Many Western universities provide for focused attention on the development of second language writers' academic writing in first-year courses, but there are generally fewer defined channels for such learning after their departure from these courses. This article uses the lens of writing as situated social practices to investigate opportunities for…

Current pedagogical practices have seen the rapid spread of technological tools that carry out tasks on behalf of the learner; we use the term "technological proxy" to refer to these tools. A popular technological proxy used by students worldwide is a text-matching software called Turnitin. Turnitin alerts users to sections of an…

In a critical study, researchers explored academic writing experiences of three international female graduate students at a southern U.S. university in order to understand their perspectives of themselves as writers across cultures, their experiences with academic writing, and their coping strategies for academic writing assignments. Findings…

Process-based composition pedagogy has ignored the question of "doneness": the criteria used to decide when a piece of writing is complete. This article uses survey results from first- and second-year composition courses to challenge common beliefs about how students determine when writing assignments are sufficiently completed. We find…

Student plagiarism in higher education is widespread and presents a growing concern for faculty and administrators who are intent on upholding academic integrity. However, a myopic view of plagiarism as a purely ethical issue is misguided. It is not always simply a deliberate attempt to deceive. Through the involvement of students in an…

The present study investigated how 6 Korean ESL graduate students in Canada used a suite of freely available reference resources, consisting of Web-based corpus tools, Google search engines, and dictionaries, for solving linguistic problems while completing an authentic academic writing assignment in English. Using a mixed methods design, the…

The transformation of higher education has been a pressing concern for policy makers and practitioners. This article provides examples of the transformative potential of assessments designed within the framework of a multi-literacies and heteroglossic pedagogy in an Applied English Language course at a South African university. These assessments,…

Although immigrant youth make up more than 20 percent of school-age children in the U.S., little is known about how they manage school assignments and texts. In this paper the author presents Tara (pseudonym) as a telling case of a first-generation immigrant youth who is encountering and grappling with academic literacy--defined as not only the…

This qualitative research study examines how 12 undergraduate second-language learners understood the concept of citations in academic writing. The following questions guided this study: What are the participants' beliefs about citing research? How do students conceive the role and function of citations in their writing assignments? How do they…

In a first-year, university-level communication course that examined issues of race, ethnicity, postcolonialism, diaspora, and coming-of-age using different points of view and modes of communication, students created graphic novel-style auto-ethnographies to reflect on their experiences with diaspora and identity creation. The assignment was an…

The study examines writing challenges Emirati and Saudi students face at U.S. universities. Based on a sample of 219, a mixed methods approach was used to analyze responses from the participants. The results of the questionnaire reveal that Less than 31% Emirati and Saudi students feel "comfortable" in completing written assignments. The…

Academic writing is a mainstay of expression in secondary schools. However, many students think of academic writing in terms of local operations that include spelling, punctuation, use of third person, and so on. Teachers may expect mastery of local operations, but often they want students to navigate the terrain of the content area or discipline…

This ethnographic research probes into feedback on academic writing received by Taiwanese students in Australian higher education institutions, and examines whether the feedback received helped students to participate in the written discourse of academic communities. Academic writing dominates the academic life of students in Australia and is the…

Considering the change of attitudes of plagiarism detection to assessment for learning, it is necessary to explore the effect of the paradigm shift for Turnitin, from "plagiarism detection" to self-service learning aid. Two research questions are explored in the present study: (1) How Turnitin augments self-service skills of students and…

In this study, a qualitative analysis of 276 first-year Japanese university science major responses to plagiarism to deconstruct prevailing generalizations regarding the incidence of plagiarism by Japanese university students. These students were enrolled in a compulsory yearlong English academic writing course. While utilizing a contextualized…