Peer feedback has long been an essential part of a process approach to writing in university EFL classrooms. This study examines how the affordances of peer feedback are shaped by students’ language choice. We interviewed 27 Chinese university students in an English writing course about their experiences giving and receiving oral peer feedback on an initial and revised draft of an essay. Semi-structured interviews were analyzed thematically and triangulated with stimulated recall, transcripts of peer review discussions, and content analyses of learners’ incorporation of feedback across essay drafts to better understand perceptions and actions following from language choice during oral peer review of their L2 writing. Findings show that students incorporated 56 percent of oral peer feedback instances when revising, and almost all of these occurred in students’ first language, Chinese. Participants described the L1 affordances of clarity, efficiency, and pragmatics as important considerations when giving oral feedback on peer writing. Through triangulation of oral peer feedback discussions, change across essay drafts, and student interviews, language choice is shown to be a supportive practice for L2 writers in oral peer feedback. In contrast to previous research that suggests that the L1 is used primarily for solving problems and less frequently for discussion of content, our findings show that students chose to use their L1 for peer review because of the perceived support offered for improving their writing – namely, clarity, efficiency, and pragmatics.

In our information age, written communication has become increasingly important in many professions. As a result, university faculty and administrators need to develop specific curricula and pedagogies that will facilitate the process of equipping students with the required writing knowledge and skills to meet the demands of their workplace environments. In this article, we argue that Writing Across the Professions (WAP) as a curricular model meets that requirement, particularly in Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) contexts, which we believe are conducive to fostering writing transfer in university students. WAP foregrounds the importance of writing in workplace contexts and aims to facilitate the transfer of students’ knowledge and practices by focusing on rhetorical genre theory and analysis, discourse community theory and analysis, providing engaged feedback on students’ writing, and inviting students to critically reflect on their previous and current writing knowledge and practices. In this article, we propose four conceptual foundations that university faculty and administrators can utilize to implement WAP programs at their institutions. The first concept is that professional (writing) knowledge and practices are contextual and require lifelong learning; WIL faculty and students thus need to be informed about what is involved in learning to write across professions. Secondly, as the transfer of professional (writing) knowledge and practices goes beyond disciplinary boundaries, both faculty and students need to build contextual awareness. Thirdly, as problem-solving is an integral part of writing in the professions, faculty and students need to engage in critical reflection. Finally, professional (writing) knowledge and practices impact identities and therefore require mentoring. In outlining these shared concepts from WIL and writing transfer research, this article offers examples of how they can inform curricular approaches and pedagogical practices in WAP.

This article draws on Toulmin’s model of argumentation to propose a way of engaging with controversial topics in ways that require not only the assertion of a point of view, but attentive listening to contrasting beliefs. Given the paucity of models of respectful listening in public discourse, school becomes a place where teachers can provide opportunities for contentious discussions to be conducted through civic discourse. The article begins with an outline of Toulmin’s model, with an emphasis on warranting examples so that they serve as evidence for a claim, and engages with opposing viewpoints for a reasoned rebuttal and synthesis. The article then suggests that the topic of school dress codes would be a fruitful topic of student inquiry and argumentation, given the ideological basis of a dress code and the many differences of opinion surrounding them. Such instruction is illustrated through a method that relies on inductive reasoning and discussion as the basis for generating ideas in argumentative writing. The article concludes with a view of writing pedagogy that promotes responsible argumentation in light of critical responses that lead to a synthesis and extension of learning.

Bullshit, as defined by Frankfurt (2005, p. 10), is language that is “disconnected from a concern for the truth.” Much scholarship shows that bullshit is a prominent feature in organizations that is difficult, if not impossible, to get rid of (e.g., McCarthy et al., 2020; Penny, 2010). Bullshit, by definition and by cultural practice, seems antithetical to business writing orthodoxy. As Thill and Bovée (2020) suggest in a representative textbook, communication should be clear and ethical. However, Spicer (2020) codifies bullshit as a social practice whose outcomes are not always dire. Well-crafted bullshit benefits its users, allowing them to “fit into a speech community, get things done in day-to-day interaction and bolster their image and identity” (Spicer, 2020, p. 20). Contrasting with business writing’s abstinence-only bullshit stance, this suggests that successful writers must adapt to their organization’s speech act practices. In this article, we argue that students must be taught about bullshit. After describing bullshit and its role in organizations, we show how business writing could incorporate a critically informed approach to bullshit in undergraduate courses, internship preparation courses, and other curricular instances in which students work directly with organizations. While bullshitting should not be outright encouraged, continued ignorance will do nothing to solve its associated problems. Promoting bullshit literacy, however, could both minimize bullshit’s harms and maximize its benefits. We close by describing how this approach could foster critical thinking skills, promote more seamless adaptation to organizational cultures and communication practices, and perhaps even improve mental health outcomes.

There is little research on teachers’ thoughts about giving feedback to young text writers. This study aims to contribute more knowledge about this by interviewing four primary school teachers about their thoughts about giving feedback on texts written by young writers. A second aim for this study is to contribute more knowledge about how writing medium might affect what potential teachers see for giving feedback on different aspects of a text. Finally, the study investigates which discourses of writing become visible when teachers talk about giving feedback on texts written by young writers. Findings indicate that overall teachers report that they give oral feedback to beginning writers, and they say it is important to have a positive focus. When teachers talk about what feedback they would have given examples of student texts, they have a tendency to focus on local aspects of the text. Interestingly, even in digital texts where some local aspects are occluded, there is a focus on local level. A review of the answers given by the teachers in this study indicates that most responses represent a skill discourse.

Providing comments on student writing is one of the most important, difficult, and time-consuming activities instructors undertake. Many studies have examined written feedback, and much research has shown the problems associated with this form, ranging from time spent providing thoughtful feedback to students’ confusion about the commentary. Some instructors have used audio commentary to address these issues. Audio commentary has been researched for years; the results have indicated that students prefer audio commentary, and it is perceived as more personal and positive by instructors and students. To date, little research has looked closely at audio commentary to understand if or how it might differ from written in form and function. This research uses as multicase approach and genre analysis to examine the organisational moves and discourse analysis uncover why audio commentary is perceived differently by both producers and consumers of this genre. Results show that audio commentary does not differ in form or function from its written counterpart, but metadiscursive features may play a role in how the genre is perceived by both instructors and students, providing real evidence of how audio commentary is different from written.

This longitudinal study examines one central dimension of discursive essay writing, viz. text structure. It presents results from 40 upper secondary school students’ argumentative and expository texts, four essays in Swedish and four in English (N=320) written during the students’ three years upper-secondary schooling. In addition, three students’ writing progression in eight tasks is presented as cases. The study contributes to the knowledge about upper-secondary school students’ written discursive development in two languages, Swedish (L1) and English (L2). The research is informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and the texts were analyzed for logical structure, defined as the cultural norms for clear organization of texts in more academic or formal contexts. The analysis comprised three levels: (1) the global level (text structure in steps and general organization), (2) the paragraph level (paragraphing supporting the global structure), and (3) the linguistic level (language related discursive markers). Based on the analyses of different levels, an overall assessment of logical structure was made. The results show that the progression in terms of text structure largely failed to occur and neither the choice of language or different text types (argumentative and expository texts) shaped students’ ability to structure their text.

As we enter the era of bullshitology, methods of evaluating ‘authenticity’ become even more necessary. Celebrity writers of color, like all writers, have to present themselves as themselves in literary discourse. However, due to the discursive tendency to pigeonhole authors of color, such authors instead construct a public persona to negotiate the paradoxical position they inhabit within the discourse. Junot Diaz, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, presents himself differently across different communicative contexts, by indexing existing metapragmatic stereotypes regarding the ‘authentic’ author. The results emerge as demonstrating Diaz’s style-shifts that occur according to the size of the communicative contexts. The smaller the communicative platform, the more Diaz assuredly resists pigeonholing. Similarly, the larger the platform, the more Diaz capitulates towards pre-determined discursive labels. Such an outcome underlines the challenge contemporary authors face in order to remain viable and exert influence over prevailing cultural conversations.

Using a multidisciplinary approach to social justice teaching, this article explores the often invisible impact of double consciousness on adult English language learners in the United States and provides examples of classroom practice that invite students to reflect on its effects. The experience of double consciousness is examined as it relates to English language learner identities. A Critical Language Awareness (CLA) framework and identity-conscious teaching practices are explored to encourage student participation and reflection. This approach, demonstrated through examples used in writing classes, encourages the exploration of identity in the face of oppression by interrogating social constructions and fiction and nonfiction stories containing connected themes. Three classroom lessons and consequent writing are analyzed with a critical discourse lens to examine student responses and reflections on language and identity. Student writing demonstrates that encouraging English language classes to interrogate the language of institutionalized inequity and identity formation can illuminate potential influences of double consciousness, which can empower students to think critically about their identities and choose whether to take steps to mediate the ways in which they could be affected by double consciousness.

The term resistance has been an evolving concept in literacy and composition studies. While much has been studied in terms of student resistance in high schools, first-year composition classrooms, and in university writing centers, little is known about how resistance occurs in afterschool tutoring programs between volunteer writing tutors and their tutees. Using an ethnographic case study approach, this paper examines how three adult volunteer writing tutors made sense of resistance in working with their adolescent tutees in an urban tutoring program. The findings showed that tutor attitudes, values, and reactions shaped their experience of resistance in a variety of ways including a) misreading tutee signals of engagement; b) masking expectations of cultural and linguistic compliance within a discourse of resistance; and c) embracing resistance as a bridge to tutor growth. The author uses these findings to inform current conceptions of student resistance and compliance and to provide implication for volunteer tutor training.

This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of Halliday’s Sydney School genrebased approach in teaching Chinese written composition to South Asian ethnic minority students in Hong Kong. Chinese language, with its heightened status in Hong Kong, holds a key for South Asians with low socio-economic status to obtain upward mobility (Shum, Gao, Tsung, and Ki, 2011). However, South Asian ethnic minority students, as a disadvantaged group of second language learners, lack sufficient parental and institutional support in Chinese language learning. The genrebased pedagogy derived from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) was applied in this study to improve Chinese language performance of South Asian ethnic minority students for a better chance to participate in mainstream society. The SFL approach is primarily concerned with language choice in social situations and has been widely applied in sociolinguistics (Hyland, 2007, 2012). Its latest model in language teaching methodology, the ’Reading to Learn, Learning to Write’ (R2L) pedagogy, is a genre-based teaching strategy which is designed to guide students to experience different levels of language through extensive classroom reading and writing activities with selected texts. The current study is intended to extend the approach to teaching and learning Chinese as a second language. The employment of genre-based pedagogy aims to support South Asian students with their learning of Chinese written composition in the senior secondary curriculum. The Chinese teachers involved were first provided with appropriate training in the genre-based approach to language teaching focusing on the genres of Narration and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use theand Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the genre-based teaching approach, by means of pre- and post-tests after and before genre instruction. Text analysis based on SFL was then employed to analyze the students’ written composition in both pre- and post-tests in order to understand the effectiveness of the genre-based pedagogy in teaching Chinese as a second language. The finding shows that the students at the high, medium, and low levels improved both in the construction of schematic structure and the variation of lexicogrammatical choices from the whole-text, sentence and word levels respectively in their writing performance. Hopefully, the findings will help curriculum development and teacher education for teaching Chinese as a second language to non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong and beyond.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

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

This introductory review article for this special issue sets out a range of issues in play as far as English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing is concerned, but with a special emphasis on English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) (as opposed to English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP)). Following the introduction, the article begins by outlining the different types of EAP and presenting the pros and cons of ESAP and EGAP for writing. It then goes on to review work in a range of areas of relevance to ESAP writing. These areas are register and discourse analysis; genre analysis; corpus analysis; ethnography; contrastive rhetoric; classroom methodology; critical approaches; and assessment. The article concludes by arguing that whichever model of writing is chosen (EGAP or ESAP), or if a hybrid model is the choice, if at all possible, students need to be exposed to the understandings, language and communicative activities of their target disciplines, with students themselves also contributing to this enterprise.

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

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

The growing disparity in the cultural and linguistic backgrounds in U.S. classrooms of teachers and students suggests that there is a critical need for teachers to be knowledgeable and prepared to effectively teach this diverse population of students. In a longitudinal research study conducted in two 3rd grade classrooms in the Southeastern region of the United States, researchers examined the impact of a sustained and generative model of professional development on teachers’ sense of agency and their understandings of what it means to be a writing teacher with multilingual students (Flint, Kurumada, Fisher, and Zisook, 2011; Flint, Zisook, and Fisher, 2011). In this article, we add to this empirical work by focusing on pedagogical practices that strengthened the writing curriculum and teachers’ understandings of the children they teach. The pedagogical shifts, which happened over an extended period of time, were marked by two distinct and interconnected processes: (a) teachers began to understand and adopt the discourse of writing workshop and then use it as a mediator of students’ thought to promote student voice; and (b) teachers gradually released their control over students’ authorial voice and agency for writing. These processes enabled students to share more about their lives, beliefs, and interests, and for their teachers to recognize the uniqueness and perspective each child brought to the classroom.

Peer feedback is often considered a critical component of self-regulated learning. The purpose of this mixed-method study was to understand the effects of how a unique form of peer feedback – an online system of co-construction – might both trigger and sustain self-regulation in academic writing. Participants were 21 Japanese undergraduate EFL writers, 10 of whom worked as peer advisors in an online writing center. Peer advisors self-reported significantly more strategies than the comparison group. In addition, textual analysis of the feedback that peer advisors provided to writers showed evidence of strategy internalization, whereas the comparison group lacked metacognitive awareness and provided feedback of a lesser quality. Within group analysis points to how specific characteristics of peer feedback developed over time and with experience. This study considers how educators can use online feedback-on-feedback as a method for eliciting verbalizations of self-regulation.

Doctoral students who seek to become part of what Geertz called “intellectual villages” (Geertz 1983: 157) must acculturate themselves into the ways of being, knowing, and especially writing in an academic discourse community. In this autobiographical case study, I use the academic writing I produced as a doctoral student to explore the process of developing an academic identity. I analyzed my writing for the absence or presence of the following rhetorical strategies: referencing conventions, use or avoidance of the scholarly I, and use of questions in the text. This critical examination of my writing illustrates the ways in which I experimented with my emerging academic identity as I struggled to begin participating meaningfully in the ongoing conversation within the discourse community I sought to join.

Writing teachers are at the forefront in helping newcomers become members of the academic discourse community as writers of essays, reports, and dissertations. Newcomers may be native English-speaking, nontraditional students with limited writing skills or multilingual learners whose primary language is not English. The gap between their limited rhetorical practices and the norms of their professional disciplines concerns educational institutions seeking to facilitate the development of these students’ literacy skills. To lessen that gap and provide information on an underresearched population, this article reports on an exploratory case study of students at a Mexican university enrolled in a Chicano literature course taught in English. The data-based study adopts a situated literacy theoretical approach to learn about participants’ efforts to become successful multilingual writers. It is part of a larger ethnographic study of the rhetorical literacy practices of Mexican multilingual writers concerning the sociocultural context of writing instruction in the contemporary Mexican educational system. An understanding of students’ literacy practices in the local context can help researchers and teachers to better understand problems and issues regarding academic writing from participants’ perspectives.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.