This article presents an ethnographic case study of pre-service teachers' transformative learning in a Culture-Writing course at a Chinese university. In recounting three stories with fieldwork data gleaned from moments of students' pre-class discussions, reflective writings, and reports on term-paper projects, this study showcases how a group of…

The present study explores the role of writing in undergraduate education students' learning experiences in the United States. It focuses on how writing about previously significant experiences in the forms of narratives and journal entries transforms international education students' perceptions and identities and provides them with the space for…

Extant literature indicates that international graduate students may experience writing anxiety. Using a grounded theory analysis, we sought to understand how Chinese international graduate students (n = 15) experienced writing anxiety in an R1 public university. Findings revealed that writing anxiety among these students was related to (1) their…

This study investigates the process and its effect for a doctoral student's advanced academic literacy (AAL) development in the context of student-supervisor relationship (SSR). The data sources comprise an authentic three-year tutorial record and 68 reflective learning journals written by a successful Chinese doctoral student of linguistics. The…

This article hypothesizes that one of the reasons for Chinese EFL learners' rigid use of nominalization and insufficient use of hedging in academic writing can be attributed to the unclear understanding of the relationship between these two expressions. The aim of the research is to first prove and then explain the possible co-occurrence of…

Despite the steady growth in the recruitment and education of MBA students in China, there is a dearth of research on MBA students' perceptions of Business English Writing (BEW) in this context. This paper conducts a qualitative inquiry into Chinese MBA students' perceptions of BEW in English as a foreign language context in China. Forty-four MBA…

Based on a larger ethnography (Li, 2017. Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students' Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China. (PhD), Macquarie University. http://www.languageonthemove.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/LI_Jia_Social_reproduction_and_migrant_education.pdf) and…

Student plagiarism is a growing problem within Australian universities and abroad. Potentially exacerbating this situation, research indicates that students' attitudes toward plagiarism are typically more permissive and lenient than the policies of their tertiary institutions. There has been suggestion that this is especially so in Asian countries…

Informed by Vygotsky's conceptualization of the Zone of Proximal Development, this case study investigated the benefits of peer feedback on second language (L2) writing for students with high L2 proficiency and the factors that may influence their learning in peer feedback in the Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language context. Specifically, the…

Second language (L2) writing research has shed light on the important question of whether instructors' feedback (written and/or oral) is beneficial for students' writing (Conrad & Goldstein, 1999; Bitchener, 2008; Ferris, 2006; Truscott, 2007), and yet there are still debates about the efficacy of teacher feedback. One of the reasons why this…

This research inspects the allocation of involvement load to the evaluation component of the involvement load hypothesis, examining how three typical approaches to evaluation (cloze-exercises, sentence-writing, and composition-writing) promote word learning. The results of this research were partially consistent with the predictions of the…

Central to argumentative writing is the proper use of epistemic devices (EDs), which distinguish writers' opinions from facts and evaluate the degree of certainty expressed in their statements. Important as these devices are, they turn out to constitute a thorny area for non-native speakers (NNS). Previous research indicates that Chinese EFL…

One of the most common and vital areas of coverage in second language (L2) writing instruction is writing from sources, that is, the process of reading source text material and transferring content from that reading to writing. Research as well as everyday practice in the classroom has long shown that working with source texts is one of the most…

This study aimed to validate a newly-developed instrument, The Writing Strategies for Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) Questionnaire, with respect to its multifaceted structure of SRL strategies in English as a foreign language (EFL) writing. A total of 790 undergraduate students from 6 universities in Northeast China volunteered to be participants.…

Prominence, as an important dimension of cognitive construal, refers to the capacity to evoke a certain substructure as the focus of attention, which can be materialized in a variety of semantic and grammatical expressions (Langacker, 1987). Subject of a sentence (Zhang, 2011) and specific sentence structures (Lin, 2013) can bring a substructure…