Life writing is frequently considered as a private act of composition and reflection. What are the benefits and challenges if students are asked to participate in a collaborative life-writing project that aims to capture, explore, and reflect upon the relationship between personal life history, memory and place? In this essay, I will demonstrate…

This article examines the deeper purposes behind the teaching of creative writing. To extend an analogy created by William Blake in his poem 'The Tyger', its furnaces are examined and its 'deadly terrors' clasped. It re-interprets the different views of teaching English, as drawn up in the United Kingdom's Cox Report. It argues that these views…

Decades of theorisation and research on the teaching and learning of second-language writing have hardly created coherent theoretically profound and practically relevant understandings of writing instruction. This article discusses the possibilities and insights created by bringing personal meaningfulness into the realm of writing pedagogy.…

This study attempts to explore the issue of intercultural and transnational negotiation in written English communication. I am interested in the reciprocal development of written discourse across cultural boundaries. My analysis focuses on academic writers' sense of self and their individual ability to reach otherness when they share the roles of…

This article presents two separate but related studies on native-English speaking (NES) instructors' teaching writing practice in Chinese universities. One study is a case study that explores the teaching practice of three NES instructors' writing instruction in a southern Chinese university as well as students' responses to their practice.…

Writing is often a massive challenge for the learners who study English as a Foreign Language (EFL). Many EFL practitioners are searching for solutions to help learners improve the level of their writing. In this auto-ethnographic study, two narratives are discussed. In the first narrative, the primary challenges of EFL writing encountered by a…

The international project described in this paper has been inspired by the Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Projects (TAPP). By 2013, the TAPP network had connected classes in writing, usability testing and/or translation at three universities in the US and several partner universities in Europe, Africa and China. The pedagogical import of these forms…

I begin with an account of my own observation of an English lesson taught by one of my student teachers using a teaching resource, "The Island," that I used myself as a new teacher more than 20 years ago and of my own responses on finding it transformed by two decades of change in educational policy and practice. It has become almost a…

Creative writing courses are growing in universities and outside them. Publishers and agents even turn to them now as sources of promise and talent. This article describes a particularly successful MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths College in London and makes a case for the popularity and the usefulness to universities, to aspiring writers and…