Adopting a queer pedagogy in composition classes that include diverse student populations can play an important role in promoting conversations on diversity and equity in the classroom. Under this approach, teachers and students are invited to question the connections between language, the body, power, and ethnicity, thus analysing how our…

Digital multimodal composing (DMC) allows students to mobilize a wide range of multimodal resources to make meaning. While studies in DMC tended to focus on language-learning contexts, few of them examine its use in content-based courses whereby students are proficient L2 users expected to demonstrate understanding of abstract concepts using DMC.…

This study explores possible benefits of freewriting for EFL students' writing anxiety and fluency. Thirty university students who were enrolled in an academic writing class participated in the study. Pre- and post-writing anxiety surveys, freewritings, pre- and post-essays, and student reflections were collected as data. The study found that EFL…

Virtual exchange, as a global social practice, provides language teacher candidates with opportunities to connect their global peers and language learners. Integrated into teacher education, virtual exchange practices enhance teacher candidates' professional and pedagogical knowledge and practices. This study details a virtual exchange program…

This preliminary study explores how international students bring their cultural knowledge and experiences into relationship with other writers' ideas as they engage in an online discussion in response to a news text. This article focuses on a language excerpt from an online discussion group, including the assignment prompt, reading text, student…

It is now relatively straightforward to program software to detect words and phrases containing errors in the free-form writing of L2 learners of English. This article, however, reports on progress in the development of software which not only detects errors but also provides feedback explaining the nature of each error and how to correct it. Such…

This article questions how narrative writing is assessed, seeking to understand what we test, what we value, and why. It uses a single anomalous case that arose in the course of my recent PhD thesis to highlight the issues, asking if sufficient attention is being given to the value of emotional content in a piece of writing in comparison to its…

Feedback in writing has in recent years attracted the attention of an increasing number of writing researchers. While much feedback research focuses on the act of feedback per se, little attention has been paid to the issue of teacher readiness to implement change in feedback. Using data gathered from Hong Kong secondary teachers attending a…

This study utilizes a pre-test/post-test assessment to investigate the instructional efficacy of a genre-based approach to teaching summary writing. Forty-one EFL university students in Taiwan were asked before and after the instruction to summarize a simplified version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a maximum of 500 words. All the students'…

Implementing process pedagogy in an L2 writing classroom has its own limits for students with low English proficiency. Although L1 writers commonly benefit from writing multiple drafts, most of the low English level Korean college students in my English composition class did not benefit from the revisions. This article introduces an innovative…

This article critically reviews the usefulness of grammar correction in second language writing instruction through the eyes of five second-language writers. It first examines the validity of four teaching principles that appear to influence how writing instructors approach error correction in classrooms and concludes with discussions as to why…

This article explores how effective peer reviews, where students read drafts of their fellow students' essays and make suggestions for revisions, are for English-as-a-Second-Language composition students. Suggestions for organizing effective peer review sessions are provided. (four references) (JL)

The technique of self-monitoring, by giving students control over the feedback they receive, enables teachers to provide effective feedback. This article presents a study investigating the use of this technique in Chinese students' English writing. The results show that students can be trained to use self-monitoring in their writing.…

In academic writing, non-native speakers tend to misuse the phrase "on the contrary", confusing it with "on the other hand". Sources of guidance to usage in English almost invariably describe it as a phrase of contrast or contradiction. This may apply to how the phrase is normally used in dialogue, but an analysis of the phrase as usually…

This paper aims to explore advanced ESL learners' ability to make improvements in grammatical accuracy by autonomously noticing and correcting their own grammatical errors. In the recent literature in SLA, it is suggested that classroom tasks can be used to foster autonomous language learning habits (cf. Dam 2001). Therefore, it is important to…