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…

The aim of this project was to identify ways in which students are using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) technologies for the planning and researching stage of essay style assignments. The study recruited 30 students from various subject areas and levels of study and with different self-reported levels of confidence in using GAI tools.…

While research on postgraduate thesis writing has investigated how students cope with institutional assessment criteria, this study explores how students form their own criteria for self-assessment through the writing process, aiming to account for the development of their independent thinking in academic socialisation. Based on in-depth…

Artificial intelligence (AI) first made its entry into higher education in the form of paraphrasing tools. These tools were used to take passages that were copied from sources, and through various methods, disguised the original text to avoid academic integrity violations. At first, these tools were not very good and produced nearly…

Learning from videos is becoming an important part of educational activities. Whereas outlines have great potential, particularly during information seeking (IS), few studies have so far explored the effect of their presence in videos. The two aims of the present study were thus to 1) evaluate the influence of outlines on IS and learning, and 2)…

This article traces the history of college writing and suggests a different way ahead. To show why we need this approach, the article historicizes the start of postsecondary English as a paradoxical one, committed to egalitarian ideals while privileging narrow and exclusive English usage. To offer an alternative approach, the article synthesizes…

This study was intended to describe the relation between students' reasoning and their ethnicities. Comparison between the argumentative writings written by Javanese and Bataknese students - two of the ethnics found in Indonesia- was conducted to seek shared and variation of reasoning between the two ethnics. Interpretation on the results of such…

Thesis writing is a skill that every PhD candidate must acquire to convey his or her research findings clearly. The main objective of this paper is to facilitate the thesis writing process so that PhD candidates understand what a PhD thesis is and can write their thesis correctly and scientifically. The methodology used in this research was…

In recent years corpus linguistics research findings have begun to trickle down into some student language learning texts, both in terms of the focus and the specific material taught. However, when it comes to writing pedagogy, the materials, templates and the models presented to students tend to show a remarkably conservative (and uniform)…

This study has been conducted to evaluate transition marker (TM) types in the MA theses written by the native speakers (NSs) of English and Turkish speakers (TSs) of English. The purpose is to compare the most salient transition types of the NSs and TSs randomly selected theses introduction, results and discussion, and conclusion sections in the…

Higher education focuses on promoting the training of autonomous, critical professionals who adapt to the ever-more demanding labor market. To achieve these objectives, it is necessary to rethink teaching practices in order to allow the student to be the main actor and modeler for their learning process. Previous studies based on Vygotsky's…

The organization of knowledge influences how effectively students learn, so that if the information is well structured and the knowledge acquisition process is carried out in a systemic way, one can more effectively retrieve pieces of knowledge. To tackle this problem a common document format used in academia, IMRaD (Introduction, Method, Results,…

Over the past few decades, the number of people enrolled in doctoral study has increased dramatically across the world. In practical terms, this has meant that universities now receive increasingly diverse students with regard to ethnicity, age, language, culture, and background preparedness for higher degree study. Students can, and often do,…

This study is aimed at investigating the rhetorical structure of Introduction chapters of English master theses written by Indonesian postgraduate students and identifying the frequency of communicative moves and their constituent steps as well as finding how the students justify their research projects reported in their Introduction chapters. The…

MA students often find writing the discussion section of a thesis (hereafter discussion writing) a difficult task (Bitchener & Basturkmen, 2006). Thesis advisors, research writing instructors, and graduate students are able to recognize the strength and weakness of discussion writing through established levels of quality. Therefore, grading…