The Middle East Study Tour (MEST) is a capstone elective unit that stands alone as a credit module towards an undergraduate degree. The tour has the dual purposes of exposing students to the Middle East region's political challenges and better illuminating potential career paths for life after university. But is one student's personal discovery…

Recent research supports the benefit of students' construction of relevance through writing about the connection of content to their life. However, most such research defines relevance narrowly as utility value--perceived instrumentality of the content to the student's career goals. Furthermore, the scope of phenomenological and conceptual…

This article describes an innovative approach to introducing translanguaging in an English for academic purposes (EAP) course at a young Sino-US joint-venture university in China. To promote the use of Chinese students' full linguistic and communicative repertoires in an English-medium-of-instruction university, I intentionally incorporated…

The recent application of Content and Language Integrated Learning programs in higher education provides an extensive area for research due to the quick implementation of English as the medium of instruction for university programs, as well as to the need of university students around the world to communicate through English and to try different…

This dissertation reports on a study investigating the identity of first-year university students as writers. The longitudinal project explored how students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds construct their identities as undergraduates and as academic writers in their first year. The research was qualitative and interpretative, and used…

This essay presents results from a comprehensive study of writing in the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Pittsburgh. It is in two sections. The first section reports on interviews with faculty from across the disciplines in the School of Arts and Sciences; the second reports finding from student focus groups and from an extensive…

How much do specialized academic discourse communities matter to undergraduate writers? To what degree should theories of specialized discourses influence the design of undergraduate Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs? At the University of Iowa, where an undergraduate Writing Fellows program engages peer tutors in writing-intensive…

A project in a second and third grade classroom resulted in a classroom newsletter designed and written by regular and special education students to provide the school and parents with information regarding activities in their classroom and school. Students were provided with an authentic opportunity to express their ideas and feelings about…