This interview study takes translingual identity as its theoretical framework and a sociocultural linguistic approach as an analytical tool to examine how two Western-educated Taiwanese professors of English writing (Beth and Nita) construct a translingual professional identity. While Beth presented herself as a competent writing instructor beyond…

The study examined the types of written corrective feedback given by second language writing teachers on Taiwanese secondary school students' collocation errors. First, the written corrective feedback that teachers provided on learners' word choice errors was examined to uncover the types of feedback provided. Then, analysis focused on verb-noun…

This study scrutinizes the range and types of feedback given for word choice errors occurring in the English Taiwan Learner Corpus (ETLC), which contains Taiwanese high school students' English writings and the corrective feedback provided by L2 writing teachers. All instances of word choice error tags (n = 1,439) were extracted from the ETLC for…

University level second language (L2) creative writing courses are widespread around the world. However, little empirical research has been done to document teachers and students' experiences with courses whose main focus is to develop students' creativity. In response, this case study was conducted to explore how an English native-speaking (NS)…

Integrating service-learning into content courses is a growing pedagogical model expanding in higher education institutes in many countries. To examine the application of this approach in English L2 writing classes, this study embarked on a tutor-tutee mentoring project at a Taiwanese university. The participants in this study served as writing…

The teacher-student writing conference has long been recognized as being able to provide personalized instruction and contribute to learners' writing development. However, teachers often find it time-consuming to conference with individual students on a regular basis. Conferencing with pairs of students, therefore, may become a more pragmatic…

How writing teachers conduct their assessment is an important but under-researched topic in the field of language assessment. By partly adopting Cheng et al.'s (2004) survey, this mail survey study aims to fill this gap by examining how tertiary-level EFL writing teachers assess their students in basic English writing classes in Taiwan. The…

In this study, a quasi-experimental within-subject design was adopted to examine the intervention effects of teaching academic formulaic sequences (FS) for writing with one intact class consisting of 15 EFL third-year college students. Fifty target FSs were chosen from five recently compiled academic formulas lists (mostly derived through corpus…

This study reports the development of a scale to evaluate the speech act performance by intermediate-level Chinese learners of English. A qualitative analysis of the American raters' comments was conducted on learner scripts in response to a total of 16 apology and request written discourse completion task (WDCT) situations. The results showed…

The purpose of this study was to address a writing teacher's perspective about integrating Facebook, a social networking site, into a university-level English writing course in Taiwan. Data, including interviews with the teacher and class postings on Facebook, were analyzed inductively, qualitatively, and interpretively, resulting in three…

Copious researches argue the effectiveness of peer-correction in writing courses (e.g., Connor & Asenavage, 1994). Also, Coit (2004) mentions using peer feedback for correcting articles through a student-centered environment is a beneficial pedagogy to extend learners' academic-style writing practice. Therefore, this study focused on…

In a debate in the Forum section of the "TESOL Quarterly", Jones and Silva (1998) exchanged views about the merits and demerits of teacher-assigned themes and topics in tertiary-level EFL/ESL writing classes. However, much more remains to be explored. Should teachers assign the topics of papers, or even the content themes for the entire…

Responds to Tony Silva's 1997 article, which asserted that English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) writing teachers should prevent themes and topics from dominating or controlling the curriculum. This paper argues that it is sometimes helpful for writing teachers to control why and what students write, focusing on university-level English writing in…