First-Year Writing

Each discipline and granting agency has its own guidelines for writing research proposals, so be sure to consult your professor or advisor as well as any specific guidelines you have received. It is also helpful to locate sample proposals in your discipline or from the agency to which you are applying. The purpose of the research proposal: The research proposal is your chance to explain the significance of your project to organizations who might wish to fund or otherwise support it. Ideally, it will demonstrate the quality and importance of your project as well as your ability to conduct the proposed research. The proposal also gives you the opportunity to think through your research project, to refine your focus, and to predict any challenges that may arise. It may be helpful to consult your proposal at various stages in your research process to remind yourself of your focus and to chart how your project has progressed.

Higher education faculty are drawn to academic service-learning (AS-L) for its positive outcomes. In order to achieve such outcomes, it is necessary for faculty to be intentional about students’ reflections on their AS-L experiences. This article describes research on three reflection exercises conducted with 41 students enrolled in two sections of an Educational Psychology course. Each reflection exercise was designed to help students achieve one of the following outcomes: becoming aware of negative stereotypes, making connections between their AS-L experiences and course content, or developing an appreciation for complexity in a situation at the AS-L site. Qualitative analysis was used to examine the data for patterns of the personal and academic knowledge study participants gained from each of the reflection exercises. Suggestions are included for adapting the three reflection exercises to suit the varying needs faculty have for their courses.

Peer feedback of writing involves writers receiving constructive criticism and suggestions on their work from peers, typically from classmates to improve the quality of their writing. It is widely used as a collaborative learning strategy for developing writing skills. The purpose of this study is to explore the perceptions of first-year students regarding peer feedback. The researcher used a volunteer sampling technique; the participants were from two universities, one located in Dhaka, the capital city, and another in Chittagong, a large city in Bangladesh. The interview data revealed that participants have positive perceptions toward peer feedback. Although there are some challenges with peer feedback, the study found that to gain the highest benefits, students need to be educated regarding its benefits and develop a multicultural setting in the class where everyone's voice will be respected.

This article explores effective methods for developing writing skills of first-year English major students. It has a twofold objective. First, it identifies effective teaching methods that can assist educators in improving their students' English writing skills. Second, it outlines a variety of practical learning methods to enhance students’ writing abilities. The opening section highlights the importance of writing proficiency for first-year English majors. The authors emphasize that effective writing is the basis of academic success since it empowers students to express themselves clearly, organize their ideas, and develop critical thinking skills. The latter foster confidence in students, enabling them to actively participate in classroom discussions and effectively express themselves in written assignments. The methodology section details the study’s reliance on general scientific methods of cognition and analysis of relevant academic literature. The authors employed a descriptive approach, utilizing methods of induction and deduction to achieve their objectives. Next, the authors present a list of thirteen effective teaching techniques gleaned from academic literature and their own extensive teaching experience. Additionally, the article emphasizes the importance of revision techniques, peer review processes, exposure to various writing styles and genres, and utilizing technology like grammar checkers and plagiarism detection software responsibly. In addition, the article offers thirteen practical learning tips for first-year students. Prioritized in order of importance, these tips range from active reading and note-taking for analytical skill development to proofreading by reading aloud for improved flow and clarity. The article highlights the significance of personalized feedback from instructors due to their expertise and ability to provide targeted guidance. In conclusion, by implementing the teaching methods and learning strategies outlined in the article, educators and students can work together to develop students’ effective writing skills.
Key words: first-year English major students, English writing skills, teaching strategies and techniques, learning strategies, skills development, college.

Current theoretical conversations in the field of Rhetoric and Composition, particularly conversations related to first-year curricular design, are increasingly concerned with the issue of “teaching for transfer,” a trend evidenced by the recent flurry of books, articles, empirical studies, and ...

Review of the third edition of Kress and Van Leeuwen's ground-breaking work Reading images. The review discusses its contribution to visual communication and design practices, and points out differences between the second and the third editions.

Focusing on noun phrase complexity in writing, this study adopted Biber, Gray and Poonpon’s (2011) hypothesized developmental stages to investigate the academic writing of Thai and native English university students by comparing their argumentative English essays as concerns their usage of noun modification. Prenominal modifiers and postnominal modifiers were identified and coded manually. It was found that both groups of writers heavily relied on attributive adjectives, nouns as premodifiers and prepositional phrases as postmodifiers, and there were no significant differences in the use of prenominal modifiers between both groups of students for the most part. The most significant differences between both datasets were in the use of prepositional phrases with abstract meanings and multiple prepositional phrases as postmodifiers. These are hypothesized to be acquired at later developmental stages and were more frequently used by native English university students than Thai universit...

M any students, especially those new to or unfamiliar with academic discourses, may face challenges with writing in specific, complex, and nuanced ways (Sullivan et al., 2017). Students are often expected to express ideas with "subtlety and nuance" yet might struggle with developing ideas in academically valued ways, including specifying meanings, acknowledging complexities, and distinguishing slight shades of significance (Schilb, 2001). Corrigan (2019) articulates a need for students' writing "to have more complexity, more nuance, more insight, more depth, more critical and creative thought" (p. 3). Engaging in a peer review process can nurture students to develop complexity and nuance in their writing and to recognize such qualities in others' work. However, students may face difficulties with commenting meaningfully on others' writing, raising a need for instructors to scaffold peer review in ways that encourage constructive feedback (Kim, 2015). By offering guidelines and support with the peer review process, instructors can sharpen students' close, careful attunement to writing while honing students' capacities to critically read others' work (Chamberlain, 2009). In this teaching tip, I share an exercise that immerses students in offering feedback on their peers' draft thesis statements. Because thesis statements serve as a place for students to articulate and frame their RW

Cohesion, particularly through sentence boundaries, makes up the principal semantic features providing the text with the required unity. Cohesive relation is both helpful in the text unity and the readers' textual interpretation. Among the different cohesive relations, encapsulation contributes significantly to developing the text, by which textual segments, including clauses, sentences, sequences of sentences, and paragraphs, are condensed and synthesized using cohesive markers. This study aimed to identify the frequency, textual segments encapsulated, and syntactic structure of encapsulated segments by the demonstrative pronoun "this". Hence, 20 research articles from the discipline of Civil Engineering from five top journals published by Elsevier were selected and analyzed. Results showed that a) "This" was more frequent in the sentence-initial compared to other positions; b) "This" was utilized more to serve the function of "Encapsulation" than point-to-point cohesion; and c) "This" was used to encapsulate two syntactic structures, namely one sentence and one clause structures. The results of this study could provide a practical guide for writers (especially novice writers) of research articles in Civil Engineering and disciplines close to it about how to use the pronoun "this" to serve the function of encapsulation.

Writing has special importance in anthropology. Writing fieldnotes is a central methodology for documenting and analyzing culture, and written personal reflections upon this process are viewed as providing insight into how knowledge is produced by a "situated" researcher. That said, there is little discussion in the discipline about the use of writing as pedagogy or a tool for popularizing the discipline. This article considers how old fashion letter writing to anthropologists can strengthen students' learning to write and analyze culture. It also indicates how writing letters popularizes the discipline. Letter writing is communication, method, tradition, and now pedagogy in anthropology. This progression of uses has relevance to teaching and learning in other disciplines.

Do academics really write the way They Say/I Say says they do? The answer to that question surely matters; how it might matter to Basic Writing is the focus of this article. They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (TSIS), a popular textbook by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, develops the metaphor of academic writing as "a conversation." TSIS claims that when "writing [i.e., what I Say] responds to something that has been said or might be said [i.e., what They Say], it thereby performs the meaningful task of supporting, correcting, or complicating that other view" (xiii). Basic conversational responsiveness and then some-this promisingly dialogic take on academic literacy is an outcome that the writing program I direct aims for. Based on recent program-wide assessment, however, our aim appears off-target, especially with respect to teaching reading as a critical part of such conversation. This failure is disappointing but, as I'll discuss below, perhaps not all that surprising. More of a surprise is the possibility that

The field of rhetoric/composition has seen a growing body of research shaped by queer theory; however, for most rhet/comp scholars, queer theory still remains marginal and unfamiliar. It is rare to see queer pedagogy mentioned in mainstream rhet/comp texts and research projects that are not explicitly designed to discuss gender and sexuality.

I am also forever grateful to Dr. Cassie Book. Without your organization, discernment, and care I would have never had the privilege to work in such a supportive and formative environment-The UofL University Writing Center. Your determination and professionalism have changed the lives of countless writers and consultants, especially my own. Thanks also to Amber Yocum, Jency Gutierrez, and Mikaela Smith. Your friendships proved invaluable to me, and thank you for your outstanding work and support.

5 Chapter 1: Introduction 6 1.1. Overview of thesis 6 1.2. Aims of the research 7 1.3. Research question 7 1.4. Rationale for interrogating printmaking pedagogy 7 1.5. Outline of chapters 9 Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework 11 2.1. Printmaking pedagogy 11 2.2. An argument for social semiotics 13 2.3. Using social semiotics to identify semiotic resources in printmaking 15 2.3.1. The hardground print as communicated and represented through modes 16 2.3.2. Medium and materiality in the printmaking process 18 2.3.3. Temporal aspects of printmaking 20 2.3.4. The relation between modality markers and the hardground print 21 2.3.5. The composition of the image 22 2.3.6. Potential site of display 22 2.4. Conventions and constraints within the printmaking studio 23 2.5. A summary of chapter two 26 Chapter 3: Methodology 27 3.1. Methodological considerations 27 3.2. Applying a multimodal social semiotic framework in printmaking 28 3.3. Context of study 29 3.4. Research Methods 30 3.5. Ethical ...

This article shares findings from a CCCC-funded grant that focuses on a dual enrollment program in Washington State called Running Start. This model invites high schoolers to take college courses on a college campus. Instructors are frequently advised to treat Running Start participants “as if they were any other college students,” yet as our large-scale survey suggests, these students have complex hybrid identities that warrant greater consideration. Without diluting academic rigor, we call for an enhanced understanding of the “funds of knowledge” (González, Moll, and Amanti) that high schoolers bring to First-Year Composition in the spirit of congruous inclusivity.

My empirical study reinforces mindfulness pedagogy’s contribution to first-year writing, while establishing a niche by emphasizing international multilingual (or “second-language”) writers as a more focused student audience. My research 1) provides an extensive synthesis of mindfulness pedagogy with the fields of composition studies and second-language writing to establish a theoretical framework and curriculum that situates mindfulness in the context of multilingual first-year writing courses, and 2) presents a qualitative study, using a phenomenological approach, based on several international multilingual first-year writing courses I taught at The University of Utah. Through this study, I argue that practicing mindfulness alongside the writing process encourages students to embrace their emergent identities as multilingual writers, leads them to acknowledge their language variety as a resource, ameliorates their attitudes toward writing, and enhances their perceived writing potentials. In publishing this research, my aim is, broadly, for mindfulness to be incorporated in first-year writing courses and, specifically, for mindfulness to be considered a valuable practice for multilingual writers. Ultimately, my findings reveal an exigency for writing instructors to encourage students to embrace the resources of their linguistic diversity, rather than perpetuate the deficit discourse surrounding language difference, and identify mindfulness as a pedagogical approach for that need.

The pressing need to promote gender equality in today's globalized society is underscored in Sustainable Development Goals and juxtaposed with the goal of cultivating global citizenship. Despite these efforts, mainstream post-colonial discourse on Maghrebi women categorizes them as less citizens neglecting 'the complexity' of their lives and experiences. The scarcity of research that depicts Algerian women's experiences along with the treatment of the topic of gender as 'taboo' restricted opportunities on researching this important category of society. While there are numerous studies conducted in the Algerian context on female's stereotypical depiction and invisibility in school textbooks, the discussion of the topic remains ahistorical. It relegates the status of women as 'the oppressed' which runs the risk of reproducing colonial epistemologies. Guided by Goffman's gender stereotype theory and Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis conceptual framework, the paper draws on data collected from four standardized English language school textbooks that are currently used in Algeria. The textbooks content affirms the 'subaltern' categorization of Algerian women through emphasizing their deagentialization, dependence, and disempowerment. These findings have implications for gender equity in Algeria, the Maghreb, and the broader North Africa contexts.

Gunther Kress’s multimodal and social semiotic theory of communication has moved beyond the realm of linguistics, which originally framed his work, and has reached out to inform other fields, such as those of education, museum studies, as well as the humanities and social sciences more broadly. This article brings together our insights in relation to a concept from Gunther Kress’s theory, that of design. Drawing from our research, we reflect on Kress’s conceptualisation of design in social semiotics and discuss how this idea has inspired us to advance research across the domains of formal learning in schools, informal learning and communication in museums, and in everyday communication and social interaction. We consider that the contribution of design is to challenge the boundaries of concepts such as ‘competence’, ‘interpretation’ and ‘critique’, associated respectively with the dominant discourses and practices in the worlds of education, museums and everyday communication and re...

This paper discusses the application of systemic-functional semiotics in the analysis of visual materials, and, specifically, presents an original systemic-functional model that is intended to facilitate both the analysis and synthesis of drawings in a cross-cultural context. The model is explained as developing from Michael O'Toole's systemic-functional semiotic model for painting (O'TOOLE, 2011) itself an adaptation of Michael Halliday's systemic-functional semiotic model for language (HALLIDAY,

The authors of the book see multimodality as intrinsic to human communication and texts, and as consisting of a multiplicity of signs. This chapter discusses how this applies in educational settings, to examine how different modes of communication are intertwined and utilized in learning, including children’s creative learning practices. In this, the authors use the semiotic concepts that operate in all communicative contexts: Field, tenor, and mode. Through them, the authors view the CLLP as a space that enables social activities, exploration of cultural, social, and societal contents and topics, and the development of social relationships. All this occurs through various communication channels, ranging from linguistic to visual and from auditive to performative expression.

The coordinated, multi-section elementary Spanish program presents
interesting arid unique challenges to the course director. Specific issues
include: ( 1) initial introduction and subsequent training of graduate teaching assistants and part-time lecturers in the procedures and methods involved in written assignments; (2) uniformity in assessment of writing tasks; (3) coordination of writing projects with the materials in the pedagogical grammar; (4) single theme or multiple themes for specific writing assignments; (5) in-class or homework assignment; (6) writing-as-process versus assembly line approach; (7) incorporation of writing in the testing program.

EFL students find it very hard to achieve a good level of reading comprehension. More often than not our students of English do not understand what they read. Besides, EFL teachers in San Miguel de Tucuman, Argentina face some common problems: over crowded classrooms, opportunities to use the target language outside the classroom, officially prescribed syllabi, etc. All these factors make it difficult for teachers to meet each student's need. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a proposal for teachers of English in the context of the reading class. The paper is directly related to the reality of the EFL classroom, shown by a survey answered by a group of teachers working at state secondary schools. We believe that a Systemic Functional Linguistics approach to text analysis could enable learners to interpret the different meanings conveyed in a written text, what would lead them to a better comprehension of reading texts.

The authors of the book see multimodality as intrinsic to human communication and texts, and as consisting of a multiplicity of signs. This chapter discusses how this applies in educational settings, to examine how different modes of communication are intertwined and utilized in learning, including children’s creative learning practices. In this, the authors use the semiotic concepts that operate in all communicative contexts: Field, tenor, and mode. Through them, the authors view the CLLP as a space that enables social activities, exploration of cultural, social, and societal contents and topics, and the development of social relationships. All this occurs through various communication channels, ranging from linguistic to visual and from auditive to performative expression.

This chapter describes one technical and professional communication program's (TPCs) revision of student learning outcomes (SLOs) in a sophomore-level technical writing course to engage industry standards and terminologies, specifically, the Society for Technical Communication's (STC's) nine areas of competency from the Foundation Certification Exam. These SLOs serve as an enculturative framework in the foundation-level technical writing course. This chapter also offers a discussion of how to navigate the challenges of implementing new SLOs, including getting buy-in from full-time and part-time faculty, especially when drawing upon industry-designed standards. Deriving from assessment data, this chapter argues that our program-specific adaptation of the STC's Foundational Exam competencies suggests effectiveness in setting the stage for a university-to-industry through-line that intends to benefit our students and reinforce the values of humanism, social justice, and user-centrism that figure as crucial emerging mandates in TPC today.

Th is issue of LEA features an interview with Professor Th eo van Leeuwen, where-starting from the fundamental role of the Hallidayan socio-semiotic approach to language in the development of Multimodality-he illustrates the background of his theoretical work as social semiotician and critical discourse analyst. Th eo van Leeuwen broadly deals with issues such as the new emerging fi eld of Critical Multimodal Studies, the importance of the socio-cultural perspective in Multimodality and the potential encounter between Multimodality and Cognitivism, with special reference to the concept of "social cognition" and to Metaphor Th eory. He concludes his conversation with a refl ection on the function of Studies in the Humanities in a specialized and digitally mediated world.

I am a writing teacher because, like every Freireian and critical literacy scholar and radical teacher I know, I believe in the power of writing, literacy, and classrooms to intervene in an oppressive world; I believe in young people’s race protests and radical interruptions of global white supremacy as its own literacy; and I believe in composing and curating whole different kinds of texts about BIPOC with and alongside young people who strike the empire back. As a Black feminist compositionist, I am enmeshed in neoliberal relationalities. Yes. But because of my Black feminist ancestors, I also belong to a lineage who knows that the praxis of Black pedagogy is an act of social protest (Cooper; Perkins). This ain’t a paycheck, and the composition classroom is not my bank account or lower-rung stepping stool.

English 299 is a two-unit credit/no credit elective, capped at fifteen students per section, intended to help first year composition students become more effective editors of their own writing. The class provides a hands-on environment to help students with sentence-level editing since the writing center on campus traditionally focuses on more global concerns. Incoming California State University Channel Islands (CSUCI) students who are deemed by the California State University system as needing additional support to satisfy their first year writing requirement (so-called "Early Start" students, explained further below) are placed in English 299 and given priority enrollment in the first year composition (FYC) course of their choice. The class follows a coaching model that helps students develop confidence as editors of their own work and demystifies the writing process.

Placement of multilingual writers within writing programs is an important and challenging issue. If students perceive that the placement process is rigid and unfair, this perception may affect their attitudes and motivation levels while taking courses in the writing program. The purpose of this study was to see whether a specific subgroup of students (n = 65) in a large university writing program for multilingual students could be successful if allowed to collaborate, with guidance, in their own placement. Various data were collected about these students in their first quarter after matriculating in the writing program: instructors' initial ratings, students' outcomes in their initial course (final portfolio scores and course grades), and students' satisfaction levels with their placement after they had completed the course (via a brief survey). These data were compared to another group of students (n = 65) who received similar placement scores but were not given the choice to move up or down a level. Findings indicated the pilot group was able to succeed at their chosen course level at levels comparable to the comparison group, and they were happy with their placement choices. Implications for placement processes in multilingual writing programs are discussed.

The present study seeks to delve into the intricacies of multimodal discourse analysis with regard to violence against women awareness campaign posters. To this end, a study is conducted on English posters. In this respect, the different semiotic modes adopted in English posters were put under scrutiny. Similarly, the study attempts to explore how the adoption of different semiotic modes may contribute to the construction of meaning when cooperating with language. To this end, three English posters were selected from different electronic sources and put under investigation. The qualitative analysis of the yielded results was couched with Kress and Van Leeuwen's (2006) Visual Grammar framework. The findings indicate that English posters employed a variety of semiotic modes. By the same token, the yielded results indicate that the majority of the sampled posters are conceptual. Such visual characterization demonstrates that the English posters tend to be static and immovable.

Building upon the research on metacognition and transfer in the fields of writing studies and writing centers, the following crossinstitutional study examines the relationships among writing center experiences, classroom experiences, and student perception of transfer. The study focuses on three particular classifications of metacognition, as developed in Gorzelsky et al.'s taxonomy: monitoring, control, and constructive metacognition. The central research questions framing the current study are as follows: 1) Do university students perceive themselves as engaging in transfer of metacognitive skills across writing contexts? 2) Is there a difference in students' perception of transfer facilitated by classroom experiences in comparison with writing center experiences? The study confirms some of the findings of prior research (Bromley et al.) that indicate university students are engaging in multiple forms of transfer but offers some distinctions and variations among sites, contexts, and types of metacognitive transfer. The data indicates that writing centers might be sites that facilitate more monitoring and control of revision-related transfer and foster the cumulative, encompassing phenomenon of constructive transfer more than classroom activity alone. However, students perceive classrooms to be the primary source of transfer related to assignment requirements. The largest difference in student perception across all types of transfer was that writing center clients more strongly perceived themselves to engage in classroom-related transfer than non-clients.

Service-learning helps students experience the practical applications of learning to write well; it also offers opportunities for students to develop a sense of civic responsibility. Although service-learning is growing in popularity, this pedagogy is not prevalent in English departments. Additionally, service-learning courses across all disciplines typically do not empower students to make their own project decisions. Given these tendencies, it is useful to consider whether service-learning is an effective pedagogy for writing, whether students should be designing their own projects, and what writing instructors could do to facilitate students' growth as writers while completing projects in the community. This is a qualitative case study, incorporating quantitative data, of two technical writing courses. I reviewed the students' answers to surveys developed for this research, plus their course evaluations, individual reflective writing, and collaborative project documents, and then I compiled and collated the students' references to what they were learning and what they were struggling with. The references fall within the following themes: student decision-making; the role of the instructor; the rhetorical tenets of audience and purpose; service; collaboration with peers and community members; written expression; and professionalism and motivation. Relying upon the students' comments in regard to these themes, I suggest that servicelearning can help students become invested in the outcome of their written expression, motivating them to learn how to address audience and purpose through strong writing. Students learn to work collaboratively and develop their own individual voices as they discover, reflect v TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER

This book is dedicated to the early pioneers in online writing instruction (OWI), who excitedly and doggedly explored the practices, pedagogies, and theories involved with moving composition to computer labs/classrooms and then into cyberspace.

Although critical thinking is increasingly central in undergraduate education, most courses dedicated to improving students' critical thinking skills produce only slight results. Many students struggle to analyse arguments and fail to acquire transferable skills without dedicated practice. We present a method to teach critical thinking that has been shown to be very effective. This method emphasises deliberate practice of reasoning skills by argument mapping, a technique to visualise the underlying logical structure of argumentation. Empirical evidence suggests that practice with argument maps results in improved critical thinking, as measured by various standardised tests. This improvement is seen also in situations where students are not using argument maps. We present Rationale, software that has been developed to facilitate the implementation of this technique into teaching practice, and show how it has been used in classrooms internationally. Further, we present an innovati...

This research investigates the level modality of Sukin skincare product advertisement in social media through the descriptive qualitative method. Kress and Van Leeuwen propose the theories supporting this thesis. The primary data sources in this thesis were ten visual advertisements. The steps passed in this analysis are selecting ten visual images, identifying the visual elements of the ten advertisements, categorizing the visual elements into visual contact, social distance, perspectives, modality, and putting them in the table. The result of this thesis shows there are 5 of demand images, 15 of offer images, 12 of far social distance, 7 of close personal distance, 1 of close social distance, 8 of high modality, 2 of low modality, 20 of frontal angle, and 20 of eye level. Thus, it can be concluded that far social distance is dominant, indicating that the company intends to show truthfulness and credibility in convincing the viewer to try the products. It is also demonstrated that ...

Squires the top 100 of major international university rankings. This program included substantial funding for incentives for faculty who publish in international journals and for support services to help them do so. Because English is the lingua franca of international academic publishing, the work of advancing this agenda has mostly been delegated to specialists in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) who direct and staff newly created writing centers and writing programs at Russian universities. The first American-style Russian writing center was founded at the New Economic School (NES), a private graduate school, in 2011. The Academic Writing Center (AWC) at HSE University, Russia's largest public university, quickly followed. Since then, 11 writing centers-some freestanding and some housed in language departments-have sprung up across the country, and a professional organization, the National Writing Centers Consortium (NWCC), has been established to support this burgeoning area of pedagogy and research. The NWCC hosted its first conference in Moscow in 2018, and research on academic writing has been a feature of many national conferences on the teaching of English. In short, there is a rapidly growing community in this area that did not exist ten years ago and which stands to exert some influence not only on the future of academic research and higher education in Russia but in other parts of the region, as interest in writing and writing pedagogy spreads to other parts of the former USSR (see Chapter 1). Though Russia has its own tradition of writing in the academy and its own academic publishers and journals, to serve the current needs, writing pedagogy models have largely been adapted from abroad. This has included concepts like academic literacy and multiliteracy (see Chapter 1, Chapter 3, Chapter 8, and Chapter 10) and institutional models like the writing center (see Chapter 5, Chapter 6, and Chapter 7). This does not mean, however, that this conversation only concerns English writing or that these practitioners wish to create a siloed, privileged space for English. Rather, there is an effort to make concepts like academic literacy translingual (see Chapter 1), and many support programs offer their services in both English and Russian (see Chapter 6 and Chapter 7). Pressure to publish is intense regardless of the language scholars are working in (see Chapter 3 and Chapter 4). Nevertheless, Russian higher education must contend with the overwhelming demand for writing and writing services in English. The Aims of this Volume The aim of this collection is to offer the reader a broad view of the changing landscape for academic writing, writing pedagogy, and writing centers 10 10 Squires Aksakalova, and myself analyze the results of a collaboration among peer tutors at the New Economic School and trainees at LaGuardia Community College in New York City. During the Spring of 2018, participants were asked to take part in a series of mediated exchanges through a Wordpress blog, reflecting on their experiences. Based on our analysis of their posts and final reflections, we argue that this exercise helped inculcate a sense of transnational professional identity among peer tutors and enabled a sustained discussion of the fraught questions of authority in peer tutoring. We also make recommendations for the use of international exchanges as a training practice for writing center staff. Though multilingualism and the need for bilingual (even tri-lingual) writing pedagogies is a feature of many of these chapters, English still looms very large on this landscape. It is the target language for most researchers seeking publication in international journals and at times a critical hurdle for them to overcome. As such, applied linguists are playing a considerable role in both the research on and the teaching of academic writing. Part Three is therefore dedicated to the language issue. Chapter Eight presents the application Paper Cat, developed by researchers at HSE University, Perm. This program, as Elizaveta Smirnova, Svetlana Strinyuk, and Viacheslav Lanin argue, goes beyond general grammar checkers like Grammarly to identify the specific linguistic features of academic discourse based on an analysis of the existing corpus of academic writing across a variety of fields. The purpose is to assist second-language (L2) writers in the production of their own texts and to assist EAP instructors in evaluating the writing of their students and writing center clients as well as designing lessons that target the features of academic discourse that cause the most problems. Chapter Nine continues this computational theme. Olga Vinogradova, Anna Viklova, and Mikhail Paporotskiy present the results of corpus research on first-language (L1) interference in the use of punctuation in English. Punctuation, they argue, is both understudied and under-taught to English language learners, and the results of their study of intermediate and advanced writing by Russian students shows that Russian speakers continue to apply Russian punctuation rules to English and do so in ways that make their communications less clear and effective. They note the most important differences and argue that punctuation simply cannot be ignored in language teaching, which it unfortunately often is. Part Four discusses the teaching of writing in undergraduate classrooms. University teaching during the Soviet period largely favored oral assessment, but writing as a mode of testing students' skills and knowledge is becoming References Academic Writing Center. (n.d.

This cross-sectional study compares the written language of Thai EFL students in their first two years of university study. First-and second-year students (N = 170) wrote opinion paragraphs by hand in response to six prompts. Using automated textual analysis tools, clausal (subordination), phrasal (coordinated phrases and complex nominals), and lexical (AWL use and lexical diversity) measures were obtained. Matched-pairs were created by pairing different first-and second-year students from the same faculty of study who responded to the same writing prompt. The results indicated that second-year students produced significantly more complex nominals and AWL words than the first-year students with effect sizes ranging from small to medium. Implications are discussed in terms of pedagogical approaches and assessment in EFL settings, and suggestions for future research are provided.

High-impact practices (HIPs) positively impact student learning in underserved populations, yet such groups are less likely to participate in these engaging activities. This paper describes an "embedded" approach in which all students at Elizabethtown College, a small, private institution in Pennsylvania, must choose and successfully complete two of five designated upper-year HIPs or Signature Learning Experiences (SLEs) in the curriculum and cocurriculum. Special attention is given to how expanding access to HIPs became a strategic priority, the process by which the SLE/HIP requirement was adopted, and the early steps institutional leaders took to promote effective implementation of the requirement.

Few studies have examined how second language (L2) students build new genre knowledge in the process of participating in L2 rhetorical situations during study abroad. The current study examines how L2 students utilize their prior genre knowledge and construct new L2 genre knowledge during study abroad. This study adopted the Rhetorical Genre Studies perspective, which argues that recurrent social situations influence people in carrying out rhetorical actions. The participants were four South Korean students enrolled in a US university as exchange students. Data included twelve semi-structured individual interview transcripts and participants' assignments written during study abroad. Findings indicated that during study abroad, participants utilized their prior process genre knowledge and discipline-specific content genre knowledge acquired at their home universities for completing L2 writing assignments. Participants' comments also pointed to the building of new L2 genre knowledge by being exposed to new yet somewhat familiar rhetorical situations and producing various academic genres, such as research reports, in the L2 during study abroad. This study highlights that L2 study abroad students should be considered as boundary crossers across languages and across writing tasks, that is, students who actively repurpose prior genre knowledge and build new genre knowledge in negotiating L2 rhetorical situations.

This paper introduces the Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers (MICUSP) as a new resource that will enable researchers and teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) to investigate the written discourse of highly advanced student writers whose written assignments have been awarded the grade ‘A’. The usefulness of two aspects of the design of the corpus — variation across discipline and across student level — is illustrated by two case studies, one on attribution and one on recurrent phraseological patterns. The first case study investigates how references to the work of others are realized and to what extent disciplinary variation exists in unpublished academic writing by students. The second study examines the use of phraseological items (n-grams and phrase-frames) by students at four different levels of undergraduate and graduate study. The paper closes with a discussion of the results of both case studies and describes future avenues for MICUSP-based research.

This paper discusses the application of systemic-functional semiotics in the analysis of visual materials, and, specifically, presents an original systemic-functional model that is intended to facilitate both the analysis and synthesis of drawings in a cross-cultural context. The model is explained as developing from Michael O'Toole's systemic-functional semiotic model for painting (O'TOOLE, 2011) itself an adaptation of Michael Halliday's systemic-functional semiotic model for language (HALLIDAY,

Focused on teaching and engaging undergraduate students for success about relevant issues that promote rhetorical analysis, critical thinking and writing skills based on sound composition theory and practice for 21 st century learning, whether online, hybrid, or face-to-face instruction.

The current study aims at the analysis of verbal language, pictures, and other images of advertisements, which are pregnant with meaning potential. Such images are structured through visual grammar that can be employed to translate the meanings of images. The study focuses on investigating the linguistic (verbal and non-verbal) techniques employed in advertisements by educational institutions to persuade the readers. The study undertakes six advertisements of three chains of educational institutions of Punjab (Punjab Group of Colleges, Superior Group of Colleges, Aspire Group of Colleges) for the multimodal analysis applying visual grammar (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) to examine the representational, interactive, and compositional meanings. The results espouse and advocate the theory of visual grammar and emphasize the potential of non-verbal language to formulate and convey several layers of meanings. The conclusions drawn, support the idea that images help in influencing and shaping the minds in favour of one, ignoring and rejecting the other.