Understanding how individuals interact with texts in situated writing acts and what goes into the process of writing in various social, cultural, and educational contexts has recently been laid out as a broadened research agenda for cultural studies of writing within the framework of intercultural rhetoric. However, there is a paucity of classroom…

Intertextuality is a prominent feature of academic writing, and the ability to use sources effectively and appropriately is an essential skill which novice writers must acquire. It is also a complex skill, and student performance is not always successful. It is presumably beneficial for students to receive consistent messages about what source use…

This study investigates the benefits of collaborative writing tasks. Previous research from the perspective of the sociocultural theory of mind suggests that writing tasks completed in pairs offer learners an opportunity to collaborate in the solution of their language-related problems, co-construct new language knowledge, and produce…

The ESP School of genre study has been noted as increasingly bridging the linguistic and the rhetorical traditions in genre studies. However, some genre theorists have characterized the ESP genre approaches as treating rhetorical contexts as mainly, if not merely, the background for explicating texts. This paper explores this issue through…

In this essay, the author explores four fundamental, but contested topics in Genre-based Writing Instruction (GBWI) about which decisions must be made as curricula are developed. Drawing from the three major genre traditions (Hyon, 1996), the author examines the contested topics ("naming", "awareness/acquisition", "pedagogical focus", "and…

English as an Additional Language (EAL) students' textual borrowing in disciplinary writing has attracted wide research interest in recent years. However, much of the research was conducted in the regular curriculum setting while the relevance of the issue in a writing-for-publication context has largely been overlooked. In particular,…

In this paper we report a case study of two first-year students at a university in Hong Kong doing the same writing assignment that required the use of sources. We explore the students' understanding of plagiarism, their strategies for composing, the similarity between their texts and source texts, and the lecturer's assessment of their work. The…

In light of the increasing student diversity in U.S. university composition classrooms, there is a strong need for collaboration between L1 and L2 writing specialists. Differences in the lexicons of our two fields, however, as well as the philosophical differences embedded in our word choices, can hinder productive L1-L2 communication. The purpose…

The present study investigates EFL students' perceptions of power differentials and their negotiation strategies when communicating with native English-speaking students via emails. The study involved 28 Taiwanese and American undergraduates who participated in a semester-long cross-national email writing activity. Findings show that students in…

In studies of L2 writing, much more attention has been paid to the needs of students learning to write than to teachers learning to teach. In EFL contexts, while much research is geared towards helping learners cope with the challenges of writing in a foreign language, studies on EFL writing teacher education are few and far between. We have…

This paper presents a critical analysis of two recent studies on error correction, Ellis, Sheen, Murakami, and Takashima (2008) and Bitchener (2008) and argues that neither study constitutes evidence for error correction based on discussion of the comparability of participants, design issues, and analysis flaws in both studies. The paper further…

In this paper, we argue that discussions of transfer in L2 writing and composition studies have focused primarily on the reuse of past learning and thus have not adequately accounted for the adaptation of learned writing knowledge in unfamiliar situations. In an effort to expand disciplinary discussions of transfer in L2 writing and composition…

This study examines how novice foreign language (FL) writers develop their genre awareness, linguistic knowledge, and writing competence in a genre-based writing course that incorporates email-writing tasks. To define genre, the study draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) that sees language as a resource for making meaning in a particular…

This study investigated the effectiveness and students' perceptions of collaborative writing (CW) in second language (L2). The study involved 38 first year students in two intact classes at a large university in the UAE (United Arab Emirates). One class consisted of 18 students and was considered the experimental group, and the second consisted of…

This article presents the findings of a study that investigated (1) the extent to which written corrective feedback (CF) can help advanced L2 learners, who already demonstrate a high level of accuracy in two functional uses of the English article system (the use of "a" for first mention and "the" for subsequent or anaphoric mentions), further…