This paper presents a special issue on writing around the globe. Researchers from across the world describe writing practices in their country using a wide variety of methodology. The papers show that while there are many similarities in writing instruction from one country to the next, there are also many differences. As a result, the authors…

Metadiscourse markers (MDMs) are lexical resources that writers employ to organize their discourse and state their stance towards the content or the reader. This study investigated the frequency with which interactive and interactional MDMs were employed in biological research articles (RAs). It also explored the possible relationship between the…

First-year composition in U.S. higher education has been a major site of L2 writing research. Despite the historical division between mainstream first-year composition and L2 writing, there has been an increasing interest in integrating insights from L2 writing research into the professional literature in rhetoric and composition and writing…

A focused scientific research effort on writing research and its relationship to language development and reading is needed to address the writing and broader literacy needs of today's and tomorrow's learners and workers. In the United States, as well as in many other nations, research on writing has been neglected in relation to the emphasis on…

While "internationalization" has become a buzzword in composition scholarship and teaching, our discourses tend toward fuzzy uses and understandings of the term and its multiple implications. We tend to focus on how our U.S. experience is being internationalized: how English and its teaching are spreading; how other countries, different…

Compares American and French business correspondence with regard to format, organization, tone, and style. Argues that many of the differences result from cultural and value differences, French letters tending to be more formal and formatted differently. (RAE)

Supplementing a study that surveyed the instructional approach to writing skills of Ontario's teacher training institutions as well as composition instruction in general at the secondary level, this bibliography complements existing bibliographies on writing instruction. More than 1,600 works published before 1977 in Canada, Great Britain, and the…

Compares essays by college students from Mali and from the United States, exploring cross-culturally the influence of orality and audience or written discourse. Finds that the "other-directed," group-directed dimension of the Malians' writing contrasts with the overwhelming by self-referential dimension of the U.S. students. (SR)

This report is the final report of a comparative study of the teaching and learning of writing in the United Kingdom and the United States, consisting of observational studies of 4 pairs of classrooms which exchanged writing between the 2 countries over a 2-year period. Following an overview in chapter 1, chapter 2 describes the study's methods.…

The media, which includes editorials, have been shown to play an important role in the definition of priorities in public agenda. In the domain of international matters, the public relies heavily on the media, and editorials play an even greater role. This article examines how explicit mentions of external sources of information function in the…

A crossnational study compared secondary school boys' and girls' social (individual attitudinal, and family) and linguistics (type/frequency of oral conversations and test related activities) experience, and their relation to differential writing performance. Subjects included more than 1000 secondary students in their final year of compulsory…

The linguistic purposes of this research were to focus on content, themes and topics, and to analyze the way the target language (English) was used in e-mail. Communicativeness and the roles of the communicator (writer-reader) became central, emphasizing the multidirectional character of e-mail communication. The basic tenet of communicativeness…