Aspects of writing knowledge and EFL students' writing quality

Writing knowledge pertaining to process, system, content, and genre plays an essential role to produce an intelligible composition. The purpose of the present study is twofold – to investigate the correlation between aspects of writing knowledge and quality of writing, and to investigate the contribution of the overall and individual aspects of writing knowledge to writing quality. The participants were 54 second-year ELT undergraduate students of a university in Indonesia. A writing test and multiple-choice test on writing knowledge were used as the instruments of data collection. The analysis employed Pearson correlation coefficient and multiple regressions. The result revealed a significant positive correlation between writing knowledge and writing quality. As a unit, the knowledge of process, system, content, and genre, indicates a significant contribution to the writing quality. Individually, however, only process knowledge significantly contributes to the writing quality. It provides additional pieces of evidence that process knowledge be given special attention, thus writing instruction should allow students to learn writing knowledge explicitly and implicitly.

The Fourth Element: Integrating Transfer Talk Into Teaching For Transfer

In Writing Studies, one of the most debated topics is whether or not we can teach students to engage in writing transfer. In order to help students, we must engage them in learning about transfer as often as possible, especially in their first-year writing (FYW) courses, with teaching- for-transfer-specific pedagogies, like the widely known Teaching for Transfer (TFT) (Yancey et al. 2014). However, there are some elements that have yet to be fully developed in their research, like the role of collaborative learning. With this thesis, I argue for the integration of a new concept, Transfer Talk (TT) (Nowacek et al. 2019), into the TFT curriculum as the fourth element. Scholars who use TT strategies suggest that students should collaborate with their peers to consider their prior writing knowledge and build a shared understanding of what writing knowledge looks like. By integrating TT into the TFT curriculum as the fourth element, we will provide students with more opportunities to learn about transfer in the hopes that they will be more successful when transferring writing knowledge in future composing situations, both in and out of school.

Re-writing knowledge, re-design textbooks: auto-production of contents in the classroom

ABSTRACT This contribution is a report of a qualitative research carried out within the Avanguardie Educative project aimed at describing and analyzing the experience of a group of Italian teachers in relation to the practice of textbook and digital resources auto-production. The research, conducted with some schools involved in an experimentation process of the alternative adoption of the textbook, has allowed us to start an in-depth reflection on the motivations that induce teachers to opt for this choice, in the direction of a rereading the relationship between curriculum, national indications and teaching autonomy, with particular attention to the student considered as an active subject of his / her training.

Writing the History of Unwritten Music: On the Treatise of Darwesh ‘Ali Changi (17th Century)

The chapter deals with the representation of memory about the musical past as represented in the Risalei musiqi by Darweh ‘Ali Changi, music master from Transoxiana (b. c.1547, d. after 1611). This treatise, written in the convention of adab genre, is an exceptional document of an essentially oral tradition, with its ‘unacademic’ way of organising musical knowledge, free from philosophical-scientific discipline and mathematical speculation, immersed in myth, legend and fable, most closely linked to poetry. It represents an attempt to fix in writing knowledge that existed in the form of a non-formalised, free-ranging discourse, testified directly by the memory of living musicians and beyond its boundaries transformed into a mythical complex.