awareness among reviewers and editors of the needs of multilingual scholars and data from an investigation into Japan-based authors’ practices of writing for academic publication. How our findings can inform journal policy and implications for reviewing practice more broadly in light of reviewer and author experiences is considered.

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.

From the perspective of sociocultural theories, individual writing conferences between a teacher and a student offer an optimal dialogical framework for negotiating and adjusting oral corrective feedback (CF) to L2 students’ developmental levels with the aim of enhancing students’ ability to self-correct. While some empirical findings support the use of negotiated CF, little research has examined the extent to which teachers negotiate CF with their students or the way they change their CF strategies in naturalistic writing conferences, especially in the Chinese EFL context. The current case study used and adapted regulatory scales for CF developed by Aljaafreh and Lantolf (1994) and by Erlam, Ellis, and Batstone (2013), to analyse teacher talk addressing linguistic errors in two writing conferences at a Chinese university. The two teachers were found to use very different approaches to providing CF. One teacher often began with implicit CF and gradually tailored her subsequent CF after eliciting the student’s responses. Contrastingly, the other teacher often diagnosed errors and supplied correction without inviting input from the student. The findings suggested that teachers’ beliefs about feedback, their goals of having writing conferences, availability of time resources, and the curriculum focus could impact their choice to negotiate CF with students.