The prevalence of low to very low adult English literacy levels in First Nations communities in Australia continues to be an issue, despite ten years of government-supported Foundation Skills training provided through the national vocational education and training system. This study examines an innovative First Nations community-controlled…

Current research suggests that students who struggle with grammar, spelling, mechanics and other "problems of ability," as well as students who suffer from "problems of engagement," as well as those students who see reading and writing as a chore, can benefit from creative writing assignments and learn to enjoy reading and…

According to creative writing pedagogies academic Susanne Gannon ("English in Australia, 54"(2), 43-56, 2019), and the Federal government-commissioned NAPLAN review (McGaw et al., 2020), NAPLAN has restricted how writing is taught in secondary schools. A NAPLAN-influenced structural approach to teaching writing has subsumed the…

A writing program based on brief regular writing sessions can greatly improve research productivity. Ten years' experience with a program at the University of Wollongong provides insights into the benefits and challenges in supporting a new writing habit.

Writing practices are seen to be essential for professional engineers, yet many engineering students and academics struggle with written communication, despite years of interventions to improve student writing. Much has been written about the importance of getting engineering students to write, but there has been a little investigation of…

Corpus-based approaches to language and literacy education, commonly known as data-driven learning (DDL), are increasing in prominence. However, the vast majority of DDL interventions involve adult tertiary level learners, leaving a dire need for comprehensive DDL studies for secondary education. The present study reports on a half-year DDL…

Undergraduate nursing students often find essay writing challenging, and feel underprepared, yet the impact of using online feedback to support essay writing has been underexplored. First-year nursing students from a regional university were involved in a project that encouraged them to access an online tutoring service, as part of their…

The article examines the experiences of Chinese PhD students doing research in China Studies as well as the experiences of their supervisors who supervise their research in Australian universities. By conducting semi-structured interviews with both PhD students and their supervisors, we aim to understand the expectations, concerns and challenges…

Sounds-Write is a systematic synthetic phonics approach that has been successfully used to teach students to read and spell for the last two decades. This volume brings together twelve case studies -- written by practitioners -- of implementation of the Sounds-Write programme in different settings and geographical contexts (Europe, US, Australia).…

While its importance for promoting learning is well-documented, feedback can only promote learning to the extent that it is acted on by learners. However, there is evidence that students often have difficulty understanding feedback or with knowing how to act on it and/or are not necessarily receptive to the feedback provided. These kinds of…

This paper is based on a research project designed to cultivate teachers as creative writers and as teachers of creative and critical writing. The project involved both primary and secondary teachers from eight schools located in Sydney, Australia. It documents the evolution of an open-ended research project that aimed to accommodate the needs of…

The internationalisation of higher education generates several issues related to quality, uniformity of subjects taught across campuses and the role of differences in English-speaking ability, which may affect student learning and skills development. This study used a self-assessment survey framework to investigate Australian (native English…

An increase in migration of Sudanese and South Sudanese people to Australia due to civil unrest in their home country has increased the numbers of Sudanese students at university. Migrant experiences, particularly those of English as a second language, can impact negatively on education and learning. Inconsistencies between student scores on…

The issues surrounding giving feedback to second language (L2) learners have attracted the interests of a number of researchers to date. Most continue to wonder how to give L2 students effective feedback. Some studies found that ESL/EFL students focus mainly on surface-level issues, those that relate to grammatical and mechanical aspects of…

This study sought to examine the development of paragraph writing skills of 116 English as a second language university students over the course of 12 weeks and the relationship between the linguistic features of students' written texts as measured by Coh-Metrix--a computational system for estimating textual features such as cohesion and…