Using textual analysis and interviews with student writers, this study aims to provide an insight into second language students' use of direct quotations in their MA theses by comparing direct quotations in high-rated and low-rated Master's theses, and by exploring student writers' own motivations to quote directly from sources. The corpus…

The present study is based on interviews with 48 students and 27 instructors in a North American university and explores whether students and professors across faculties share the same views on the use of paraphrased, summarized, and translated texts in four examples of L2 student writing. Participants' comments centered on whether the paraphrases…

Perceptions and judgments on plagiarism or acceptable use of source texts are contingent on one's interpretations and experiences in reading and writing academic texts in a specific disciplinary context. The lack of consensus on what is acceptable textual appropriation in student writing has led to the scholarship on perceptions of textual…

This paper offers a narrative framework for understanding how multilingual graduate students make sense of the continuous and frequently contradictory talk they engage in as they write. It illustrates how attention to the telling, form, and content of the stories such students relate about their ongoing interactions around academic writing can…

Understanding how individuals interact with texts in situated writing acts and what goes into the process of writing in various social, cultural, and educational contexts has recently been laid out as a broadened research agenda for cultural studies of writing within the framework of intercultural rhetoric. However, there is a paucity of classroom…

This study examines how novice foreign language (FL) writers develop their genre awareness, linguistic knowledge, and writing competence in a genre-based writing course that incorporates email-writing tasks. To define genre, the study draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) that sees language as a resource for making meaning in a particular…

This study investigated the effectiveness and students' perceptions of collaborative writing (CW) in second language (L2). The study involved 38 first year students in two intact classes at a large university in the UAE (United Arab Emirates). One class consisted of 18 students and was considered the experimental group, and the second consisted of…

The present study investigates EFL students' perceptions of power differentials and their negotiation strategies when communicating with native English-speaking students via emails. The study involved 28 Taiwanese and American undergraduates who participated in a semester-long cross-national email writing activity. Findings show that students in…

This paper presents a detailed examination of learning transfer from a university English as a second language (ESL) writing course to a writing task with characteristics very different from the kind of writing done in this ESL writing course but typical of the kind of writing required in other academic courses (i.e., involving text-responsible…

This exploratory study, undertaken from a socio-cognitive perspective, aims to investigate the effects of intensive preparatory high school training in L1 and/or L2 essay writing for university entrance exams. The analysis focuses on the task response and structural features in L1 (Japanese) and L2 (English) essays written by first-year Japanese…

This paper looks at young ESL writers in Hong Kong and describes an action research project which involved the implementation of a new ESL writing programme designed to enhance students' motivation and engagement by taking more account of the young learners' own socio-cultural context. The study examined both the students' and teacher-researcher's…

Most research in second language (L2) writing has focused on students' perceptions more than teachers' self-assessment of teacher-written feedback. This study's purpose was to investigate: (1) how much local and global written feedback teachers give, (2) how their self-assessments and students' perceptions of this feedback coordinate, and (3) how…

Recent research on academic writing has established the intersection of writing and identity. However, it is not clear whether writers themselves are aware of this link. In this study, we investigated five ESL graduate students' awareness of the identities that they constructed through the appropriation of others' words and ideas in their texts.…

Although pair and group work are commonly used in language classrooms, very few studies have investigated the nature of such collaboration when students produce a jointly written text. This study set out to investigate collaborative writing. The study was classroom based, and the participants (23) were adult ESL students completing degree courses.…

In recent years, there has been growing interest in the use of corpora in L2 writing instruction. Many studies have argued for corpus use from a teacher's perspective, that is, in terms of how teachers can develop instructional materials and activities involving a corpus-based orientation. In contrast, relatively little attention has been paid to…