While a plethora of research on second language (L2) writing instruction has focused on instructional approaches, teacher feedback and assessment practice, and student learning experiences, little research has examined issues regarding L2 writing curriculum. In particular, L2 writing curriculum discourse, as one important window to probe into the…

Emergent bilingual students in the U.S. often attend English-medium schools where their bilingual language resources are ignored and dismissed. Research suggests this is harmful for students, but little empirical work has examined how teachers in English-dominant schools can support students' biliteracy. To address this problem, this qualitative…

This study examined the forms and functions of reformulation markers (RMs) in the three disciplines of philosophy, economics, and biology to see whether there is any disciplinary variation regarding these linguistic devices and their functions in essays written by undergraduate students. To this purpose, two corpora of university students' essays…

Thematic progression can be applied as one of the techniques to analyse whether the paragraphs written are coherent or not. To this end, the present study scrutinized six English final reports written by the sixth semester students learning at an academy of secretary in Indonesia. The data originated from the six final reports were identified,…

The instruction of metadiscourse markers to L2 writers has been recommended by some scholars to assist them in employing a certain tone in persuading readers. Nonetheless, there is a dearth of research investigating the effect of process-based instruction on hedging and boosting devices to L2 learners. To fill this gap, the present study aimed at…

Analysis of the linguistic discourse plays an important role in the social, cultural, ethnographic, and comparative studies of languages. Discourse markers as indispensable parts of this analysis are reportedly more common in informal speech than in written language. They could be used at different levels, i.e. as "linking words,"…

Legal case brief writing is pedagogically important yet insufficiently discussed for Chinese EFL learners majoring in law. Based on process genre approach and discourse information theory (DIT), the present study designs a corpus-based analytical model for Chinese EFL learners' autonomy in legal case brief writing and explores the process of case…

This article discusses the findings of an empirical study that investigated the writing practices in a multilingual, rural, fourth-grade classroom in Kenya. The study was undergirded by Bakhtin's heteroglossia. Analysis of texts indicated that these emergent multilinguals used multiple semiotic resources to maximize the chances of meeting the…

For Vygotsky, language is a cultural-psychological concept emerged from social interactions and is applied for higher cognitive functions such as thinking, meaning making, and knowledge construction. In this study, a sociocultural perspective was applied to analyze the language produced by 40 sophomore Iranian EFL learners during dialogic…

Voice in mobile texts has received attention lately among scholars in literacy, sociolinguistics, and rhetoric. Some sociolinguists of globalisation have argued that uptake is shaped by the norms of each literacy regime. Though texts of non-western communities will gain positive uptake in local literacy regimes according to their own norms and…

This study explores the writing of Wikipedia articles as a form of authentic writing for learners of English in Hong Kong. Adopting "Second Language Socialization and Language Learning & Identity" approaches to language learning inquiry, it responds to an identified shortage of research on computer-mediated language socialization.…

Problem Statement: In this qualitative small-scale study, I aimed at investigating why students have difficulties in adjusting themselves to English writing conventions. I also examined the possible bilateral effects of Turkish and English writing conventions to determine whether engaging learners in contrastive rhetoric exercises can elucidate…

This article reports on a qualitative case study that explored the literacy and disciplinary experiences of 4 Taiwanese/Chinese students learning to write in a US graduate TESOL program. A combination of writing research methods was employed--case study techniques of interview and document collection, combined with discourse and text analysis of…

The goal of this study was to investigate the culturally afforded contradictions that ten advanced English as a Second Language (ESL) learner encountered when they posted their paper topics and exchanged feedback strategies online and contextualized some of these strategies to draft their papers. Using Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT),…

Second language (L2) learners notoriously have trouble using articles in their target languages (e.g., "a", "an", "the" in English). However, researchers disagree about the patterns and causes of these errors. Past studies have found that L2 English learners: (1) Predominantly omit articles (White 2003, Robertson 2000), (2) Overuse "the" (Huebner…