Students seem to encounter various challenges when writing bachelor's and master's theses, indicating a need to support them in their writing processes. In this study, academic writing workshops for students writing bachelor's and master's theses were developed and investigated during three years of a participatory action research project. The…

This study explores student perspectives about the challenges and affordances of participating in two dialogic teaching initiatives (writing group and writing workshop) implemented in Argentina to improve doctoral students' academic writing. It seeks to understand if these pedagogical initiatives can open, widen, and deepen dialogic spaces that,…

The importance of academic literacy acquisition through enculturation in higher education is self-evident. Important within the processes of enculturation is how interactants are positioned. This study examines how interactants within the writing classroom of a higher education institution in Ghana are positioned through dialogue. Data for this…

This article outlines a workshop orienting sociology graduate students to overcoming challenges in publishing. Although graduate students are increasingly told to publish, little guidance exists on how to best prepare them for this venture; mentorship scholarship typically assumes the professor--student relationship is the best or most appropriate…

This study explores how college writers responded to teachers' after-class tutoring that was intended to complement their in-class writing instruction. Through qualitative content analyses of three focal college student writers' interviews, reflections, writings, and teacher-student talks collected in a Chinese university, the study shows that…

This study examines how supervisory feedback facilitates doctoral students' academic literacy development in their situated practice of writing for publication (WFP). Multiple-sourced data collected from one supervisor and his four doctoral students were analyzed, including drafts with written comments added, feedback dialogues around text…

The paper explores questions of power arising from feminist facilitators running a doctoral writing group at a UK university. Butler's [2014. Re-thinking Vulnerability and Resistance. [Online]. Accessed September 12, 2017.…

Academic Literacies, the most influential conceptual framework for writing practitioners at UK universities, is closely related to widening participation. At the same time, writing support is often justified with the argument that written communication is among the most important employability skills for graduates. While these concepts are often…

This paper comprises findings from three parallel case studies within the broad framework of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). These provide results from classroom-based action research conducted over two years working with Semantics, Specialisation and axiological cosmologies from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT). Each author shares how one or…

Academic Literacies and English for Specific Purposes perspectives on the teaching of academic writing tend to be positioned as dichotomous and ideologically incompatible. Nonetheless, recent studies have called for the integration of these two perspectives in the design of writing programmes in order to meet the needs of students in the…

Informed by Vygotsky's conceptualization of the Zone of Proximal Development, this case study investigated the benefits of peer feedback on second language (L2) writing for students with high L2 proficiency and the factors that may influence their learning in peer feedback in the Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language context. Specifically, the…

This article discusses the complexities surrounding the teaching of a critical thinking and academic writing module on a vocational postgraduate programme. Students enrolled on this programme are strongly industry focused and often fail to see the relevance of such a module, despite the fact that most are international students with English as…

A major challenge that universities and lecturers face is improving the written output of their students. While many resources are invested in improving tertiary students' writing, lecturing staff and the broader community lament students' abilities. This article reports on a study investigating the characteristics of students' written texts and…

Recent and current changes in higher education have been both top-down and bottom-up, i.e. regulation and control measures from authorities on one hand and increasing numbers of international students on the other. This has led to a dilemma between unification and diversification. There is a marked pressure towards more testing, more streamlining…

The study described in this article sets out to understand the barriers and affordances to successful completion of the short research thesis required in many advanced undergraduate courses or Honours programmes. In the study, the genre features of students' research projects and the criteria used to assess them were analysed and both students and…