Can online collaboration yield a positive effect on academic writing in a foreign language? If so, what exactly is the added value, compared to individual writing, and (how) does it translate to better output? These are the central questions addressed in this paper. L2 writing research has long highlighted the benefits of collaboration in terms of…

Surveys of employers continually highlight the need for better communication skills among recent college graduates. Yet, writing instruction in higher education serves far more than a transactional purpose. Writing facilitates learning, helps students gain skills in analysis and synthesis, and supports a range of other personal and intellectual…

The Web has become a vast and appealing source of information for undergraduate students writing academic papers. While some online resources are comparable in quality to the materials housed in a library, newly accessible, Web-specific genres, such as interest groups, often undermine traditional expectations of scholarly authority, rigor, and…

Presents the text of an account of the author's research. Notes that the text's four layers (scientific report, reflective analysis, personal history, and deliberative appeal) are each indispensable yet individually inadequate to the task. Considers the tensions among possible accounts of the research and what these tensions say about the reading…

Asserts that the main goal of writing instruction is to help students attain the competence necessary for academic discourse and the most effective way to do this is to teach the basic strategies for uncovering the rules that govern discourse in any particular context.(SRT)

In this article we report on a study in which verbal protocol data were used to explore English as a foreign language writers' planning behavior while engaged in academic writing tasks. The analysis was approached from a temporal perspective (i.e., time spent on planning operations) in relation to three independent variables: (a) the participants'…

The narrative of personal experience is considered in this paper as a canonical discourse genre from which various forms of expository patterns can be derived in a move towards decontextualized academic discourse. More specifically, the paper analyzes the multi-draft transition from a narrative of personal experience to a classification. The…

Follows six non-native-speaker college students through an authentic essay-writing task. Finds that note-taking behaviors facilitated learning from text, but that depth of processing and the students' self-positioning in the discourse community were more important than their were overt behaviors. Concludes that students' notes were useful as a…

The two current approaches to teaching academic discourse are conventional and collaborative; in practice, they overlap because both are based on a "conversational model" of learning to write in college. Taxonomists and collaborationists disagree on the relative emphasis that should be placed on the various pedagogical methods:…

Examines the transitions that writers (college seniors enrolled in a 12-week corporate internship program) make when moving from academic to professional discourse communities. Reports a consistent pattern of expectation, frustration, and accommodation as writers adjust to their new writing communities. (MM)

This case study examined one advanced undergraduate student's efforts to write on similar topics for three different audiences--an advanced composition class, a history of Western philosophy class, and a district meeting of Pi Alpha Theta. Initially the student was juggling the demands of writing research papers for her two courses, and the third…

The first phase of a study into language learning examined six undergraduate students' building of disciplinary discourse knowledge as they became immersed in the disciplinary community of psychology. Students were followed over the entire 4-year course of their undergraduate careers. Data included interviews, questionnaires, papers the students…

Uses a case study to explore the concept of academic authority and how it manifests itself in written arguments. Investigates how differences in authority are played out in the academic environment. Examines how the lack of authority shapes the reading and writing practices adopted by students. (HB)

This study is the 10th in a series of reports from the Reading-to-Write Project, a collaborative study designed to examine the cognitive processes of college freshmen in the act of entering a university-level academic discourse community and to present a model of that transition. Subjects, 17 freshmen (of a total of 72 participating either as…

A study examined how college students wrote a critique of a sociology article; which features of written critiques were valued most by professors in the discipline; and whether students' educational level and status predicted the quality of their critiques. Subjects, 32 students enrolled in an upper-level sociology course, read and responded by…