Diversity in collaborative research communities: a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group in public health

Writing groups for doctoral students are generally agreed to provide valuable learning spaces for Ph.D. candidates. Here an academic developer and the eight members of a writing group formed in a Discipline of Public Health provide an account of their experiences of collaborating in a multicultural, multidisciplinary thesis writing group. We consider the benefits of belonging to such a group for Ph.D. students who are operating in a research climate in which disciplinary boundaries are blurring and where an increasing number of doctoral projects are interdisciplinary in nature; in which both academic staff and students come from enormously diverse cultural and language backgrounds; and in which teamwork, networking and collaboration are prized but not always proactively facilitated. We argue that doctoral writing groups comprising students from diverse cultural and disciplinary backgrounds can be of significant value for postgraduates who wish to collaborate on their own academic development to improve their research writing and communication skills; at the same time, such collaborative work effectively builds an inclusive, dynamic research community.Cally Guerin, Vicki Xafis, Diana V. Doda, Marianne H. Gillam, Allison J. Larg, Helene Luckner, Nasreen Jahan, Aris Widayati and Chuangzhou X

Tourist texts: an image-text analysis of non-English speaking tourist destinations

This paper critically investigates the way tourist texts (written and visual) construct and present cultural meanings that are legitimated through discourses of tourism

Written corrective feedback studies: Approximate replication of Bitchener & Knoch (2010a) and Van Beuningen, De Jong & Kuiken (2012)

The question of whether written corrective feedback (CF) has a role to play in second language (L2) development has been controversial since Truscott (1996) published an article in Language Learning calling for the abandonment of the practice on theoretical, empirical and pedagogical grounds. As a result of his claims, an on-going debate about the efficacy of the practice has ensued while a number of dedicated researchers have focused their attention on empirically investigating whether learners benefit from the practice in terms of significantly improving their accuracy in subsequent texts over time. Responding not only to Truscott's doubts about the overall effectiveness of written CF for L2 learning and his specific doubts about whether certain types of provision could ever have a meaningful and enduring effect on acquisition, further questions about the potential impact of different variables were central to the thinking and research that followed his claims. Such variables include the linguistic focus of the feedback and the relative merits of targeting a limited number of error categories (focused feedback) rather than a more comprehensive range of error categories (unfocused feedback). While a growing body of research has begun investigating these issues over the last 15–20 years, the field is in need of replication studies before firm conclusions can be reached

An exploratory investigation of the effects of form-focused instruction on implicit linguistic knowledge

It is, arguably, implicit linguistic knowledge rather than explicit linguistic knowledge that is the goal of second language acquisition. The question arises, however, of how such knowledge can be tested (R. Ellis 2003). This article reports on an exploratory investigation of issues associated with measuring the effects of form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisition of implicit linguistic knowledge in an intact pedagogical context. The study involved 19 elementary-level adult learners of English who received planned focus-on-forms instruction on the Past Simple tense and who were subsequently tested for both immediate and sustained gains. The results of the study indicate that form-focused instruction may have been effective in promoting immediate gains but that there was no sustained effect. However, such an interpretation is considerably weakened by the fact that the control group statistically outperformed the instructional group. Such a result may be indicative of the aim to preserve ‘ecological validity’ (van Lier 1988) at the expense of rigorously controlling extraneous variables when conducting research of a quasi-experimental nature. The study, however, raises a number of issues that future researchers should take into account when designing further investigations of implicit linguistic knowledge

An approach to teaching the writing of literature reviews [Online]

Students face difficulties in writing literature reviews that relate in particular to limited knowledge of the genre (Bruce, 1992; E. Turner, 2005). While there has been valuable research relating to genre and discourse analysis of the literature review (such as Bunton, 2002; Kwan, 2006; O’Connell and Jin, 2001), there is a lack of research into the effectiveness of published writing support programmes. Furthermore, with exceptions such as Ridley (2000) and Swales and Lindemann (2002), there is little explicit advice on how to approach the teaching of the literature review. This paper reports on one of two studies described at the 4th International EATAW conference 2007. It describes an evaluation of the effectiveness of an approach at a New Zealand university to teaching the writing of literature reviews. It focuses on a 15-hour unit of teaching as part of a six-day EAL graduate writing course. The study found clear evidence of improvement in all areas that were targeted