For teacher educators, genre-based pedagogies offer a valuable resource for assisting both pre- and in-service writing instructors to assist their students to produce effective and relevant texts. Instead of focusing on the process of composition, the content of texts, or the abstract prescriptions of disembodied grammars, genre pedagogies enable…

The assessment of student writing is an essential task for writing teachers, and yet many graduate programs do not require students to take a course in assessment or evaluation, and courses on teaching writing often devote only a limited amount of time to the discussion of assessment. Furthermore, teachers frequently need to prepare their students…

Over the years, substantial shifts in theory, belief, and practice have occurred in the teaching of language, specifically vocabulary, grammar, or their combination in lexicogrammatical features of a language as part of the writing class or curriculum (Paltridge, 2004; Reid, 1993, 2006). Much of the instruction in L2 writing for adult learners who…

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…

Increasing calls for equity and accountability in U.S. secondary schools have led to intensified scrutiny of the academic literacy development of English learning (EL) adolescents. This paper discusses some of the challenges that EL secondary students face in achieving the language and literacy skills that will enable them to succeed in their…

The paper evaluates and synthesizes research on the question of how error correction affects learners' ability to write accurately, combining qualitative analysis of the relevant studies with quantitative meta-analysis of their findings. The conclusions are that, based on existing research: (a) the best estimate is that correction has a small…

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…

Researchers of scholarly literacy are becoming more aware that a published research article, especially if it is written by an English as an Additional Language (EAL) author, needs to be viewed as a product involving a range of "shapers" who participate in the editorial process (e.g., Burrough-Boenisch, 2003). Drawing on data gathered over a…

This paper reports on a cross-disciplinary study by an L1 compositionist and an applied linguist investigating interrelationships among university basic writing students' responses to linguistic identity labels, their residency statuses, and their preferences for mainstream or multilingual composition. Previous L2 writing research has suggested…

This paper reports the results of a study comparing the interactional dynamics of face-to-face and on-line peer-tutoring in writing by university students in Hong Kong. Transcripts of face-to-face tutoring sessions, as well as logs of on-line sessions conducted by the same peer-tutors, were coded for speech functions using a system based on…

While the use of corpora and concordancing in the language-learning environment began as early as 1969 (McEnery & Wilson, 1997, p. 12), it was the work in the 1980s of Tim Johns (1986) and others which brought it to public attention. Important developments occurred in the 1990s, beginning with publications advocating the use of corpora and…

This essay presents the results of a study of first-year students in a California University who report competence as speakers and writers of a language other than English. The data collected for the study include a language questionnaire administered to over a thousand students and, from a smaller sample, responses to focus group interviews, a…

Academic criticism is defined in this paper as a statement which reflects a discrepancy between the stance of a researcher/author, on the one hand, and that of another researcher or the discourse community as a whole, on the other (Salager-Meyer & Alcaraz Ariza, 2003). Despite researchers' awareness of the potential difficulty academic criticism…

This study examines a process-oriented ESL writing assessment called the Computerized Enhanced ESL Placement Test (CEEPT). The CEEPT at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign or its non-computerized alternative (EEPT) have since 2000 offered a daylong process-oriented writing assessment in which test takers are given extended time to plan,…

Paraphrasing is considered by many to be an important skill for academic writing, and some have argued that the teaching of paraphrasing might help students avoid copying from source texts. Few studies, however, have investigated the ways in which both L1 and L2 academic writers already use paraphrasing as a textual borrowing strategy when…