This study explores the extended demands for writing in the Swedish public service sector of early childhood and how academic writing in the higher education programmes aimed at professional work in that sector is perceived to be of value for early childhood practice among practitioners. Empirical data was collected in individual interviews and…

Jennifer Hitchcock interviews community activist and director of Syracuse University's Composition and Cultural Rhetoric doctoral program, Steve Parks. They discuss Parks's working-class background, career path, influences, and activism. Parks also considers the direction of the field of composition and rhetoric and expresses optimism for the…

This paper identifies various challenges that a 1.5 generation immigrant faced in a mainstream college composition class and reports on how he constructed his social presence and became a successful multilingual writer. The findings of this study would help higher education institutions more effectively serve the growing population of ESL students…

This study brings together three student comments and three theoretical constructs taken from Bakhtin's (1981) collection of essays "The Dialogic Imagination", written in the 1930s. Bakhtin's concepts of the chronotope, interanimation and the monologic provide lenses on a shifting student perspective on authoritative writing in…

Student engagement in higher education has tended to be discussed in mainstream discourses by invoking typologies, seeking to place students into categories and focusing on the importance of "participation". I will give a critique of these ideologically loaded and normative constructs and their inherent contradictions, proposing an…

In this paper we share the outcomes of a project that sought to take up Nutbrown's challenge to "push out from the safe(er) boundaries of established methodologies" in early years research. We explore the value of auto-ethnographic storytelling, Lyotard's "petit récit", to the processes of doing and learning about research in…

This study considered the sources of facilitating experiences and strategies for thesis writing from doctoral students and graduates (N = 30). The sample was balanced between science and social science knowledge areas, with equal numbers of English as Second Language (ESL) participants in both groups. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were used…

Nurturing critical thinking (CT) has been acknowledged as a core objective of tertiary education, and drawn attention from academia of teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in China. The thrust of the present study was to determine the association between CT and EFL argumentative writing among Chinese undergraduates. To this end, 110…

The purpose of this study was to identify areas of APA formatting that college instructors view as most problematic in student writing. Using a Likert-style survey, the greatest areas of reported concern were problems with documentation, specifically, citations, references, and quoting; of lesser concern were various style and formatting errors in…

Research on authorial identity has focused almost exclusively on the attitudes and beliefs of students. This paper explores how academics understand authorial identity in higher education. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with professional academics and analysed using thematic analysis, identifying themes at two levels. At the semantic…

This paper examines the dynamic interplay between practice and theory in practice-led research in the visual arts. Building on recent debate around the issue and following appropriately rigorous models, the importance of locating a suitable methodology to adequately reflect the integrated process of research practice in written as well as visual…

This article aims at a better understanding of the role played by multilingualism and language in general in the process of scientific knowledge construction. By analysing various cases of multilingual communication in different universities and subjects (marketing, physics, law), we propose to focus on two parameters: the language regime and the…

Assessment for learning has been extensively researched in the past two decades. However, its applications as a means of classroom-based assessment, especially for promoting teaching and learning of writing, have been underrepresented in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) portfolio settings. This paper aims to critically review the extent to…

This volume provides a timely focus on various aspects related to foreign language learning and teaching within the university context. It discusses current issues, such as: increasing popularity of English Medium Instruction (EMI), communication in English as a Lingua Franca, staying abroad, and provisions of English for professional or academic…

This article reports on the results of a qualitative, interview-based study in which multilingual writing faculty based at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon, read and responded to "core" texts of composition scholarship primarily published in North America, for a North American audience. This study is premised on the…