This paper introduces a project to develop a digital academic writing tool at Leeds Beckett University (LBU). Essay X-ray is an interactive online tool designed to help students get to grips with the structure and style of academic writing and was developed using the Articulate Storyline 360 platform. The aim was to expand LBU's academic skills…

This article draws on research undertaken as part of a Collective Biography project generated by a group of activists and lecturers teaching and researching in youth and community work (YCW). Collective Biography (CB) is an approach to research in which participants work productively with memory and writing to generate collective action orientated…

Various forms of proofreading of student writing take place in university contexts. Sometimes writers pay freelance proofreaders to edit their texts before submission for assessment; sometimes more informal arrangements take place, where friends, family, or coursemates proofread. Such arrangements raise ethical questions for universities…

Purpose: In the COVID-19 era, where blended learning is gaining popularity, research-informed teaching could be one of the alternatives or options to assess students' progress in Higher Education institutions. In the past, educators have assessed students' research skills gained from research-informed teaching through coursework components or…

This true longitudinal study explored the lexical development of L2 university English major students in Thailand using two learner corpora. This study analyzed the natural learners' English language writing assignments from two writing courses and tracked their lexical development over a relatively long period (three years with five batches of…

This paper provides an overview of UK Arabic language teaching in supplementary and mainstream schools from available research papers and provides a synopsis of recent developments in supporting Arabic teaching at school level and pathways to Higher Education. The largest study cited is the 2016 research collaboration between the British Council,…

Studies into the efficacy of teacher development courses for early career academics point to graduates conceiving of their teaching in increasingly complex and student-focussed ways. These studies have used pre- and post-testing of conceptions of teaching to identify this finding. However, these studies do not identify what aspects of these…

As teaching moves increasingly online, language teachers are faced with the challenge of how to support dyslexic students in an inclusive manner in and out of the classroom. This paper will focus on an innovative educational multi-modal, mobile application -- Comics for Inclusive English Language Learning (CIELL) -- supporting upper-intermediate…

Contract cheating is currently a concern for universities and the higher education (HE) sector. It has been brought into the spotlight in recent years through the growth of online essay mills, where students can easily commission and purchase written assessment responses. This study contributes to the wider literature on academic integrity in HE…

This case study explores the challenges that Master's students encounter when learning to write in academic English as part of a UK postgraduate course, after having achieved the required IELTS entry score. Interviews with six Chinese and Japanese learners at different stages of the Master's study revealed more sophisticated writing difficulties…

The patchwork text is an assessment method whereby students produce and share short pieces of writing over the course of a module that are subsequently integrated in a final summative piece. This paper reports on the experience of using this method of assessment in a criminal justice module. The objective behind introducing this form of assessment…

Where academic literacies are understood as situated social practices, effective academic literacy support needs to reflect the disciplinary and institutional specificity of the practices. However, the institutional separation of academic literacy teaching from disciplinary subject teaching, typical of UK universities, creates significant…

Establishing a positive, proactive approach to issues such as plagiarism requires that students are equipped with the skills and experience to act with integrity, and that educators are fully aware of the attitudes and ability of students, particularly when they start university. This project used a questionnaire-based methodology to probe the…

Strong arguments have been forwarded for embedding academic writing development into the UK higher education curriculum and for subject tutors to facilitate this development (Hyland, 2000; Lea & Street, 2006; Monroe, 2003; Wingate, 2006). This small-scale case study explores subject tutors' practices and beliefs with regard to the provision of…

A key highlight of this study is generating evidence of children "making aware the unaware", making tacit knowledge explicit. The research explores the levels of awareness in thinking used by eight 7-8 year-old children when engaged in school-based genre writing tasks. The focus is on analysing children's awareness of their thought…