“Google Reigns Triumphant”?: Stemming the Tide of Googlitis via Collaborative, Situated Information Literacy Instruction

Googlitis, the overreliance on search engines for research and the resulting development of poor searching skills, is a recognized problem among today’s students. Google is not an effective research tool because, in addition to encouraging keyword searching at the expense of more powerful subject searching, it only accesses the Surface Web and is driven by advertising. American higher education unwittingly fosters the use of search engines in research by emphasizing results rather than process. Academic librarians emulate teaching faculty in their reliance on lectures, and their course-related instruction is limited in its effectiveness because it is constrained to one-shot, lecture-driven sessions. A more effective way to teach research is to collaborate with faculty via problem-based and project-oriented learning tasks that incorporate authentic discipline-specific information finding and critical thinking into assignments

“Transfer Talk” in Talk about Writing in Progress: Two Propositions about Transfer of Learning

This article tracks the emergence of the concept of “transfer talk”—a concept distinct from transfer of learning—and teases out the implications of transfer talk for theories of transfer of learning. The concept of transfer talk was developed through a systematic examination of 30 writing center transcripts and is defined as “the talk through which individuals make visible their prior learning (in this case, about writing) or try to access the prior learning of someone else.” In addition to including a taxonomy of transfer talk and analysis of which types occur most often in this set of conferences, this article advances two propositions about the nature of transfer of learning: (1) transfer of learning may have an important social, even collaborative, component and (2) although meta-awareness about writing has long been recognized as valuable for transfer of learning, more automatized knowledge may play an important role as well

Design-Based Research in CALL

The purpose of this volume is to expand and refine our understanding of the use of design-based research (DBR) in CALL by contributing to the growing body of literature in this area. We have tried our best to strike a balance between theoretical considerations and concrete examples of DBR. The first section of this volume focuses on theoretical perspectives and ideas that can inform the use of DBR in CALL. The second section contains studies that illustrate DBR through concrete instances of its operationalization. We hope this volume will be a useful source of information and inspiration for those considering to further explore DBR in CALL. For updates on DBR in CALL, please visit the companion site to this volume: https://sites.google.com/site/designbasedresearch/https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/language_books/1006/thumbnail.jp

Educating Technical Communication Teachers: The Origins, Development, and Present Status of the Course, “Teaching Technical Writing” at Illinois State University

Since the early 1980s, Illinois State University’s English Department has educated numerous technical communication practitioners as well as dozens of teachers of technical communication throughout the United States. Today, the program’s faculty members are nationally recognized for their contributions to scholarship and education and its Ph.D. and M.A. students are sought after to teach in the technical communication programs of other universities. A critical component of this success was the development of the graduate course, Teaching Technical Writing in 1990. This essay situates the development of that course in the history not only of the technical communication program at Illinois State University but in the history of the technical communication field, particularly since 1950. Although the essay focuses on one course in one midsized, Midwestern U.S. University, it is, I believe, exemplary of the development and current status of technical communication pedagogy throughout the U.S

Taking the long view on writing development

Studies on writing development have grown in diversity and depth in recent decades, but remain fragmented along lines of theory, method, and age ranges or populations studied. Meaningful, competent writing performances that meet the demands of the moment rely on many kinds of well-practiced and deeply understood capacities working together; however, these capacities’ realization and developmental trajectories can vary from one individual to another. Without an integrated framework to understand lifespan development of writing abilities in its variation, high-stakes decisions about curriculum, instruction, and assessment are often made in unsystematic ways that may fail to support the development they are intended to facilitate; further, research may not consider the range of issues at stake in studying writing in any particular moment. To address this need and synthesize what is known about the various dimensions of writing development at different ages, the coauthors of this essay have engaged in sustained discussion, drawing on a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Drawing on research from different disciplinary perspectives, they propose eight principles upon which an account of writing development consistent with research findings could be founded. These principles are proposed as a basis for further lines of inquiry into how writing develops across the lifespan

Machine Scoring of Student Essays: Truth and Consequences

The current trend toward machine-scoring of student work, Ericsson and Haswell argue, has created an emerging issue with implications for higher education across the disciplines, but with particular importance for those in English departments and in administration. The academic community has been silent on the issue—some would say excluded from it—while the commercial entities who develop essay-scoring software have been very active. Machine Scoring of Student Essays is the first volume to seriously consider the educational mechanisms and consequences of this trend, and it offers important discussions from some of the leading scholars in writing assessment.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1138/thumbnail.jp

Pedagogical implications of teaching codes of ethics at tertiary level. An Italian case study

The study aims at investigating the use of codes of ethics in teaching EFL to students enrolled in a first-level master course in Marketing Management in an Italian public university. Ethical codes are expected to reveal their potentiality in “sensitising and preparing students to meet the communicative demands of disciplinary communication”, in Bhatia’s (2002) words. Within the theoretical framework of genre analysis and its possible implications for language teaching, the present paper focuses on learners’ achievements in their EFL learning process using corporate codes of ethics, which are presented to the students both theoretically and on a practical level. A pre-questionnaire, a pre-and post-test, and an abridged post-treatment questionnaire are used to collect data. The scope of this five-week study is to demonstrate that genre pedagogy caters to learners’ needs, as on one side it raises rhetorical and genre awareness, and on the other side it fosters language awareness also at a micro-textual, lexico-syntactical level

Further research on pedagogical implications of teaching codes of ethics at tertiary level

A second step into the study of the integration of codes of ethics (CoEs) into the syllabus of a Business English course in an Italian public university. As highly specialized corporate documents, CoEs represent a specific genre, as intended by Swales (1990). They are commonly used to implement ethical principles into business practice (Krč 2015), however, studies on the pedagogical implication of using CoEs in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) courses, especially in Italy, are scarce. On one hand, CoEs as a specific genre are expected to reveal their potentiality in providing students with the necessary tools to meet the needs of disciplinary communication (Bhatia 2002). On the other hand, they could be considered useful in raising content, communication, cognition and culture-related skills in EFL learning, thus exemplifying the integration of content and language in education at large. Previous findings (Giglioni & Patat 2020) suggested that CoEs are functional pedagogical tools for students in terms of lexicon enhancement and overall engagement in corporate communication and behaviors. Within the theoretical framework of genre analysis and its possible implications for language teaching, this paper addresses issues raised in the first phase of the study. More specifically, this second stage of the research, which provides data for comparison, focuses on students’ perceptions and achievements in their EFL learning process with special attention to language awareness at a micro-textual level. Even if based on a small sample, it is believed that this qualitative and quantitative approach to CoEs allows for learners’ improvement in language proficiency without neglecting corporate discourse

First-Year Writing Program Assessment at Small Liberal Arts Colleges

This project examines first-year writing program assessment practices at small liberal arts colleges and universities in an effort to understand how these practices resemble or diverge from prevailing scholarship on writing program assessment. There is extensive literature on best practices in writing program assessment, but nearly all of it by scholars and researchers working at public comprehensive universities who assume that type of institution as their model. At the same time, scholarship on writing program assessment at small liberal arts institutions is scant, amounting to fewer than ten publications in the last twenty years, even as these schools are structurally and philosophically different enough from public comprehensive universities that prevailing best program assessment practices often do not fit their contexts and needs. Small liberal arts institutions are historically important to higher education in United States, remain numerically significant, and serve hundreds of thousands of students per year. To better understand how they engage with best practices in writing program assessment, the author distributed a survey to more than 120 institutions, ultimately receiving responses from 42. Using these responses and in-depth interviews with the directors of first-year writing programs at three other small liberal arts universities, the author tested his hypothesis that these schools are either not engaging in writing program assessment or are not doing so in ways that are consistent with best practices. The combined results ultimately reveal that (1) the responding schools are shifting, including in their approaches to first-year writing and in their assessment of those programs; (2) many assessment projects show signs of interference from upper-level administrators; and (3) these institutions are engaging in writing program assessment, but often in ways that are out of line with prevailing scholarship. The study examines the possible reasons for these themes, makes suggestions for how the directors of first-year writing programs at small institutions can gain better control of and improve their program assessment efforts and for how program assessment scholars might consider the small liberal arts experience, and closes with suggestions for further research