Helping Second Language Student Writers Improve Their Revision

Writing ability is a comprehensive evaluation of language learning level. Nowadays, most universities offer writing-related courses to help students lay a good foundation for writing and contribute to their subsequent studies. Compared with native English speakers, second language learners need to do more revision, which is a great challenge for second language learners. Therefore, in this paper, the aim is to make the second language students understand and apply the revision correctly.

Harnessing the Power of Reflective Journal Writing in Global Contexts: A Systematic Literature Review

writing that has significant impacts on student writers worldwide and identify the qualities of reflective journal writing that foster transformative practices involving personal, relational, and intellectual activities. This systematic literature review incorporated important theoretical frameworks into acceptable convictions. A thorough analysis of 20 recently published research articles (out of 450) from 2016 to 2021 aimed to present written arguments that support thesis positions and credible evidence, as well as determine the global contexts of writing practices. The findings showed that reflective journal writing reinforced a profound transformation to further explore self-discovery, self-inquiry, and critical ideas. It is also concerned with writing performance, as well as the advancement of cognitive and metacognitive writing skills. Reflective journal writers' voices empowered significant changes in a variety of writing aspects, including personal idea exploration, creativity, self-organization, and professional practice development. These findings have implications for encouraging critical reflection, self-expression, and critical thinking among students. They should write reflective journals that can have an impact on a global community and allow them to bring about transformations.

Assessment of the Analytic Scale of Argumentative Writing (ASAW)

The Analytic Scale of Argumentative Writing (ASAW) was developed because of the need for a genre-specific scale to assess English as a Second Language (ESL) university student writers’ argumentative essays. The present study reports the findings of field-testing ASAW. For this purpose, argumentative samples (n = 110) were collected and remote-scored by experienced raters (n = 5) who used ASAW. Overall, moderate to high inter-rater reliability (r = 0.7-0.9), as well as high (r = 0.84-0.92) and moderate to high (r = 0.70-0.77) intra-rater reliability coefficients after short (6-week) and long (9-week) rating intervals were obtained, respectively. Some established instruments were used to score the same essays rated using ASAW to test the concurrent validity of the scale. The scores assigned by the raters using the scale demonstrated moderate (r = 0.51) to high (r = 0.77) correlations with the scores awarded using several other standard instruments. The raters who used ASAW were given a questionnaire to evaluate the scale itself, and on average, the results indicated that the raters were highly satisfied with it. It took an average of 5.5 minutes for the raters to evaluate an essay, indicating it was economical. The study has useful implications for refinement of ASAW and development and validation of similar scales and benchmarks in the future.

The Writer, the Text and the Reader: An Exploration of Identity in Second Language Academic Writing

<p>Students studying in university contexts often find learning to write English for academic purposes especially challenging. Some of the challenges reside in acquiring the necessary skills and strategies to be successful academic writers. A less tangible consideration which has received recent attention from first and second language writing researchers is the relationship between writing and identity. How do student writers become part of a situated community in which some discourses may be privileged over others? While all writing can be a potential site of struggle, this may have particular significance for second language students who bring their own unique backgrounds and literacy histories to their academic writing and may find becoming part of a new and heterogeneous discourse community profoundly unsettling. Using case study methods, this dissertation explores the experiences of four undergraduate students as they become academic writers in a second language. It also carries out an analysis of some of the linguistic features one particular student essay to examine how writers simultaneously construct their texts and are constructed by them.</p>

The Writer, the Text and the Reader: An Exploration of Identity in Second Language Academic Writing

<p>Students studying in university contexts often find learning to write English for academic purposes especially challenging. Some of the challenges reside in acquiring the necessary skills and strategies to be successful academic writers. A less tangible consideration which has received recent attention from first and second language writing researchers is the relationship between writing and identity. How do student writers become part of a situated community in which some discourses may be privileged over others? While all writing can be a potential site of struggle, this may have particular significance for second language students who bring their own unique backgrounds and literacy histories to their academic writing and may find becoming part of a new and heterogeneous discourse community profoundly unsettling. Using case study methods, this dissertation explores the experiences of four undergraduate students as they become academic writers in a second language. It also carries out an analysis of some of the linguistic features one particular student essay to examine how writers simultaneously construct their texts and are constructed by them.</p>

Development and validation of the questionnaire on EFL students’ perceptions of authorial stance in academic writing

Studies on academic writing of EFL students have found that they have been less successful in presenting an effective stance. It has been assumed that how they perceive authorial stance may influence their stance deployment. Yet few studies have been conducted to assess student writers’ perceptions of stance. To fill the gap, this research intends to develop and validate an instrument, the Perceptions of Authorial Stance Questionnaire (PASQ), for assessing EFL students’ perceptions of authorial stance and further exploring their relationships with stance deployment and the overall quality of English academic writing. Taking a dialogic perspective, we designed the research with two studies in it. In Study 1, exploratory factor analysis with 197 respondents and subsequent confirmatory factor analysis with another sample of 191 respondents produced results of a 17 item scale with two-factors: dialogic contraction and dialogic expansion. In Study 2, scores for the two subscales of the PASQ were examined in relation to the frequencies of various stance types and writing scores. Results show that scores for the two subscales of perceptions were positively correlated with the frequencies of different stance types. However, no significant relationship was detected between students’ perceptions and their writing scores. Possible reasons of the findings and their pedagogical implications are discussed.

Gratitude communication in academic written acknowledgement

In the existing literature, no attempt has been made to inspect how men and women rhetorically manage their gratitude communications in the academic written discourse. To bridge this knowledge gap, the present article examined how students of different gender construct their thanking acts in the acknowledgements of their M.A. theses. Discrepancies between male and female postgraduates’ employment of linguistic patterns and gratitude themes were compared. The results showed that student writers’ gratitude communications to a certain extent are conditioned by the conventional rhetorical patterns of the academic genre. Remarkable gender variations were evidenced in the students’ selections of lexical items for encoding the thanking expressions, thanking modifiers, and gratitude themes of their acknowledgements. These gender discrepancies in gratitude communications are highly pertinent to the social expectations of masculinity and femininity, the students’ psychological orientations toward the emotion of thanking and their own value priorities.

Expressions of Criticality in Expert and Student Writing: A Corpus Contrastive Analysis of Literature Reviews

Literature review in academic writing plays an integral role in demonstrating writers’ knowledge about a field of study as well as in informing the writers of influential researchers and research groups in the field. More importantly, writers are expected to critically analyze previous studies related to their topic. Despite its importance to the academic text, student writers find it challenging to establish a critical stance and to provide evaluative judgment when reviewing the literature. This paper presents a contrastive analysis of student and expert writers’ expressions of criticality in literature review sections of 8 applied linguistics master theses from UiTM (a Malaysian public university) and 62 literature reviews of research journal articles from a similar field (i.e., Language and Communication, English for Academic Purposes and Applied Linguistics). Corpus techniques are used to identify the most common expressions of criticality used by these two groups of writers. The corpus was analyzed using detailed consistency analysis and concordance software from WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2012). Findings revealed that student writers prefer to use hedges and boosters to express criticality and the evaluations they make tend to sound more reporting rather than analyzing and synthesizing the resources critically. Results from this study are beneficial for constructing pedagogical instructions and guidelines for student writers in their critical analysis of the literature review.

Democratizing the Online Materials-Based Classroom: What Can Student Writers’ Voices Offer?

This qualitative case study explores the interaction between Chinese college student writers’ voices and their teacher’s use of online materials during one semester-long writing course. It shows that, when acted upon selectively and critically, students’ voices can potentially improve their teacher’s use of online materials. This practice, in turn, can help students gain effective and necessary knowledge of writing. This study also shows that students’ interactions with their teacher seem to lead to bolder and enhanced narration of their voices on how to teach optimally through online materials.