Editorial: Welcome to the Inaugural Issue of the Journal of Academic Writing: the Roles of Writing Development in Higher Education and Beyond

This Editorial introduces the inaugural issue of the Journal of Academic Writing

Modeling Multivocality in a U.S.-Mexican Collaboration in Writing Across the Curriculum

Since 2006 the ‘Antwerp Group’ group has explored student writing from various country perspectives to understand what practices and pedagogies are country specific and what issues cut across national borders. The insights of the Antwerp Group helped inform a 2009–2010 collaboration between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey in which we combined Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and English as Foreign Language (EFL) instruction. This paper describes how a theoretical model used by the Antwerp Group helped us identify the multivocality that each collaborating group brought to this new partnership. In the end, theorizing multivocality helped us recognize our diverse perspectives as a resource even as we sought to find a collaborative voice in setting project goals, defining a student survey, and implementing a curricular design for a WAC-EFL writing course

The Dialect of the Tribe: Interviewing Highly Experienced Writers to Describe Academic Literacy Practices in Business Studies

  Much recent discussion of ‘academic literacies’ has focussed upon the ways in which students are accultured into appropriate discourses and genres in the academy. This may be particularly true where a discipline has a very strong sense of lexicon and content. In awareness of this, semi-structured interviews were carried out in the spring of 2009 with three highly experienced academic writers in the department of Accounting and Finance at the Manchester Business School. The main focus of this paper is on academic literacy practices. The results of the interviews are discussed in this paper, which examines the relationship between experienced writers and their discourse community, the norms within which they work, the place for creativity, and the extent to which each of these may be negotiated. It will firstly consider the concepts of ‘discourse community’ and ‘Community of Practice’ (CoP), before discussing notions of creativity and ideas-generation as a means of informing the academic work that these writers develop.  

Investigating Undergraduate Students’ Experiences with Argumentative Writing in a Post-War Kosovo

This action research study reports on Kosovan, English as a Foreign Language, undergraduate students’ perceptions of the usefulness and effectiveness of class activities that promote the panning for gold approach (Browne and Keeley 2004) in the process of argumentative writing. The data obtained from a questionnaire, essay evaluation and a focus group, reveal that students show interest in the approach though they do not feel at ease when required to take a decision that calls for systematic evaluation of their thinking in a quest for new answers. It is apparent from the study that, in order for students to think critically and write argumentatively, the panning for gold approach and the principle of inquiry should be integrated across the curriculum or, in a better case scenario, should be an integrated part of daily life. The results have implications for syllabus and classroom practices

‘What is the Purpose of Feedback when Revision is not Expected?’ A Case Study of Feedback Quality and Study Design in a First Year Master's Programme

This article presents a qualitative case study of feedback practices in the first year of a two-year master's programme. Writing and feedback are viewed as contextualized cultural practices shaped by factors at macro, meso and micro level. The empirical data consists of a text corpus of students’ essays and teachers’ comments, supplemented by interviews. Initial findings showed a discrepancy between the considerable amount of comments given by the teachers and the students’ lack of use of the feedback they received. The text analysis, based primarily on Hattie and Timperley’s (2007) model of feedback revealed several features of the feedback that counteracted learning, but a major problem was unclear goals for the writing combined with a study design that did not include revision of student texts

Reader-Friendliness and Feedback: German-L1 Scholars’ Perceptions of Writing for Publication in English

Failure to publish articles in the dominant Anglophone scientific journals has implications for multilingual scholars’ future careers and for the global dissemination of scientific knowledge. Despite the importance of this topic, there have been few studies of the perceptions of multilingual scholars engaged in this process. In an effort to close this gap, an online questionnaire was emailed to 153 German-L1 scholars at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland. The 46 respondents ranked 'writing reader-friendly texts' as their number one problem in writing scientific publications in English, followed by 'using correct grammar'. Reader-friendliness was defined by the majority of the respondents as 'writing in a clear and simple style'. The questionnaire also revealed some interesting differences between the views of novice and more experienced scholars regarding the role of different sources of feedback in helping them overcome these problems. The results from the questionnaire will be explored in more detail in follow-up interviews

A Writer Development Group for Master’s Students: Procedures and Benefits

This paper outlines the procedures used in, and evaluates the success of, a pilot writers’ group for MA-level academic writers.  After some background on writers’ groups is provided, the activities used in a pilot Writer Development (WD) Workshop, along with the rationale behind the activities, will be described. The usefulness of the activities will then be evaluated from the viewpoint of the student-writers. Results indicate that along with social and affective benefits, the members perceived academic merit in being involved in the group. Most members experienced, at the very least, a heightened awareness of individual writing processes, and of feedback practices and preferences. The activities in the workshops seemed to help the members develop themselves as writers, and an improvement in the quality of written product was perceived by the writers themselves

Japanese and Taiwanese University Students’ Summaries: A Comparison of Perceptions of Summary Writing

The study investigated Japanese and Taiwanese postgraduate students’ perceptions of summary writing. Eight Japanese and eight Taiwanese students who speak English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at a university in England participated in the summary writing task in English, questionnaires, and follow-up interviews. The questionnaire and interview data were analysed in terms of (a) students’ background knowledge on summarising and (b) educational background regarding experiences of summarisation and summary writing instruction taught in classes. The results revealed that the Japanese and Taiwanese students shared similar opinions on definitions of summary writing. The students in both groups tended to be self-taught in L1 summarisation due to little L1 summary writing instruction. ESL/EFL writing teachers should note that students from different countries may have culture-specific summary writing conventions and that students from the same country may have different summarisation experiences and perceptions of textual features