Data from a study of graduate instructors in a composition teaching practicum show that the neglect of declarative knowledgeaboutlanguage is something that they were conscious of and wished to remedy. This finding supports arguments calling for reinstating a focus on linguistic knowledge in composition and writing studies programs.

Current composition practice relies on a decades-old summary of research concluding that a focus on grammar in students’ writing is useless, or even harmful. Conversely, hundreds of recent studies from the fields of second-language writing and applied linguistics claim to provide evidence of the benefits to providing feedback on grammar in students’ writing. This article summarizes the arguments for and against such feedback and problematizes the results of previous research by describing a quasi-experimental study measuring the effects, both positive and negative, of providing students with grammar feedback on their writing. Results show that, while feedback on specific grammatical forms improved participants’ accuracy on those forms, it also led to decreased accuracy on other forms related to but not the focus of instruction. Furthermore, the control group’s accuracy equaled or surpassed that of the two feedback groups.

Writing scholars often note the heterogeneity of the second language (L2) student population in higher education writing courses, but only recently have researchers begun to carefully examine differences in the writing ability of international L2 learners and U.S. resident L2 learners. Most of the empirical research to date focuses on the two groups’ grammatical accuracy to the exclusion of other dimensions of writing ability. Such a limited focus not only underrepresents the multifaceted construct of writing ability, but also overlooks potential areas where noticeable differences across the two groups’ writing ability might surface. Although arguably less salient than grammatical (in)accuracy, and not as prevalent in scoring rubrics, students’ use of sociopragmatic features in writing offers an alternative approach for comparing the two groups of learners beyond their use of grammatical forms. Thus, the current study describes and compares how international and U.S. resident L2 learners used certain sociopragmatic markers in their writing. By focusing on the meanings associated with these markers, the study suggests that students’ use of such markers reflects their sociopragmatic awareness. Findings indicate that the two groups of writers may be more similar than different, contrary to previous research.

This article reviews various frameworks for defining second-language learner groups, as described in the literature, and summarizes relevant empirical studies based on these frameworks.