Providing effective written feedback to ESL students poses a challenging yet crucial task for language teachers. While numerous studies have delved into critical feedback, few have explored students' perceptions of praise in written feedback. To gauge students’ view of praise, we analyzed responses to two types: person praise (e.g., "You are a good writer") and performance praise (e.g., "You used the past tense correctly"). Language proficiency levels (high and low) and cultural backgrounds (Asian and Romance) were also considered. ESL students ( n = 100) were given feedback on an essay they wrote and surveyed about praise comments. In addition, three focus groups were conducted. Quantitative data indicated a preference for both praise types, while focus groups revealed a preference for performance over person praise. Lower proficiency students valued and considered praise to be more change-invoking than high-proficiency peers. Additionally, students from Romance cultures favored praise more than Asian cultures. Interaction effects highlighted nuances, such as high-proficiency Asian students perceiving praise as less kind, valuable, positive, and clear than their Romance counterparts. These findings offer insights for teachers and administrators to develop an informed praise philosophy and recognize which praise type best meets their students’ needs.

Using eye-tracking and interview methods, this study investigates how business communication students and editing students attend to and evaluate writing. Participants reviewed blog posts embedded with errors and judged publication readiness. While both groups visually fixated longer on errors than non-errors, business communication students were more likely to approve error-containing texts for publication. Qualitative data revealed that business communication students prioritized content while editing students prioritized surface-level issues. These findings suggest that disciplinary background informs evaluative standards, even when error-detection behavior is similar. The results carry implications for instruction in business writing and editing, especially concerning collaborative, cross-disciplinary workplace writing.

Authorial voice plays a key role in helping writers establish themselves as experts in their field as well as demonstrate their individual style (e.g., Tardy, 2012). Citation usage has an important impact on authorial voice in academic writing and can be implemented in various ways; namely, through citation types (e.g., integral, non-integral) and citation presentation (e.g., direct quotes, summaries, generalizations). While many researchers have examined citation type among novice and experienced writers, researchers have largely overlooked citation presentation across disciplines – that is, how experienced authors balance the use of quotations, summaries, and generalization to index authorial voice. Beginning academic writers may be encouraged to use quotations to prevent plagiarism, but it is unclear if this advice reflects patterns in published writing across disciplines. In this study, we examine the background sections (i.e., introductions and/or literature reviews) of 270 academic research papers to evaluate the extent to which various citation types and presentations are used in background sections across six disciplines. Findings which can inform disciplinary writing guides and educational materials indicate disciplinary variation in citation type, with applied linguistics using the most citations overall and physics and biology using the fewest integral citations. Disciplines also differed in their citation presentation, with some favoring summaries and others favoring generalizations while quotation was rare overall. These results have important implications for teachers and material developers who can use these patterns of source usage to compare and contrast disciplinary norms and provide direct instruction on features of academic voice. Cross-disciplinary awareness of voice features can also highlight disciplinary patterns for students, allowing them to write more like experts in their fields.

Within universities, writing centers are often seen as service providers that allow students to receive support and feedback on their writing.  The usefulness of writing centers has been evaluated by things such as total number of visits and return visits, students’ trust and comfort in asking tutors questions, and tutors’ overall knowledge of writing concepts. But few researchers have shone light on students’ own perceptions of the usefulness of a writing center, especially perceptions between native English (NES), non-native English (NNES), and Generation 1.5 students. We did just that by sending a usefulness survey to 800 universities across the U.S. We analyzed the data from 463 student responses to these surveys using non-parametric statistics and found that NNES and Generation 1.5 students reported more difficulty making an appointment than NES writers. They also reported being slightly less likely to ask their tutor questions, trust their tutors, and return to the writing center, which is perhaps the most important outcome of usefulness. This information can help writing center administrators better anticipate multilingual writers’ needs and take steps to improve informational materials and the writing center experience for these writers which may increase their overall attendance.

Most U.S. colleges and universities expect students to improve their writing ability by taking first-year composition (FYC) courses. In such courses, non-native English (L2) writers with diverse language backgrounds study alongside their native English (L1) speaking peers. However, it is not clear how different these populations are in terms of their language development over time, leaving questions unanswered about whether L2 writers develop more or less than L1 writers in an FYC curriculum. To investigate, we compared 75 L1 and L2 students’ written accuracy, fluency, and lexical and syntactic complexity over the semester of an FYC course. Data showed that L2 students had significantly higher rates of language error and less fluent and lexically complex writing compared to L1 writers. Moreover, L2 student writing became less grammatically accurate over 14 weeks despite showing greater fluency and syntactic complexity. These results suggest a need for plurilingual pedagogies in FYC that embrace diversity and inclusion while also providing L2 writers with instruction on socially powerful and dominant linguistic forms.

Students face multiple challenges when transitioning from high school to college writing, with new content, audiences, genres, and task expectations. Psychometric researchers have shown that self-efficacy, competency, and affective factors can help or hinder students during this transition, but little previous research examines what students themselves say about their writing and writing experiences. This study analyses the content of 248 essays from first-year composition writers who discussed their writing identities, processes, products, and journeys. Our findings show differences between writers who view themselves positively and negatively. Instructors can use this information to design meaningful prompts, utilize process writing activities, and engage students in meaningful reflection.

Writing centers generally espouse tutoring policies for native speakers intended to help students improve their writing skills through minimalist intervention and a reliance on student intuition. At the same time, researchers have recommended somewhat directive tutorials for L2 writers who may lack native-speaker intuitions about culture or language. Yet the literature is unclear about whether L1, L2, and Generation 1.5 writers observe a difference in writing center practices based on their language background. This study examines the reported expectations and experiences of 462 writing center tutees by grouping them according to their language background (L1, L2, and Generation 1.5) and comparing their expectations with their reported writing center experiences on eight measures of tutorial behavior. Results indicate that all writers reported receiving similar and directive tutorials, a finding that differs from discourse-analytic results. The findings further demonstrate differences in what writers expect, with L1 writers expecting reflective tutorials, Generation 1.5 writers expecting negotiation, and L2 writers expecting directiveness. While necessarily abstract, results can nonetheless be useful in pre-or in-service tutor training in centers with high concentrations of Generation 1.5 or L2 writers.

Writers for whom English is a second language (L2) are thought to benefit from tutors who function in an informant role in which they provide cultural, rhetorical, and linguistic information that L2 writers sometimes lack. While this approach is intuitively satisfying because L2 writers may have gaps in their schematic knowledge of English or related rhetoric and culture, researchers have yet to ask students whether they want informant-tutors or to compare student preferences across language backgrounds. In this study, I operationalized three types of information tutors might supply: rhetorical, cultural, and linguistic. Students from across the U.S. ( N =200) who had recently attended a writing tutorial completed a survey asking them to rate the relative importance of several sub-skills within each informant category. The students were further categorized as L1, L2, or Generation 1.5 writers based on responses to an extensive demographic section. Results show that all groups felt it was important for tutors to be informants with almost no significant variation across language groups. These findings emphasize that all writers want academic information and suggest that tutors should provide this irrespective of a student’s language background. Keywords : L2; Generation 1.5; Rhetorical; Cultural; Linguistic; Informant; Writing Center

Students in first-year composition (FYC) courses are expected to control the mechanics, vocabulary, style, and grammatical accuracy of their writing. Yet language development support, particularly that of grammar instruction in US FYC courses, has largely disappeared in recent decades, due in part to suppositions that students implicitly know grammar. This assumption is problematic given the increasing number of multilingual writers enrolling in US schools with observed needs for explicit language instruction. The present study explores whether first- and second-language writers of English perceived a need for language instruction and whether they wanted or expected it. Students from 12 sections of FYC were asked in surveys and interviews about their prior language learning experiences and current self-perceived language needs and then were asked to complete one of two self-directed language development projects (LDPs): an online, self-selected grammar and usage study project or journal entries focusing on vocabulary/style in texts they had read. Student work was collected, analyzed, and supplemented with students’ end-of-term observations and preferences about self-directed LDPs. Our findings reveal that students overwhelmingly wanted and expected language instruction and were largely positive about both types of LDPs, but they felt that language instruction should be offered in multiple delivery methods beyond just self-study. With these findings in mind, we offer pedagogical suggestions for addressing the perceived and real needs for language development of linguistically diverse FYC students.