Substantial research indicates that students' beliefs mediate learning strategies. Nevertheless, students' strategy-related beliefs about feedback and their mediation on strategies to act on feedback are insufficiently addressed. This case study aimed to examine: (1) students' strategy-related beliefs about feedback in L2 writing and (2) how…

Despite postgraduates' struggles to master English academic writing, the fulfilment of postgraduates' motivational needs in classes of English academic writing has been scarcely researched. This study examines the motivational practices of teachers of postgraduate English academic writing, the perceived effectiveness of the adopted strategies, and…

Integrated writing is increasingly used in language assessment programmes. As a hybrid task, it requires students to coordinate different language skills, i.e. listening, reading and writing, to retrieve information from multiple sources, and compose an essay for a specific purpose. Tapping into the varied skills that contribute to successful…

This research conducted diagnostic assessment of problems in first-year undergraduates' English academic papers and tracked potential sources of the problems to the writing process and strategy use. Data collected include 339 term papers and interviews with 17 students. The samples were manually error tagged and marked against a detailed…

Writing at the doctoral level presents many challenges for second language writers. This paper reports on a longitudinal study investigating English as a second language (ESL) doctoral students' writing problems and the strategies they developed to meet these challenges. Eight students were interviewed four times over a two-year period during…

This study aims to explore the effectiveness of a paradigm to teach native Cantonese-speaking university students the hierarchical structure of expository prose to improve paragraph coherence. Most of the diagnostic argumentative essays the participants in this study wrote in the course were incoherent, failing to meet readers' expectation of…

This article describes a study which investigated how explicit strategy instruction may shape student use of metacognitive knowledge and in what ways this knowledge promotes self-regulation in the learning of writing. From a class of a 2-year associate degree programme in Hong Kong, which experienced a 15-week process-oriented writing course…

Reporting a case study of two high-achieving Chinese students studying at a university in Hong Kong, this paper presents evidence that poses an anti-thesis to the stereotypes of first year university students as holding naïve beliefs about learning and of "Chinese learners" as lacking in critical thinking. Many studies have examined…

As a symptom of globalization and the marketization of the universities, more and more scholars, many or most, of whom use English as an additional language (EAL), are being required to published in English. This article presents some qualitative data which highlights some of the difficulties encountered by such writers. It first discusses a…

The importance of establishing a connection with readers in academic writing is now widely acknowledged. The growing literature on this topic, however, has largely concentrated on published "expert" texts and on the ways that writers use language to project their stance or identity. In contrast, this paper will focus on strategies which…