Academic literacies (AL) research has made significant contributions to understandings of student writing and literacy across higher education and particularly learning development. However, researchers and practitioners both within and external to the AL movement have struggled to clarify the relationship between AL and pedagogy. English for…

Engineering undergraduates face difficulties in comprehending discipline-specific study materials because the reading skill has been neglected at the school-level, and the students themselves have not been motivated adequately to read. This paper hypothesizes that instruction-sessions on reading strategies enable tertiary-level learners to…

This paper analyzes writing tasks in academic writing textbooks for Japanese university students, focusing on the organization and difficulty of these tasks based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). A total of 411 writing tasks from 30 textbooks were coded by two experienced Japanese English teachers. The author…

Writing successful academic conference abstracts is essential for PhD students to enable them to access world-class conferences for the presentation of their research. However, these students often face both discourse-structure and linguistic difficulties in writing their conference abstracts. This study evaluates the impact of genre, process,…

Peer review is generally regarded as a useful learning tool for students, providing them with opportunities to interact with their peers when engaging in the process of critical reading and critical thinking, thus possibly raising students' motivation to learn. For peer review to be a manageable task for students, appropriate scaffolding is…

Acquisition of an additional language is assumed to involve several internal and external factors for the learner. Among external factors, instructional procedures and materials are vital in helping learners master L2 skills. This study investigates how the instructor's instructional variables and in-house materials influence tertiary-level Omani…

Knowledge of collocations is essential for English academic writing. However, there are few academic collocation referencing tools available and there is a pressing need to develop more. In this paper, we will introduce the ACOP (Academic Collocations and Phrases Search Engine), a newly developed corpus-based tool to search large academic corpora.…

This study explores the use of a Moodle-based electronic textbook (e-textbook) created for an on-campus intensive academic writing course. The role of the e-textbook in facilitating collaborative writing practice and developing academic digital literacy skills as part of a blended learning approach is investigated. The study involved 83 students…

This paper describes the rationale, design and implementation of a short private online course (SPOC) on data-driven learning (DDL) (Johns, 1991), focusing on L2 error correction in postgraduate academic writing and involving over 300 registered users. I discuss the affordances of using a SPOC platform (namely "EdX") for online DDL…

Adopting Hyland's (2002) framework of reporting words (RVs), the paper investigates the use of RVs in Master's theses written in English by students of two disciplines, Economics and Management and Natural Resources. The data were drawn from two sub-corpora, each consisting of 82 Literature Reviews, where other authors' research is summarised and…

While UNHCR estimates there are approximately 26 million refugees globally, only 1% of them have access to higher education. In US higher education, number of refugee-background students is often not tracked as they tend to be lumped together with other domestic students. While we do have some studies that explore transition and acculturation…

This study investigated the experiences of students in learning specific academic English vocabularies (ESAP) through the use of a mobile dictionary called SPEARA. The mobile app was designed to help the students learn the use of specific words, providing definitions and examples of use from authentic sources. The study aimed at identifying points…

This study investigates the possibility and efficacy of paper-based, in-class, data-driven learning (DDL) of academic lexical bundles below the C1 level of proficiency described by the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR; advanced high ACTFL). A two-stage experimental design involving three groups (n = 41) and 24 two-to-four word academic…