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…

Although models have been a mainstay of academic writing pedagogy for centuries, a recurrent critique has been that they control or limit student writing and misrepresent the affairs they claim to model. These insufficiencies notwithstanding, models are ubiquitous in the ordinary, practical world, and their usefulness to novices can easily go…

Within a social view of literacy, this paper reports a two-year ethnographic case study of an adolescent multilingual writer, with respect to her transitions across in-school (i.e., Creative Writing class) and out-of-school writing contexts. This study was aimed to address two specific gaps in the fields of second language (L2) writing and…

Although the concept of metacognition has received considerable attention for its impact on learning across disciplinary areas, it has not been sufficiently discussed in the context of L2 academic reading and writing. In this paper, we bring together two theoretical frameworks, genre analysis and metacognition theory, and discuss the concept of…

Using textual analysis and interviews with student writers, this study aims to provide an insight into second language students' use of direct quotations in their MA theses by comparing direct quotations in high-rated and low-rated Master's theses, and by exploring student writers' own motivations to quote directly from sources. The corpus…

There has been extensive discussion of the difficulties experienced by tertiary students when writing using sources in both first- and second-language (L1, L2) writing literature; however, few studies have reported on instructional interventions that aim to assist students to master this complex academic literacy. The action research study…

The traditional approach to the education of newcomer students separates English language development from content instruction. It is assumed that English language proficiency is a prerequisite for subject-matter learning. The authors take the alternate view that the integration of historical thinking and digitized primary sources enhances English…

Lexical phrases are both numerous and functionally important in written texts. Despite this, L2 learners often find their use problematic, typically overusing a limited number of well-known phrases, while at the same time lacking a diverse enough phrasal repertoire to employ lexical phrases in a native-like manner. While a number of studies have…