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

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

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.

Against the limitations English monolingualism imposes on composition scholarship, as evident in journal submission requirements, frequency of references to non-English medium writing, bibliographical resources, and our own past work, we argue for adopting a translingual approach to languages, disciplines, localities, and research traditions in our scholarship, and propose ways individuals, journals, conferences, and graduate programs might advance composition scholarship toward a translingual norm.

This article provides quantitative data to establish the relative, perceived burden of writing research articles in English as a second language. Previous qualitative research has shown that scientists writing English in a second language face difficulties but has not established parameters for the degree of this difficulty. A total of 141 Mexican, Spanish-speaking scientists from a range of scientific disciplines participated in a survey which directly compared writing scientific research articles in Spanish and English as a second language. The survey questions defined burden in relation to perceived difficulty, dissatisfaction, and anxiety. The results revealed that the experience of writing a scientific research article in English as a second language is significantly different than the experience writing in a first language and that this writing process was perceived as 24% more difficult and generated 11% more dissatisfaction and 21% more anxiety. The findings suggest that the use of English as a second language is the cause of this increased burden.

This paper reports on a 10-year case study at a Chinese university of a faculty team's attempt to develop and disseminate a project-based computer-assisted language learning (CALL) program for professional communication. The discussion focuses on three main challenges (professional/academic values, pedagogical philosophy, and institutional culture) to expand a project-based CALL program at this university. Based on the findings, this paper discusses how the implementation of project-based CALL for professional communication needs to be founded upon a good understanding of China's sociocultural contexts and how it might be tailored in order to be more responsive to the local university context. This paper concludes by suggesting a path that practitioners might take in light of these circumstances and challenges.

The study investigated Japanese and Taiwanese postgraduate students’ perceptions of summary writing. Eight Japanese and eight Taiwanese students who speak English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at a university in England participated in the summary writing task in English, questionnaires, and follow-up interviews. The questionnaire and interview data were analysed in terms of (a) students’ background knowledge on summarising and (b) educational background regarding experiences of summarisation and summary writing instruction taught in classes. The results revealed that the Japanese and Taiwanese students shared similar opinions on definitions of summary writing. The students in both groups tended to be self-taught in L1 summarisation due to little L1 summary writing instruction. ESL/EFL writing teachers should note that students from different countries may have culture-specific summary writing conventions and that students from the same country may have different summarisation experiences and perceptions of textual features.

Textual borrowing, a distinctive feature of academic writing, is a very complex practice which poses problems to novice English as a Second Language/English as a Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) writers. Students in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) also encounter these problems when writing in English. The present study investigates the use of source texts in student essays in order to find out how BiH students incorporate borrowed text into their own. The first part of this paper provides a short theoretical background on the topic and offers insight into the BiH education system, while the second part of the paper presents the main research results which show a high incidence of inappropriate textual borrowing in student texts. It is argued that a stronger focus on teaching writing and more hours of explicit teaching are possible ways to overcome this problem.

This action research study reports on Kosovan, English as a Foreign Language, undergraduate students’ perceptions of the usefulness and effectiveness of class activities that promote the panning for gold approach (Browne and Keeley 2004) in the process of argumentative writing. The data obtained from a questionnaire, essay evaluation and a focus group, reveal that students show interest in the approach though they do not feel at ease when required to take a decision that calls for systematic evaluation of their thinking in a quest for new answers. It is apparent from the study that, in order for students to think critically and write argumentatively, the panning for gold approach and the principle of inquiry should be integrated across the curriculum or, in a better case scenario, should be an integrated part of daily life. The results have implications for syllabus and classroom practices.

Critical reviews allow access to the critical thinking abilities of their writers, especially with regard to analyzing and synthesizing ideas. In most institutions of higher learning, critical reviews are assigned as coursework, and the general assumption is that students would know how to produce a ‘good’ review, one that meets its readers’ expectations. Is this a fair assumption? If not, which particular skills and strategies do we, as academics, teach them? This study was undertaken to find the answers to these questions and focused on the critical review writing of postgraduates. A mixed methods approach was adopted incorporating questionnaires, interviews and critical reviews of articles written in English by ESL postgraduate students at the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya. The critical reviews were analyzed from two perspectives (contents and presentation) using a checklist devised by the researchers. The findings revealed that most of the students lacked the skills and strategies for writing effective reviews.

Since 2006 the ‘Antwerp Group’ group has explored student writing from various country perspectives to understand what practices and pedagogies are country specific and what issues cut across national borders. The insights of the Antwerp Group helped inform a 2009–2010 collaboration between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey in which we combined Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and English as Foreign Language (EFL) instruction. This paper describes how a theoretical model used by the Antwerp Group helped us identify the multivocality that each collaborating group brought to this new partnership. In the end, theorizing multivocality helped us recognize our diverse perspectives as a resource even as we sought to find a collaborative voice in setting project goals, defining a student survey, and implementing a curricular design for a WAC-EFL writing course.

Composition theorists concerned with students’ academic writing ability have long questioned the application of voice as a standard for writing competence, and second language compositionists have suggested that English language learners may be disadvantaged by the practice of emphasizing voice in the evaluation of student writing. Despite these criticisms, however, voice continues to frequently appear as a goal in guidelines for teaching writing and on high-stakes writing assessment rubrics in the United States. Given the apparent lack of alignment between theory and practice regarding its use, more empirical research is needed to understand how teachers apply voice as a criterion in the evaluation of student writing. Researchers have used sociocultural and functionalist frameworks to analyze voice-related discursive patterns, yet we do not know how readers evaluate written texts for voice. To address this gap in research the present study asked: 1) What language features do secondary English teachers associate with voice in secondary students’ writing and how do they explain their associations? 2) How do such identified features vary across genres as well as among readers? Nineteen teachers were interviewed using a think-aloud protocol designed to illuminate their perceptions of voice in narrative and expository samples of secondary students’ writing. Results from an inductive analysis of interview transcripts suggest that participating teachers associated voice with appraisal features, such as amplified expressions of affect and judgment, that are characteristic of literary genres.

Adaptive help seeking and self-efficacy have been examined extensively over the last 20 years, but few studies have investigated their role in writing center tutoring, which has become an important component of process-oriented writing instruction. Using data collected over an 8-year period, this study analyzes the effect of writing self-efficacy (assessed using established self-efficacy scales) and help-seeking behavior (measured by frequency of writing center visitation) on writing performance as measured by composition grades. Participants were 671 undergraduates, approximately half of whom were international students for whom English was a second or third language. Data analyses showed an inverse correlation between self-efficacy and help-seeking behavior. In addition, high levels of help-seeking behavior resulted in better performance in composition classes, especially for the ESL participants; indeed, this behavior was the strongest predictor of success.

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.

Learning from Language: Symmetry, Asymmetry, and Literary Humanism, Walter H. Beale Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric, Paul Butler Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition, Chris Holcomb and M. Jimmie Killingsworth Academic Writing in a Global Context: The Politics and Practices of Publishing in English, Theresa Lillis and Mary Jane Curry A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies, James Ray Watkins Jr.

This essay describes one ESL instructor’s motivation for and experience with implementing a class wiki.

Despite a long debate and the accompanying call for changes in the past few decades, grammarinstruction in college English classes, according to some scholars, has remained largely “disempowering,” “decontextualized,” and “remedial” (Micciche, 2004, p. 718). To search for more effectiveand empowering grammar teaching, this study explores the use of corpora for problem-basedlearning/teaching of lexicogrammar in a college English grammar course. This pedagogy wasmotivated by research findings that (1) corpora are a very useful source and tool for languageresearch and for active discovery learning of second/foreign languages, and (2) problem-basedlearning (PBL) is an effective and motivating instructional approach. The data collected andanalyzed include students’ individual and group corpus research projects, reflection papers oncorpus use, and responses to a post-study survey consisting of both open-ended and Likert questions.The analysis of the data found the following four themes in students’ use of, and reflectionsabout, corpus study: (1) critical understanding about lexicogrammatical and broader languageuse issues, (2) awareness of the dynamic nature of language, (3) appreciation for the context/register-appropriate use of lexicogrammar, and (4) grasping of the nuances of lexicogrammaticalusages. The paper also discusses the challenges involved in incorporating corpus use into Englishclasses and offers suggestions for further research.

This article explores how the English language contributes to cross-boundary communication failure and establishes that there is an “English language problem” that has not been adequately addressed in preparing United States native English-speaking students for international technical communication tasks. For example, U.S. technical communication scholars are still grappling with the problems of using English in software internationalization and translating technical communication products across boundaries of national culture and language without privileging Western values and beliefs. The tendency is to assume American culture and American Standard English as the norm, and to identify cultural and linguistic differences as problems only when there is a communication failure or when non-native speakers of English translate product users' manuals and other documents for use by Americans. The article draws attention to the limitations of the current favored strategies for training native speakers in international audience analysis and calls for a revamping of the curriculum to allow for the integration of language-based methodologies. It suggests the incorporation of the World Englishes perspective into training programs to internationalize students' learning experiences.

This article describes a study on the types of writing tasks that ESL students commonly encounter in introductory academic courses at a two-year college and discusseshow the results of the study may have an impact on instruction.

Reviewed are: The Idea of a Writing Laboratory, Neal Lerner Generation 1.5 in College Composition: Teaching Academic Writing to U.S.-Educated Learners of ESL, Mark Roberge, Meryl Siegal, and Linda Harklau, editors The Community College Writer: Exceeding Expectations, Howard Tinberg and Jean-Paul Nadeau College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction, Anne Beaufort

Earlier research on assessment suggests that even when Native English Speaker (NSE) and Non-Native English Speaker (NNES) writers make similar errors, faculty tend to assess the NNES writers more harshly. Studies indicate that evaluators may be particularly severe when grading NNES writers holistically. In an effort to provide more recent data on how faculty perceive student writers based on their nationalities, researchers at two medium-sized Midwestern universities surveyed and conducted interviews with faculty to determine if such discrepancies continue to exist between assessments of international and American writers, to identify what preconceptions faculty may have regarding international writers, and to explore how these notions may affect their assessment of such writers. Results indicate that while faculty continue to rate international writers lower when scoring analytically, they consistently evaluate those same writers higher when scoring holistically.

Faculty involved in implementing a grant to incorporate technology into post-secondary ESL teaching and learning describe the coaching model they used to do this. The authors explain how they drew from principles of literacy coaching to develop and implement their model; describe their experiences in working with coachees; discuss technology plans, including instructional software and lessons; and reflect on the successes and challenges experienced by the faculty and students. The profile includes applications for faculty professional development in higher education, with implications that are especially meaningful for programs predominantly staffed by part-time and adjunct faculty.

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.

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.

Reviewed are: Teaching Writing Online: How and Why by Scott Warnock, Reviewed by David J. Cranmer Teaching Writing Online: How and Why by Scott Warnock, Reviewed by Amy Cummins Generation 1.5 in College Composition: Teaching Academic Writing to U.S.-Educated Learners of ESL , edited by Mark Roberge, Meryl Siegal, and Linda Harklau, Reviewed by Todd Ruecker Learning from Language: Symmetry, Asymmetry, and Literary Humanism by Walter H. Beale, Reviewed by Eric Bateman

This article reports findings from a qualitative study of Spanish-English code-switching “or Spanglish” among bilingual Latina/Latino sixth graders at a middle school in East Los Angeles. Analysis of the data revealed significant parallels between the skills embedded in students’ everyday use of Spanglish and the skills that they were expected to master according to California’s sixth-grade English language arts standards. In particular, students displayed an impressive adeptnessat (1) shifting voices for different audiences, and (2) communicating subtle shades of meaning. It is argued that this skillful use of Spanglish could potentially be leveraged as a resource for helping students to further cultivate related academic literacy skills. The article concludes with a discussion of specific implications for how teachers might begin to leverage Spanglish as a pedagogical resource by helping students to recognize, draw on, and extend the skills already embedded intheir everyday use of language.

This exploration begins with the history of libraries in the United States, examining the ways in which Jefferson’s library, the Library of Congress, and Benjamin Franklin’s ideas about libraries intended to address public literacy levels and problems. Changes to the structure, function, and role of libraries in public life are discussed in terms of the changes made since the first libraries were founded in the US with an eye toward developing public literacy and critical literacy as presently understood. Finally, the current practices of public libraries, including their support for community reading projects, their use as sites of literacy instruction (both ESL and basic education), and their use of technology and related functions are explored to see how libraries contribute to the goal of improving adult literacy in America. Two case studies will show how public libraries function as key sites and librarians as key supporters of this goal.

This article reports on the use of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus as a source for developing test items for the Grammar and English Usage section of the Warwick English Language (WELT) test in 2007. A key feature of this newly designed multiple choice grammar test was its use of student-generated writing. The extracts used for the re-designed test were derived directly from the BAWE corpus, as opposed to text books, published sources or indeed, simulated extracts of academic writing devised by test developers, which had been the case previously. The rationale for using the BAWE corpus for language test design is outlined, with a particular focus on the attributes of the students’ writing within the corpus, and the inclusion of both first and second language writing. The challenges involved in developing grammar test items based on BAWE corpus data are also presented. While the procedures set out in the paper were undertaken within a specifically British higher education setting, it is hoped that the research will be of interest to test developers and/or researchers in writing skills in other academic settings worldwide.

The trend towards using English as an academic lingua franca has undoubtedly increased the awareness of a need for specific EAP writing instruction and inroads into researching student writing have been made. However, systematic improvements for a theory-informed teaching practice still require more detailed knowledge of the current state of student academic writing, which also takes into account local practices and requirements. Extended genre analysis provides such a means of researching student writing in specific settings. This is an innovative methodology which expands on English for Specific Purposes (ESP) genre analysis (cf. Bhatia, 1993, 2004; Swales, 1990, 2004) to systematically integrate corpus linguistic tools into the analysis and to take into account the special status of student genres. A special advantage of this methodology is that it can be applied easily and successfully to small-scale purpose-built corpora.This paper presents an application of extended genre analysis to a corpus of 55 student paper conclusions produced by non-native speakers in the initial phase of their studies. Findings suggest systematic differences in structure between student and expert genres, as well as a more complex set of differences in lexico-grammar, and especially the use of formulaic language, between research articles and non-native student papers. The implications of these findings as well as of the proposed methodology of corpus-based genre analysis for teaching practice are also discussed.

This article presents the results of a pilot study examining the use of first-person pronouns, certain adjectives and grading adverbs in a corpus of 51 French psychology student papers written in English as a second language. These results were compared to a corpus of published psychology articles and to a sub-corpus of psychology student texts from the British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE). Strategic use of pairs of evaluative words was found in the students' texts but not in the published texts. However, the variables of native language and level of field expertise cannot explain all of the variance observed. Future work will improve the validity of the findings by using larger corpora of student and published texts.

In response to growing concerns among faculty regarding the lack of attention to the bilingual student population in our pre-service teacher education program, the authors engaged in a shared self-study of the process of revising and implementing a secondary English methods course with explicit attention to the special needs of bilingual/bicultural learners. The paper describes how the second author, an English educator, with support from the first author, a mentor/colleague in bilingual education, identified and negotiated tensions and dilemmas that arose in a process of curricular transformation toward culturally and linguistically responsive teacher education practice. The study highlights several points of disjuncture, or critical turning points, experienced by the English educator and the ways in which she navigated the contradictions that resulted at these points of disjuncture through conversation with her mentor. Our documentation and articulation of this process may assist content area teacher educators in negotiating new knowledge and creating strategies for managing the dilemmas in practice that arise in the design and implementation of revised course curricula aimed at supporting culturally and linguistically diverse learners.

This article describes a beginning research partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and two Mexican universities, the Universidad de Quintana Roo (UQROO) and Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, that has developed and implemented an environment merging the pedagogies of English as a foreign language (EFL) and writing across the curriculum (WAC). The article presents a theoretical background for this partnership based on the research on globally networked learning environments (GNLEs) and then focuses on the early stages of the project as the research teams define their objectives, research methods, and teaching approaches.

In a globally networked learning environment (GNLE), 16 students at a university in Sweden and 17 students at a university in the United States exchanged peer-review comments on drafts of assignments they prepared in English for their technical communication classes. The instructors of both sets of students had assigned the same projects and taught their courses in the same way that they had in the previous year, which contrasts with the common practice of having students in partnering courses work on the same assignment or on linked assignments created specifically for the GNLE. The authors coded the students’ 816 comments according to their focus and orientation in order to investigate the possible differences between the comments made by the L2 students in Sweden and those made by the L1 (English as a second language) students in the United States, the possible impact of peer reviewing online, and the influence of the instructors’ directions on the students’ peer-reviewing behavior.

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.

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

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).

The objective of this paper is to use psychoanalytic theory to examine how attempts at critical teaching in two English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms related to changes in student subjectivity. The research critiques critical pedagogical assumptions regarding transformation and empowerment through a Lacanian perspective. More specifically, the persistent problem in critical pedagogy research “that it does not explore the effect of critical practices on student actions and beliefs” is examined. Based on a two-year study in ESL classrooms in the Southwestern U.S., this report uses case studies to outline types of changed comportments, or microtransformations, that students exhibited. Microtransformations are defined as instances in which small events triggershifts in student practice and consciousness in ways that counter critical pedagogical narratives but are consistent with Lacanian theoretical perspectives.

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 article presents the case for using a critical literacy approach to enhance the freshman composition experience for second language writers. As our classrooms become more multilingual and multicultural with each passing semester, we need to move away from thinking of our ESL students as “outliers” and consider them as key participants with specialized linguistic and cultural needs and strengths. Using both published examples and her own experiences, the author illustrates how a critical approach can be advantageous to second- language writers and offers ways such an approach might be implemented in actual practice.