This article explores the prospects for internationalizing the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing, a degree that has gained considerable popularity in the United States in the past half century but has yet to gain much of a foothold in other countries. As part of this exploration, we describe the experiences of establishing the first low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing in Asia at City University of Hong Kong, explaining the justification for setting up such a program with reference to the history of teaching creative writing and the current conditions for literary writing in English in Asia and globally. We also reflect upon the processes of planning, curriculum design, and administrative negotiation and that went into setting up the program and report on feedback from the first cohort of students. The experience of setting up this program is used as the basis for raising a number of more general issues regarding the teaching of creative writing in English in international contexts.

Assessment of students for college admissions and performance tends to emphasize memory and analytical skills – that is, one’s retrieval of acquired knowledge and one’s skill in analyzing that knowledge. But in everyday life, individuals need creative skills to generate new ideas, analytical skills to assess the value of those ideas, practical skills to implement the ideas and to persuade others of their value, and wisdom-based skills to ensure the ideas help achieve a common good. I discuss in this article a program for assessing the creative, practical, and wisdom-based skills that currently are neglected by many assessments, and provide data regarding the outcomes of the program.

The article reviews the impact of digital environments on written modes and practices, with a focus on online collaborative works and “born digital” creations. Examples of these works and relevant Web sites are provided, in addition to learning activities for involving students in electronic environments. The pervasiveness of electronic contexts in our public and private lives means that writers and teachers of writing are now able to rethink all genres of communicative activity, written or spoken, and how these are deeply influenced or entirely reformed by digital media.

Writing trips overseas are recalled and proposed as a valuable source of inspiration for budding writers when they are thrown into a new context. The focus of discussion is on a program that takes a creative writing class abroad as part of the university curriculum.

This article integrates a research foundation in creativity with practical applications to writing pedagogy. A creativity assessment based upon the work of Torrance and Guilford and designed for diagnosing rather than predicting individual creative thinking strengths is presented along with tools and techniques for enhancing creative writing pedagogy and an analysis of student comments from an online Master’s program in Creativity and Innovation.

This article discusses creativity within the classroom with a focus on creative writing. First, it reviews concepts of creativity in the educational literature and a previous study on how science teachers fostered “small c” creativity in their classrooms. Small-c creativity values the kind of thinking that produces new ideas in learners but is not necessarily historically important to any field or domain. It can be argued that when educators help their students excel at thinking creatively every day, it assists them in more frequently producing creative products. Using this theoretical lens, an analytical study framework was developed from a review of the literature stating that teachers who foster small-c creativity: (1) support divergent thinking; (2) accept learning artifacts that are novel; (3) nurture collaboration in which individual kinds of creativity are supported; (4) provide choices in what is an acceptable response; and (5) include lesson guidelines that enhance learning and self-confidence. Findings of the science study were applied to the writing classroom, as five poet-teachers were interviewed regarding their beliefs about small-c creativity. The themes that emerged within the teacher interviews are discussed. The piece concludes with recommendations for writing teachers geared to help them foster small-c creativity in their classrooms.

Writing a story is on the surface only a matter of discipline, but I argue that inherent in the creative process is a battle between order and chaos documented in the earliest myths of civilization. I examine several myths about the journey to the underworld to suggest that these stories are metaphors for the biology and psychology that empower the creative process.

Advances in computer coding and Internet technology are drastically redefining publishing and literature itself. This article examines how e-literature, literary texts dependent on code, differs from and works to supplement traditionally printed literature. In particular, e-literature alters traditional concepts of authorship and readership. A coded interface requires the input of a reader to generate a text; the resulting text is therefore a collaboration between the reader and the author, resulting in a change each time the text is read. . The article examines how hypertext pioneers have explored the possibilities offered by computer coding and the Internet, expanding the limits of literary creation and altering the very definition of literature itself.

Olivia Archibald's essay ("Representation, Ideology, and the Form of the Essay") arguing for a turn away from the formal, Baconian essay and towards the more creative and personalized Montaignian form of writing that was the original essai, and, in the most recent issue (volume 4.1), Douglas Heil's essay ("TV Writing and the Creative Writing Workshop: Shaping Practice across Disciplinary Boundaries") arguing for a meshing of the approaches of creative writing in English departments and scriptwriting pedagogy in mass communication. The current issue brings together the perspectives of creative writers, writing teachers, and creativity scholars to offer a novel examination of creativity for writing pedagogy. In combining reflections on the nature of

More than mere mathematical form, the fractal and other processes of chance can be used to help spur creative writing in new directions. From the inception of the I Ching, some form of constraint and the use of chance operations have been employed for centuries to free the creative impulse from overdetermination. This essay explores how one writer uses the flux of chaos both in the classroom and in his own writing, from collaborations to specifically designed writing exercises that help free the unconscious mind while still providing a sturdy architecture for perception.

No one has enough time to write; take that as a given, but nearly everyone can find 10-20 minutes a day to jot down a few notes – things noticed, a fact read in the newspaper or book, or heard on the radio. These notes will come in handy when a larger block of time for writing presents itself, for they are often the kindling for a first draft. Writing a little bit each day is akin to leaving the faucets dripping on a cold January night; while the ideas are flowing the creative pipes won’t freeze.

This article explores the notion of creativity as it relates to writing. It supports the tenet that all written texts, regardless of genre, contain creative elements to varying degrees, one reason being the representational aspect of language and, in particular, written language. It proposes that it would be more productive to examine written creativity on a continuum rather than through an exclusive dichotomy between creative and non-creative, and describes the elements that would be involved in such a continuum. The article explains some pertinent approaches to creativity, both linguistic and non-linguistic, and leads to a discussion of creative techniques on semantic, syntactic, and textual levels, drawing examples from a database of different texts.

Harriet Levin Millan introduces this special issue of Writing and Pedagogy: Creativity and Writing Pedagogy.

Taking a hybrid approach of research and narrative, theory and reflection, this essay utilizes yogic theory as a lens to discuss how students can negotiate one of the more challenging aspects of their research writing: freely setting out into the realm of creative, original research while negotiating genre-based constraints. I present research on genre and the “containment” of composition that highlights some of the past and current discussion about the potentially inhibiting heuristics that can shut down students’ constructions of agency and creativity in researched writing. Drawing upon research in contemplative pedagogy, essential texts of yogic philosophy, and images of the body in asana, I use the philosophy and language of yogic practice to propose a pedagogy that invites students to see their way toward an embodied practice of research, one that helps them to acknowledge and negotiate generic constraints, seek innovation, and accept uncertainty in their research-based writing.

How to Write an Earthquake/Comment écrire/Mou pou 12 Janvye edited by Beaudelaine Pierre and Nataša Durovicová (2012) Iowa City, Iowa: Autumn Hill Books. pp. 124 978-0984303670

Many writers begin as avid readers: reading can be the impetus and inspiration for their own work. In addition, many writers teach in undergraduate creative writing programs where they are confronted with students who do not share their relationship to reading or to language. This situation creates two problems: students aren’t engaged enough by language to make creative use of their reading and they lack a sense of authority that might allow them to be helpful critics of one another’s work. This essay explores and explains one strategy I have used in my undergraduate creative writing courses to address both issues. By asking my students to write creative responses to each other’s work, they learn to read more closely and carefully and also gain a sense of authority and competence in providing constructive criticism.

Brain diseases and their medical treatment may help or hurt creativity. They do so by changing the brain’s motivational system. Scientists and cultural historians have proposed links between creativity and disorders ranging from depression and psychosis to epilepsy and syphilis, but the best evidence is for conditions such as hypomania (mild mania) that elevate energy and mood. Many writers with symptoms of depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or even insomnia need advice about what medications can do to creativity. Doctors, however, typically dodge the issue. This article describes what drugs may be safest, and also reviews the effects of intoxicants such as alcohol. In general, treating severe illness has benefit to creativity that outweighs the medication side effects, but some medications are better than others.

This essay argues that creative writing and mass media programs have much to learn from each other. In its use of roundtable writing and serialized storylines that parallel 19th century literature, prime-time television writing is a natural fit for programs that intertwine creative writing workshops with the study of literature; institution within the curriculum is urged. Mass media programs – while perhaps already offering TV writing – can bolster this subject through the incorporation of creative writing workshop traditions.

Writing in the Devil’s Tongue A History of English Composition in China Xiaoye You (2010) Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press. pp. 237 ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-2930-4. ISBN-10: 0-8093-2930-1

In this essay, I suggest ways in which postsecondary writing programs may respond to the effects of the current economic recession. Relying on shape as a metaphor, I offer strategies for writing programs to survive the recession and to be better insulated from future economic downturns.

Based on the theory of dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981) and intertextuality (Kristeva, 1986), this study explores students’ and professors’ thoughts about formal citation practices based on their comments on whether certain words from source materials need to be acknowledged as others’ words in student writing. A total of 75 students and faculty members at a North American university were interviewed to comment on five examples of language re-use in some undergraduate writing. Participants’ comments focused on how they valued and distinguished (a) between words and ideas, (b) between words representing specialized concepts and words forming a grammatical structure, and (c) between specialized or newly coined words and words that have become widespread since their creation in a specific subject area. The study suggests the complexity of original expression and makes visible what individual students and professors are considering in their citation practices. The study further suggests that writing pedagogy needs to move from rule following to judgment and defense of judgment.

As the number of pupils who are multilingual and multicultural continues to increase in the United States, finding ways to best support these learners’ writing has become a priority. This project explores the creation and use of third spaces that support writing in three diverse urban classroom contexts. Ethnographic case studies reveal the ways in which teachers created third spaces for multicultural and multilingual students’ voices to be heard (Bakhtin, 1986; Dyson, 2003). Findings suggest that co-constructing third spaces can contribute to a writing pedagogy that includes multilingual and multicultural student discourse(s) while expanding the social and practical purposes for writing. These findings have implications for teacher educators, researchers, and classroom teachers with regard to the power of co-constructed spaces where students’ lives and languages are used as the foundation for merging school and local networks.

This essay focuses on the implementation of a multimedia writing course and, in particular, a techno-literacy memoir project, which asked students (advanced undergraduates and graduate students) to use their creativity in choosing digital environments, such as podcasts, blogs, and wikis, for sharing their memories of gaining literacy through technology. What the students learned from this project was an ability to fluidly transition between print and digital literacy, along the way strengthening their ability to engage their audiences, and a recognition of their own cyborgian writing skills; indeed, they saw how various communication technologies were extensions of themselves. Through this project, they understood that they had been “cyborgs” since childhood (growing up with, for example, seemingly primitive Speak’N’Spells and Commodore 64s), and this realization helped them transition into a new repertoire of composing skills essential for 21st century student writers.

Webheads in Action is an online community of practice (CoP) comprising teachers and learners who, for well over a decade now, have engaged one another in frequent collaboration serving to enhance the learning and knowledge of all concerned. This is achieved through constant exchange of ideas not only about teaching but also on the use of the Internet to provide opportunities for learning through appropriate application of freely available Web 2.0 tools in personal learning networks (PLNs). This article introduces Webheads as a CoP and provides specific examples of how participants scaffold each other’s teaching of writing and development of multiliteracies skills.

The case studies in this article represent the work of two elementary teachers who integrated their students’ identities into the literacy curriculum. Drawing on Cummins’ (2001) concept of identity investment, academic engagement, and multiliteracies theory, I discuss and analyze samples of students’ dual language writing and document the teaching practices that made these identity texts possible. Interview data from student participants and examples of their work illustrate the ways in which students re-imagine their identities by engaging with writing in both languages. The work of these students demonstrates the power that writing can have as a medium for students to express their identities. This study further shows that teaching writing through the use of personal narratives and cultural stories affords students opportunities to build their own cultural capital in relation to the expectations of academic writing.

This article focuses on student teachers of English in the Bachelor of Arts in Teaching English as a Second Language (BA TESL) program of the public state university of Oaxaca, Mexico. In Oaxaca, and Mexico at large, proficient English users are mainly from the upper socioeconomic classes. In general, the schools value Spanish and English to the exclusion of the prevailing Indigenous languages. Moreover, to be a legitimate English teacher, one is expected to look or act “American” or “gringo” and/or to have a “native-like” English accent. The Oaxacan student teachers are mainly from the lower or middle socioeconomic classes. They do not have “American” characteristics and lack a “native-like” English accent. Within this context is the present discussion situated. It demonstrates that the student teachers in two BA TESL classes utilize bilingual identity texts and dialogical ethnography as autobiographies and collages in order to co-create identities with which to assert their legitimacy as English teachers and multilingual speakers. The student teachers also validate their students’ multilingual identities, resist the “native speaker” versus “non-native speaker” dichotomy, confront the hegemony of Spanish over Indigenous languages, and attribute an international importance to their formation as English teachers. The bilingual identity texts and dialogic ethnography allow multilingual identity and intelligence to enter the TESL classroom and curriculum.

Identity texts, literacy engagement, and multilingual classrooms: What do these terms mean and encompass, and how do they play out with today's highly diverse school-aged population, their teachers, and their families?The articles included in this volume of Writing & Pedagogy deal with the educational experiences of individuals from marginalized social groups, adding names and faces to individuals who teach and learn in multilingual classrooms.The latter term refers to classrooms that are multilingual by virtue of the large number of home languages spoken by students in these classrooms, home languages that are not the same as the language of instruction.The articles in this special issue illustrate how and why multilingual learners' literacy engagement, or personal investment in schooling, increases when teachers, peers, and their own parents view students' literacy productions positively.The term used for these productions or "texts" -be they written, spoken, visual, musical, or any combination thereof -is identity texts to emphasize that they express the learner's identity.taken together, these articles offer readers a global view of the relationship between providing spaces that honor marginalized groups' languages and cultures, of why marginalized individuals invest themselves in those spaces, and of how such investment influences children's subsequent academic achievement.The contributors draw on Cummins' (2001; this volume) academic language learning and literacy engagement frameworks to capture, untangle, and illustrate the dialectical interplay and

This article reports findings from an ethnographic action research study of Deaf and hearing parents and young children participating in a family American Sign Language (ASL) literacy program in Ontario, Canada. The study documents the context for parents’ and children’s learning of ASL in an environment where resources for supporting early ASL literacy have been scarce. Through semi-structured interviews and observations of six individual families or parent-child dyads, the study documents participants’ encounters with professionals who regulate Deaf children and their families’ access to ASL. At the same time, the setting of the ASL Parent-Child Mother Goose Program is presented as a Deaf cultural space and thereby a counter-discourse to medical discourses regarding Deaf identity and bilingualism. This space features the Deaf mother participants’ ASL literacy and numeracy practices and improvisations of ASL rhymes and stories to enhance their suitability for young children. The practices of the ASL Parent-Child Mother Goose Program leader also serve to define and support emergent ASL literacy. In addition, a Deaf cultural space inside a broader context of public services to young Deaf children provides a means for the hearing mother participants to facilitate critical inquiry of issues surrounding bilingualism, ASL, and a Deaf identity.

In this article, two case studies of Internet-based sister classes designed to foster second language learning are described with a focus on student writing. Writing is examined within the context of social constructivist and transformative orientations to pedagogy. In the context of these pedagogical orientations, writing is initially analyzed as communication within an environment that merges writing with speaking and also promotes changes in pedagogy. These pedagogical changes enable students’ writing to become a vehicle for generating new knowledge, creation of literature, and critical examination of social realities relevant to students’ lives.

Effective Second Language Writing Susan Kasten (ed.) (2010) Alexandria, Virginia: TESOL. pp. 219 ISBN: 978-193118563-9

Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media Mizuko Ito, Sonja Baumer, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Rachel Cody, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Heather A. Horst, Patricia G. Lange, Dilan Mahendran, Katynka Z. Martínez, C. J. Pascoe, Dan Perkel, Laura Robinson, Christo Sims, and Lisa Tripp (2010) Cambridge: MIT Press. pp. 440 ISBN: 9780262258920

This issue is focused on the importance of students writing and reading texts that incorporate their own specific experiences and identities, including as minorities or speakers of English as a second or additional language. I see this orientation as related to arguments others (e.g. Archibald, 2009) have made about the need for writing in academic contexts to be less bound to the strict conventions of the essay form, and indeed for concepts of text to be interpreted to include non-print forms. The field of academic writing, coming from both the Rhetoric and Composition side of the house and the Applied Linguistics-ESL side of the house, is increasingly consolidating a view that all students should be involved in writing themselves into their texts and, further, into the educational curriculum. This is the essential insight of the notion of identity texts which is central to this issue All of the articles in this issue derive from the influence of Professor Jim Cummins and his career-long focus on education in bilingual and multilingual contexts, academic language learning and literacy, and especially his Empowerment Framework Cummins' Featured Essay adds to the ongoing critique (including in some editorials and articles previously published in this journal) of misguided educational policy impacting learning and literacy in negative ways. He argues and advocates for approaches that will ensure literacy engagement for students from marginalized groups and backgrounds where English is not the primary language, as illustrated in each of the approaches

Policies designed to improve educational outcomes in the United States (and many other countries) over the past decade have failed to raise overall achievement or close the gap between middle-class and low-income students in any significant way. Little tangible impact is evident despite the expenditure of billions of dollars ($6 billion for the Reading First program alone). Alienated adolescents, primarily from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, continue to drop out of high school in large numbers. I argue that the persistent failure of educational policies designed to close the achievement gap is largely a result of implementing evidence-free policies and instructional practices. Policy-makers have chosen to ignore extensive empirical evidence suggesting the following: (a) factors associated with socioeconomic status (SES) and broader patterns of societal power relations exert a major influence on educational outcomes; (b) literacy engagement is a stronger predictor of reading performance than socioeconomic status (SES), and low-income students have significantly less access to books and print than do higher-income students; (c) students will engage academically only to the extent that classroom interactions and academic effort are identity-affirming. The framework proposed for stimulating school-based policy discussions argues that school polices need to maximize print access and literacy engagement among marginalized group students and in addition that they need to enable students to use language and literacy in ways that will affirm their identities and challenge the deficit orientation that is frequently built into programs and curriculum for low-income and bilingual learners.

Research indicates that when students’ identities are affirmed in micro-interactions between themselves and teachers, they are more likely to invest themselves academically (Cummins, 2001). Aboriginal students faced with pedagogical materials that negatively represent their culture are loath to invest themselves in their schooling. This reflection on practice describes the implementation of a dual language book project designed to produce positive identity texts to counter damaging representations of marginalized group members. The participant-authors were Aboriginal parents who wrote books intended for their preschool-aged children in their ancestral language and English. These parents created identity texts to reflect their children’s identities back to them in a positive light (Cummins, this volume) and, in so doing, they engaged in a form of “decolonized writing.”

This is the second part of a two-part article on how Web 2.0 tools freely available afford so many opportunities for collaboration among writers in the context of social networking, creating the means for student writers to write purposefully for worldwide audiences. Part I set the stage by placing writing in the context of new views of literacy due in part to revoluntionary changes since the turn of the century in how content finds its way to the Internet. It explained how artifacts created with such tools are aggregated and harvested as learning objects with potential to promote and augment communication and collaboration online, and to promote writing by giving students interesting and meaningful ideas to write about, thus significantly changing how the teaching of writing might be re-envisaged in the digital age. Whereas Part I examined the production side of this dynamic, Part II explains how the Internet resolves the marketing side of the role once played by traditional publishing and how writers and audiences can navigate this seemingly chaotic preponderance of content online by tagging their work and using RSS and other aggregation tools to find one another's written work and carry on conversations about it, thus providing truly authentic motivation for their writing.

Like other kinds of work with a strong intellectual-reflective component, teaching is complex action. The wide range of skills and types of decisionmaking involved in this complex, high-level work classifies teachers as professionals not simply laborers As I have noted in research carried out with K-12 teachers in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, teachers have to manage a wide range of competing priorities in their work Like other teachers, writing teachers must handle a set of contrasting aims in classroom teaching, balancing the course-level and whole-class curriculum concerns of structure and predictability against the activity-level and individual-level concerns of teaching-learning process, creative response, and adaptation to circumstances and to the needs and interests of individual students. The teacher's balancing act is complicated by the need to factor in requirements and constraints imposed by administrators and governing bodies as to class size, workload, curriculum and texts, testing, grading, and record-keeping, and it is exacerbated by the extra time needed to handle the added burdens. It is further exacerbated by differences in what can be planned for in advance and what cannot and by differences in the teacher's goals, preferences, and ideals, on the one hand, and the reality of the teaching situation, on the other. Writing teachers' best-laid plans are often laid aside because of the constraints of their teaching situation, such as too-large class size or students whose linguistic or writing skills require remediation.

Rationality and the Literate Mind Harris, Roy (2009) New York: Routledge. pp.190 ISBN10: 0-415-99901-4.

In this article, we describe an approach to teaching first-year composition that is built on a qualitative design for undergraduate research and writing. As writing instructors at a state teaching college, we see the need to move our students beyond the boundaries of expressivism, personal narrative, and argument and into the murkier, messier, and more critical territory of considering subjectivities, interpreting cultural texts and contexts, and, ultimately, coming to see the dynamic and dialogic nature of rhetorical situations and knowledge production. We have discovered that asking undergraduates to do field work as a way to enter the academic conversation allows them to shift from high school writing to college-level writing. Inviting them to delve into a primary research project of their own design grants them permission to construct their ownership, authority, and intellectual engagement of ideas. Case studies of the experiences of five student research writers illustrate the process through which, as ethnographers, students become actors in their own learning process.

Writing pedagogy and civic literacy can form an interactive, interdisciplinary partnership beneficial to students. Students learn to compare the classical rhetorical genres of epideictic, forensic, and deliberative rhetoric to modern ceremonial, judicial, and legislative rhetorical genres. Elements essential to writing pedagogy – ethos, logos, pathos, claims, warrants, and enthymemes – become meaningful as students engage in civic-themed reading and writing assignments designed for first-year composition. Writing pedagogy enriched with a civic literacy motif encourages students to practice writing to authentic audiences for genuine civic purposes.

This study employs ethnographic case study method to explore secondary English language learners’ experiences with content-area writing in a U.S. public school setting. Documentary evidence, interviews, and students’ written work comprise the data set. Data are interpreted through a sociocognitive theoretical lens to take into account contextual and individual cognitive factors that come into play in English language learners’ development of content-specific writing. Findings suggest that a combination of institutional factors (e.g. school program design, state regulations, and state assessment systems) in concert with teacher beliefs and expectations of English language learners impact the content-area writing instruction which English language learners receive. This study points to the need for continued investigation of state policies, school processes, and teacher beliefs and practices that may enhance the quality and breadth of writing English language learners experience as they move through secondary school.

This response to Poole's article (preceding) offers a comparative view of K-12 education in England and Wales, suggesting that the issues there are similar to those in the United States, involving politics and a performative culture that will be hard to change.

No Child Left Behind has transformed education, including writing instruction. Teachers must remain true to effective writing practice in order to combat the rising trend of relying on standardized writing tests as the only measure of effective writing. When assessing writing, teachers should be major players in the assessment process, and a wide range of assessments should be used to accurately determine students’ writing abilities.

Although response to student writing often consumes the majority of a writing instructor’s time and energy, studies of teachers’ philosophies and practices with regard to feedback have been relatively rare in the response literature. In the study described in this article, college writing instructors from six community colleges and two four-year universities in Northern California (N=129) were surveyed, and volunteers from this group (N=23) gave follow-up in-depth interviews. In addition, each interview participant provided 3-5 samples of student texts with their own written commentary. Based on the findings, our analysis focuses on two questions: 1. How do the participants (college-level writing instructors in Northern California) perceive response to student writing? 2. In what ways might the participants’ own practices be causing or adding to their frustrations? We found that although most of the participants value response and believe it is very important, they are often frustrated and dissatisfied with the task itself and with its apparent lack of impact on student progress. Our data analyses suggest some possible underlying explanations for these teachers’ complex attitudes toward response. The discussion concludes with suggestions of ways writing instructors can adapt or focus their response practices to increase the efficiency and quality of their feedback, to reduce frustration, and to increase satisfaction with this aspect of their teaching practice.

Instead of focusing on students’ citation of sources, educators should attend to the more fundamental question of how well students understand their sources and whether they are able to write about them without appropriating language from the source. Of the 18 student research texts we studied, none included summary of a source, raising questions about the students’ critical reading practices. Instead of summary, which is highly valued in academic writing and is promoted in composition textbooks, the students paraphrased, copied from, or patchwrote from individual sentences in their sources. Writing from individual sentences places writers in constant jeopardy of working too closely with the language of the source and thus inadvertently plagiarizing; and it also does not compel the writer to understand the source.

Writing is no easy task in any discipline and at any stage in a student’s course of university study. In addition, it brings with it the important concern of plagiarism. Obtaining student and teacher perceptions of the strategies students use to produce their assignments has been valuable in identifying and dealing with plagiarism. This article reports on a survey carried out at one English-medium university in Lebanon of 358 Arabic student views by discipline and year and 31 teacher views on the strategies students use to “improve” their written assignments. Results show that although students are aware of the prevalence of plagiarism in all disciplines and in all years of study, they perceive more incidences in the professional disciplines, at advanced levels, and in student use of strategies that give help to and gain help from their peers. Teachers indicated higher student use of all strategies and a greater extent of plagiarism than did the students. Recommendations in line with recent research emphasizing more positive methods are made for raising student awareness of ethical writing strategies, establishing common ground on what constitutes plagiarism, and implementing pedagogical practices and institutional policies that educate rather than penalize.

Academic Writing and Plagiarism: A Linguistic Analysis. Diane Pecorari (2008) London: Continuum. pp. 213 ISBN: 978–08264–9166–4

Plagiarism, the Internet and Student Learning. Wendy Sutherland-Smith (2008) New York: Routledge, 2008. pp. 224 ISBN: 978–0-415–43293–1

Over the past few decades, researchers interested in composition and second-language (L2) writing have increasingly begun to examine issues related to intentional and unintentional plagiarism, factors influencing plagiarism such as culture and language proficiency, and L2 writers’ textual borrowing practices. However, less attention has been paid to the instructional issues surrounding plagiarism. This article aims to add to the research on pedagogy specific to writing from sources by reporting on a survey conducted with 113 writing instructors working at universities, colleges, and intensive English language institutes in the Western United States. These instructors evaluated existing resources for teaching how to avoid plagiarism and shared ideas about the types of instructional materials they use or would like to use. Additionally, the article examines a case of one writing instructor utilizing resources related to textual borrowing when teaching a unit on summarizing as part of an academic writing course for L2 writers, and explores the decisions made in the process of implementing various resources in the class. Based on the results of the survey and the case study, recommendations are made for writing instructors and materials developers, along with suggestions for future research.

The growing attention given to plagiarism in the Internet Age has triggered the development and marketing of scores of antiplagiarism services and devices. This article deals only with text-based plagiarism. We first mention some of the current developments in plagiarism detection systems. Next we briefly describe principles and challenges of such systems. Finally, we outline what can happen after a system reports possible plagiarism.