This article reports on the partial results of a longitudinal study I conducted to investigate the first-year students' experiences in dealing with the challenges they face while attaining the academic literacy skills required of them and constructing their academic identities at an American university in the UAE. While the challenges encountered…

In this paper, we present a collaboration between writing professors and an information systems (IS) professor to scaffold case analysis writing at an American English-medium branch campus in the Middle East. We describe our process for revising the professor's writing assignment to make his expectations more explicit and for creating scaffolding…

Many university undergraduates consider writing assignments an overwhelming requirement. Traditional instructions rarely provide students with clear directions of how to use the Internet to search for authentic material and complete a task. The aim of this study was to scaffold the competence of EFL university students in writing an informative…

This study explores the views, perceptions and suggestions of teacher trainees regarding L1 use in foreign language classes and search for their awareness of the issue. A qualitative research design was employed. The data were gathered by means of 5 open-ended questions. The findings revealed that most of the participants preferred mostly target…