Feedback plays a central role in writing development. This is particularly so in tertiary education in China because of both the attitudes of tutors and staff and also the move towards a more process orientation to teaching writing. However, constraints resulting from examination-focused programmes and the number of students in each class mean…

Despite the rich literature on disciplinary knowledge construction and multilingual scholars' academic literacy practices, little is known about how novice scholars are engaged in knowledge construction in negotiation with various target discourse communities. In this case study, with a focused analysis of a Chinese computer science doctoral…

It has frequently been claimed that, in foreign language writing, attention to linguistic processes inhibits attention available for higher level conceptual processing [e.g., Chenoweth & Hayes, 2001; Whalen & Menard, 1995]. This study examines this hypothesis for foreign language revision processes by comparing online revisions made by 22 Dutch…

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.…

With genre now viewed as a fundamental element of writing, both second language writing and mainstream composition studies have seen an increased focus on the question of how writers learn genres. The purpose of this paper is to review key findings from 60 empirical studies that have investigated this question. To this point, research has…

This preliminary classroom study aims to examine the impact of trained responders' feedback on EFL college students' revisions, both in terms of revision types and quality. After a 4-hour in-class demonstration and a 1-hour after-class reviewer-teacher conference with each student (n = 18), the instructor/researcher collected students' first…

Recent studies on Chinese-English contrastive rhetoric have argued that there is actually little to contrast and the traditional "qi" (beginning), "cheng" (transition), "zhuan" (turning), "he" (synthesis) structure has little influence on contemporary Chinese writing. A comparative analysis of select online instructional materials on argumentative…

This paper compares the development of linguistic fluency in the writing of 5th-8th grade, U.S. students enrolled in English as a Second Language (ESL, n=189) and regular language arts (RLA, n=546) classes. Linguistic fluency is defined as the use of linguistic structures appropriate to rhetorical and social purposes and is measured using five…

Taking language management as its initial perspective, this paper examines some of the sorts of linguistic problems that second language writers of English face when contributing to scholarly journals and some of the issues that editors face when working with authors on those problems. Language Management Theory (hereafter LMT) is briefly…

The study focused on five elementary Mandarin-speaking students' development as writers over a two-year period in US classrooms. Mandarin speakers who came to the US in 2nd, 3rd, or 4th grades demonstrated some language loss in their Chinese writing. We found differences in terms of sentence complexity, character complexity, rhetorical features,…

Medical writing and manuscript preparation are rarely taught in the context of undergraduate, graduate, or continuing medical education. As editors of a ''small'' medical scientific journal published in English in a non-native English-speaking (NNES) country, we hold that the knowledge of scientific methodology and specificities of scientific…

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.…

Various authors have shown the first person to play a key role in the construction of the writer's persona in research articles. This paper compares the use of first person in a corpus of biology articles produced by native English-speaking (NES) writers and a corpus of research article manuscripts produced by non-native English-speaking (NNES)…

Debate about the value of providing corrective feedback on L2 writing has been prominent in recent years as a result of Truscott's [Truscott, J. (1996). The case against grammar correction in L2 writing classes. Language Learning, 46, 327-369] claim that it is both ineffective and harmful and should therefore be abandoned. A growing body of…

Second language writing scholars have undertaken descriptions of English-language writing instruction in a variety of international settings, describing the role of various contextual factors in shaping English-language writing instruction. This article describes English-language writing instruction at various levels in Poland, noting how it is…