Professionals routinely ask colleagues for feedback on drafts of their written work, and the feedback they receive frequently includes suggestions for changes in wording. By convention, professionals are free to appropriate these suggestions without citation; the suggested words or phrases become, in effect, the author’s own in a transaction this essay terms a textual gift. In contrast, guidelines and policies on plagiarism for student writers are typically phrased in ways that would appear to forbid students from accepting textual gifts or to require that they use citation in doing so – both of which interfere with teaching students how to solicit and make use of feedback in a professional manner. Centered on a case from the author’s own experience, this essay explores the complexities of textual gifts in academic settings through a look at the language of institutional policies, handbooks on writing, and online guides to citation practices, as well as existing scholarship on plagiarism. The essay argues that new scholarship is needed to guide both instructors and institutions, and maps out some potential avenues for this work.

In the academy, approaches to handling plagiarism vary widely. Some – for example, the approaches of programs that use turnitin.com or similar software – favor detection and punishment. Others view instances of plagiarism as teaching moments, while still others argue that a culture-wide change in values is required for plagiarism to diminish. Our discussion examines these different perspectives, tracing them to their disciplinary or structural homes, before suggesting a practical pedagogy of plagiarism instruction that reconciles the differing approaches.

Over the past decade, university student plagiarism has received considerable attention, and a number of text-based studies have investigated the extent to which student writers copy source text language into their own written work. Much less is known, however, about student paraphrasing. To address this gap, the present study analyzed a corpus of summaries written by a group of native English speakers (n=124) writing in their first language (L1) and by a group of students from other language backgrounds (n=103) writing in their second language (L2), and aimed to identify the major grammatical strategies that students employed when paraphrasing source text language. While many of the paraphrases analyzed contained copied strings of 5 or more words, most did not. And while the strategies of deletion and synonym substitution were frequently used, many students, both L1 and L2 writers, made a number of grammatical changes to the original. Students who avoided copied language used a common paraphrasing strategy: Rather than simply select individual words to replace with synonyms, they divided the original excerpt into its major components (e.g. subject, main verb, direct object) and transformed those components into new units typically of a different grammatical form) that expressed the same idea. These findings suggest that continued investigation of student paraphrasing may help to refine our understanding of the linguistic strategies associated with effective textual borrowing.

In response to difficulties in dealing with plagiarism and academic honesty, faculty and staff in a university-based American intensive English program (IEP) took specific measures to help international students understand these issues. The host institution’s policy on academic honesty, which was too difficult and nuanced for second language writers to understand, was replaced with a new policy written in simple language, making concepts and penalties easier to understand. Program-wide measures were implemented in stages to build summarizing and paraphrasing skills for students at all proficiency levels and to support their development as academic writers, and changes were made to the curriculum, incorporating writing from sources at an earlier stage, in scaffolded assignments. Teaching emphasis was shifted from after-the-fact punishment of plagiarism to proactively teaching about concepts of academic honesty and writing from sources. To assist with this, plagiarism detection services were repurposed and used as teaching tools for students instead of policing tools for instructors.

Writing in the Disciplines: A Reader and Rhetoric for Academic Writers (Sixth Edition). Mary Lynch Kennedy and William J. Kennedy (2008) New York & London: Pearson Prentice Hall. pp. 682 ISBN-10: 0–13–232003–7

Writing courses increasingly incorporate Internet and online learning activities as part of the syllabus and teaching materials. How does this change our teaching practices, and which free and collaborative online tools can be most appropriately applied in online and blended writing courses? This is the first part of a two-part article focused on freely available Web 2.0 tools and how they can promote collaboration in the context of social networking. Part I places writing in the context of new views of literacy due in part to revolutionary changes since the turn of the century in how content finds its way to the Internet. Web 2.0 and cloud computing have made it possible for writers to publish not only prose but a range of other media online without having to pass through traditional gate-keepers, and tools and mechanisms have evolved for networking communities of like-minded writers online. Among the many impacts of this development is the possibility now for student writers to write purposefully for worldwide audiences. Part I examines the production side of this dynamic, while Part II (to appear in the first issue of this journal in 2011) explains how the Internet resolves the marketing side of the role once played by traditional publishing and how writers and audiences can navigate the seemingly chaotic preponderance of content available online to find one another’s material and carry on conversations about it, thus providing truly authentic motivation for their writing.

This study investigates English language learners’ writing strategies with reference to their gender and year of study at a university in Iran. To this end, a writing strategies questionnaire was employed to tap into the memory, cognitive, compensation, metacognitive, social, and affective strategies of 230 participants. Semi-structured interviews with participants were also conducted in addition to the questionnaire. Participants’ perceptions demonstrated no significant differences in writing strategy use for either gender or year of study. Metacognitive and cognitive strategies were found to be the most frequently used strategies by all writers, and both the low- and high-level male and female learner-writers used writing strategies with approximately the same frequency. Interviews identified sociocultural and contextual differences in students of both genders and years of study which reflect the challenges foreign language learner-writers of English face in an academic context. Further research on writing strategies taking more specific variables, task settings, and contexts into consideration is necessary to shed more light on EFL writing strategy use.

This article describes an approach to writing instruction that involves a combination of the genre approach and the process writing approach. The stages of the writing process that students often do not take time for, namely brainstorming, organizing ideas and drafting, are done as much as possible in the classroom. In preparation for this, students are introduced to models of the type of texts they will have to write, so that they can become familiar with the features that are typical of that text type (genre). These features form the basis of a checklist that will serve as a form for teacher feedback, which is given to the students at various stages of the writing process up to final revision. In addition, certain points are focused on in peer feedback. Throughout the entire process, students are encouraged to become aware of their progress through written reflection. We have found that such an approach, overseen and monitored by the teacher, leads students to writing more focused texts that conform to the genres to which they belong. For the purposes of this article, the text type of argumentative (opinion) essay was used as an example.

This study focuses on how teachers enrolled in a graduate level, online English Education course perceived formulaic or thesis-driven student writing, commonly associated with the traditional “five-paragraph essay.” One goal of this course, “Writing, Reading, and Teaching Creative Nonfiction,” was to engage teachers in reflecting about the uses of this “new” genre in their own classrooms. Living in several states, the participants included one science teacher, four Special Education teachers, and ten middle and secondary Language Arts teachers. We analyzed 12 separate prompts posted to the discussion board over a six-week period. Also, participants were required to post one “thread” into each discussion board, with follow-up comments to threads from at least two other participants. Approximately 75 out of a total of 800 coded comments dealt with formulaic writing. The following patterns of participants’ perceptions emerged from these comments: (1) student benefits of formulaic writing; (2) a hierarchical sequence for teaching writing; (3) obligations to teach formulaic writing; (4) resistance to formulaic writing; (5) the constraints of formulaic writing on students; and (6) the constraints of formulaic writing on teachers. Based on this study, we recommend that teachers engage in writing themselves which includes risk taking, modeling writing and significant revision for their students, and sharing models of writing; ensure that their students write in many forms and genres, including, but not limited to, the five-paragraph essay; develop realistic views of the expectations and obligations they face daily; and internalize effective writing practices. In the process of exploring the genre of creative nonfiction, teachers also had to grapple with old debates, as almost all of this study’s participants changed their views, discovering that the chains they had felt actually were not as tight as they had originally believed.

Previous research has shown that late immersion education in Hong Kong is not achieving the dual curriculum goals of content and second language learning which a late immersion curriculum can expect. This article presents a case study of writing in four late English immersion classes in Hong Kong, two in Biology and two in History, examining whether and how some of the teaching and learning processes with respect to writing support content and language learning. The study analyzed 285 samples of student writing using a writing analysis framework that reflects features of both content and language learning. The writing analysis, along with contextual data from teacher and student interviews and a teacher questionnaire, indicate that students demonstrate little content and language learning in their writing. The data suggest that the writing pedagogy adopted may partly explain the unsatisfactory learning outcomes. A major reason for adoption of the pedagogy seems to lie in the teachers’ and students’ views of the role of copying and memorization in writing and in learning, views which are characteristic of the Chinese educational context. Implications for writing teacher education within an immersion curriculum where the immersion language is from a different educational culture are discussed. Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3

This essay describes a literacy project involving college students who are preservice teachers and students in an urban alternative public school. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” served as a touchstone or linchpin for the development of literacy skills and identity construction for both the college and secondary school students. Utilizing the idea of “a new neighborhood” as a metaphor and a goal, all students were given opportunities to engage with language, opening them up to a variety of new experiences and a new sense of belonging within a safe classroom environment.

Critical Literacy and Urban Youth: Pedagogies of Access, Dissent, and Liberation. Ernest Morrell (2008) New York & London: Routledge. pp. 256 ISBN 978–0-80585–664–4 (9780805856644).

Given the high demands in knowledge and practice of written language conventions of academia and of specific disciplines, research traditions, and accepted approaches to thesis writing, doctoral students face a daunting array of challenges in writing a thesis. Here we discuss some ideas for automated analysis of low-level features of a thesis and preliminary work using Correspondence Analysis showing differences across chapters in theses from four fields (Biology, Linguistics, Tourism, and Film Studies) according to the presence of the three types of reporting verbs studied by Hyland (2002), i.e. those expressing research acts, cognitive acts, and discourse acts. The analysis illustrates the method and is suggestive of its potential for pointing up differences in thesis structure that might be of value for thesis students and their supervisors.

This article explores the role of a thesis introduction in establishing the contribution of the thesis to its field of study and how the introduction might be exploited by the writer of the thesis and their supervisor to scaffold the thesis writing process. The focus is on how the introduction realizes a conceptual map of the field of the thesis, a series of speech acts, and a text which construes the conceptual map of the field and the relevant speech acts by means of its method of development. A second focus is on how these aspects of the introduction can serve as heuristic devices which can be used to generate versions of the introduction and to project the structure of the entire thesis.

Developing Academic Literacies: Understanding Disciplinary Communities’ Culture and Rhetoric. Dimitra Koutsantoni (2007) Vol. 4, Contemporary Studies in Descriptive Linguistics. Oxford: Peter Lang. pp. 302 ISBN: 9783039105755

The control of discourse functions, such as defining, contrasting, intensifying, and hedging among others, is an important skill in effective academic writing. Unlike the case with a typical writing textbook, where examples of discourse functions are invented or drawn for a variety of sources, the present work is based on an analysis of discourse functions from a single exemplary Doctoral thesis. The presentation demonstrates how a useful set of materials can be garnered from just one rich source. Additionally, it provides readers with descriptions and examples of eleven discourse functions identified through the analysis and discusses how this material has been implemented in the author’s advanced graduate writing class.

Tertiary institutions offer a variety of provision for postgraduate students aimed at the development of academic writing skills. This article using a series of workshops and individual tutorials designed specifically for students engaged in writing theses and exegeses in certain discipline areas in a large New Zealand university. It outlines and reflects on the process of identifying and analysing relevant information for the design, content and on-going development of the workshops. This includes supervisors’ expectations, students’ needs and feedback, as well as the features of published texts and unpublished theses and exegeses. The post-workshop tutorial provision is underpinned by the two key principles of dialogue to assist clarity of expression, and encouragement for students to express their own voice. The experience gained from this work has led to the development of a discipline specific online paper for students in their first year of postgraduate study.

This article illustrates how freely available computer tools can be used for academic writing. It presents a series of tools and functions from the area of corpus linguistics, and shows how these can be used by students and teachers when working on dissertations and theses or when exploring conventions of academic writing and of writing in specific disciplines.

First person pronoun use in academic writing has received much attention from researchers over the past decade (Baynham (1999), Tang and John (1999), Kuo (1999), Ivanic and Camps (2001), Hyland (2001; 2002; 2004), Harwood (2005) and Koutsantoni (2003, 2007), to name a few). It is acknowledged as the most visible representation of the writer’s identity in the text. This paper investigates the influence of revision on the use of first person pronouns in dissertation writing. The aim of the paper is to reach a better understanding of how writers’ identities develop in academic texts during the process of writing. Master’s level dissertations written by international students mainly from the Far East and enrolled at a UK university form the data for this study. The results reveal that the revision process can be used as an effective means to raise students’ awareness of how their identities develop during the writing process and how they might transform from being novices of the academic discourse community to becoming initiates (Thompson, 2001).

In academic writing, referencing sources is more than just a strategy for demonstrating scholarship. In thesis writing, for example, it plays an important role in making the writer’s argument persuasive. This investigation is concerned with the different ways in which thesis writers incorporate and evaluate diverse voices through academic referencing. First, it sets out an analytical framework underpinned by systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, 2004), particularly developments in appraisal theory (Martin and White, 2005). The framework provides a dialogic perspective on the linguistic options for referencing academic sources. The discussion then shows how the framework was used to conduct a detailed analysis of one doctoral student’s incorporation of academic sources in a successful Film Studies thesis. The analysis concludes with an illustrative list of referencing strategies used in theses and other types of academic writing. By reporting on how the conventions of referencing can be used in rhetorically effective ways, the research aims to make a contribution to the field of academic writing which is of practical as well as academic value.

Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Local Publics. Elenore Long (2008) West Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press. pp. 316 ISBN: 978–1-60235–056–4

The purpose of this study was to explore the influence of professional development at a site of the National Writing Project (the Tampa Bay Area Writing Project), on student writing achievement. Student writing samples were collected at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year from 22 classes of students in grades 3-12. Statistical analysis, using Repeated Measures ANOVA, of a stratified random sample of papers from each class, revealed significant differences between students in classrooms of writing project trained teachers and students in classrooms of closely matched control group teachers, with students in treatment group classrooms demonstrating higher writing achievement at the end of the year. Effect sizes for the treatment group were consistently higher than those of the control group. Significant differences were not in evidence until April, two months after the state writing assessment, following which the teachers had changed their practices from a prior focus on test preparation. Results from statistical analysis and teacher interviews suggest that the pressures and requirements which educators and legislators believe will improve writing performance may actually impede teachers from doing their best work, and consequently, the students from achieving their best writing performance.

Though sometimes seen as remedial in nature, writing centers have pedagogical missions that are far broader in scope in most educational institutions. This reflection traces both the growth of writing centers since their origins in the early 1900s and their current points of intersection with other writing programs – first year composition, writing across the curriculum, and community literacy initiatives. In spite of the economic and administrative difficulties they will face in the future, writing centers will continue to thrive.

Truth in Nonfiction: Essays. David Lazar (Ed.) (2008) Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. pp.195 ISBN 978-1-58729-654-3

In setting forth the intended philosophy of the eSphere column, the column’s editor introduces what is possible in the teaching of writing in today’s technological climate as compared to the much less connected era when he started teaching several decades ago. At that time, computers were viewed as tools supporting behaviorist and algorithmic training philosophies, whereas current perspectives regard them more as adjuncts to constructivist and connectivist methodologies, and where writing is concerned, as a means of promoting authentic communication enhanced by social networking. Technology is now seen to facilitate most aspects of each step of the writing process. The eSphere column intends not only to document developments along these lines and to shed light on their impact on teaching writing, but to foretell them, following and extrapolating the trends and paradigm shifts as teaching practitioners utilize and adapt the affordances inherent in modern technologies. The column aims to encourage teachers to experiment and become familiar with the new tools and the most appropriate methodologies for their use. It is hoped that the eSphere column will become part of the conversations among teachers promoting informal learning with one another, which in subsequent stages can be applied with transformative effects in classrooms.

This essay examines the beginnings of first-year writing programs in the academy and the early history of the essay to reveal how and why a particularly limiting range of allowable subjectivities entered into the writing classroom through the essay’s form. Most college first-year writing courses privilege a thesis-driven form of the essay that is much closer to Bacon’s (1592/1966) collection of essays, in contrast to those written by Montaigne (1575/1965), who is often referred to as the “Father of the Essay.” Reasons for this practice include the writing curriculum’s seeming alliance with classical rhetoric’s definition of both essay and student writer. The concept of ideology as conceived by Althusser (1968/1971) proves useful for understanding the essay’s implications in subjectivity formation. Although all essay forms are informed by ideology, the act of privileging thesis-driven forms in schooling practices can also privilege the practice of requiring students to take on subjectivities allowed only within those forms. Expanding the writing forms assigned within first-year writing programs can offer writers more open, contradictory possibilities for expressing authority, resistance, critical inquiry, creativity, and difference.

The teaching and learning of writing was examined in ten diverse K-12 schools in which all of the students in one or more classrooms had individual access to laptop computers. Substantial positive changes were observed in each stage of the writing process, including better access to information sources for planning and pre-writing; easier drafting of papers, especially for students with physical or cognitive disabilities that made handwriting laborious; more access to feedback, both from teachers, who could read printed papers much more quickly than handwritten ones, and, in some schools, by automated writing evaluation programs; more frequent and extensive revision; and greater opportunities to publish final papers or otherwise disseminate them to real audiences.

Most writing teachers make use of pens/pencils or computers as a tool to provide their students with written feedback. This article recommends a range of feedback modes for writing teachers, including (1) pen-and-paper, (2) insert comment/track change (giving comments by deleting and adding), and (3) insert audio (recording your voice). Advantages and disadvantages of each feedback mode, based on teacher’s observation as well as students’ preferences, are discussed to help writing teachers consider how different commenting modes might facilitate their feedback process.

This article describes an action research project conducted at two public schools in an urban center in the province of New Brunswick in eastern Canada. The project involved the development of and experimentation with a model for the instruction of writing (ÉCRI – écriture cohérente et raisonnée en immersion) at both the elementary and middle-school levels. Research questions focused on gaining insight into best practices for teaching writing through practitioner dialogue in professional learning communities (PLCs), classroom observation and videotaping, teacher reflections, and stimulated recall. The data gathered were analyzed to determine similarities and differences between the implementation of the model in elementary and middle school settings as well as second-language and first-language learning contexts. Results of the study demonstrate the applicability of this multi-phase model at both levels and in both learning environments and the adaptations necessary to meet the needs of learners in these contexts.

This is the inaugural issue of a journal, Writing & Pedagogy, that seeks to provide a new forum for discussion and dissemination of knowledge focused on both writing and the teaching of writing. It is innovative in being both international in scope and in spanning across all levels of education, from K-12 through doctoral level. The journal aims to provide information and stimulate conversations that can advance the theory and practice of writing pedagogy in first-and second-language environments by revealing similarities and differences in the practices and concerns regarding writing and the teaching of writing across different contexts and educational systems. The journal solicits submissions in the categories of essays, research reports, pedagogical reflections, discussions of technology, and book reviews. Although the primary focus is on the teaching of English writing within formal education, the journal welcomes articles on writing outside of English education, such as the teaching of writing in other languages, the writing needs of specific workplace contexts, and issues of a theoretical or practical nature involving the nature of writing or research on writing.

Advances in technology, such as the word-processor, have long supported the pedagogy of composition. However, in the Internet environment a variety of electronic tools and multimedia can further enhance best practices in teaching writing: the integration of reading and writing, recursive drafting, targeted grammar and vocabulary study, peer review, and publication.