In this study, we sought to understand assessment-related attitudes and authentic experiences of evaluation anxiety with a sample of first-year university students. We focused on identifying: (a) why students had reported high levels of anxiety on a recent, grade-bearing assessment, and (b) how their attitudes toward assessment type and weighting…

This paper adds to the nascent literature on teaching research methods and what students learn from courses and assessment. Postgraduate students are often confronted with large amounts of reading, and the content of material can be intimidating. Convincing them also to engage critically with readings is even more difficult. We report on a…

In this paper, a practical course for listening, speaking, reading and writing was designed using authentic video material. The aim of this paper is to offer tools to the TEFL teacher in order to design new course materials using video material. The development procedure is explained in detail, and the underpinning main theories are also…

This article argues that task representation should be considered as part of the construct of classroom-based academic writing. Task representation is a process that writers move through when creating a unique mental model of the requirements for each new writing task they encounter. Writers' task representations evolve throughout the composing…

As two lecturers from quite different disciplines--Population Health and Musicology--we faced a common instructional challenge: how to improve the standard of student writing in our first-year courses for nonmajors, and thus to invite our students into the discourses of our disciplines. We collaborated in the design of a sequence of online writing…

This article describes a project conducted with Year 12 English students. It was based on the model of "Teaching as Inquiry" (Ministry of Education, 2007) and aimed to develop students' self-efficacy in relation to their literature-response essay writing. Self-efficacy was measured using Bandura's (2006) self-efficacy scale and an…

Undertaken during a period when changes in the assessment of English in public examinations at 16+ were becoming embedded in classroom practice, this comparative research explores where poetry is located within the newly aligned examination assessment frameworks of New Zealand and England. It comments on how these frameworks are locally…

Two online collaborative assignments that connected students in courses at Unitec, New Zealand, and Baruch College, City University of New York, are the focus of this article. For the first assignment, small, blended groups used five different online techniques to explore topics being discussed in an intercultural communication course at each…