The Future of Composition Studies

One of the hardest battles that composition practitioners encounter within the writing classroom is dealing with students' poor writing skills. Traditional methods that only engage students to produce work that does not make use of the students' faculties, only propel students to continue to create work that is unsatisfactory. Currently, as composition practitioners continue to look for teaching strategies that can help their students become better writers, they often believe that reading, speaking, and listening cannot facilitate the teaching of writing. Because of the historical views that have defined the composition field, the discipline does not allow any other paradigms to redefine or shape how writing is taught. What is needed to combat such problematic teaching pedagogy is the institution of other methods that incorporates the use of writing, listening, reading, and speaking to teach students how to become better writers.

Gender and Language

The present study investigated gender differences in the use of linguistic features as well as the social meanings attached to those differences. Academic essays, written by 44 (22 male, 22 female) first-year undergraduate students enrolled in the English Language Teaching program at a government university were analyzed with respect to the use of linguistic features (adjectives, empty adjectives, intensifiers, linking adverbials) as well as the number of words and sentences used by the students. The results showed that, in comparison to males, females used more adjectives, intensifiers, and words. Males, on the other hand, used more empty adjectives and linking adverbials than females. Based on the results, pedagogical implications are discussed, and recommendations are provided in order to increase teachers' awareness of gender differences and improve students' writing skills.

Writing in the Digital Age

It is a fact that technology has become an indispensable part of our lives. The recommendations of the World Health Organization because of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic surrounding the whole world brings the obligation to continue the education and training activities with distance education systems. Once again, the significance of technology use in education has become abundant. Within the scope of this chapter, applied studies on digital writing, digital micro, and macro-level writing, Web 2.0 tools, digital and automatic feedback in digital writing will be envisaged in line with the 21st century technological educational requirements. In addition, the effective tips to teach basic digital writing through technology integration will be explored while the impact of the information age on the writing discipline will be discussed.

When Teaching Composition Becomes an Art Through a Futuristic Book-Writing Pedagogy

The author recognizes the importance of Freshman Composition students being equipped with the skills necessary to write effectively for college and beyond. In this chapter, the author shares her story of how a renowned Composition professor forces her to take a self-critical look at what she was doing in her Composition classroom, which compels her to change. For new teachers of Composition or for teachers looking to change, the author shares her newly adopted student-centered-book-writing pedagogy, which puts the focus on the student and creating an environment in which they can write, and write a lot. The author, forced to be honest and change herself, adopted a pedagogy that allows her students a voice and a chance to be honest in their writing through their expression of voice, an asset she recognizes as necessary in this 21st century, especially in our increasingly diversified world of academia. The author shares her student-centered-book-writing-pedagogy.

Multilingual Writing in Digital World

This chapter examines teachers' practices and strategies while using digital tools for writing. The chapter argues that when teachers use digital writing, they need to change their teaching strategies in order to ease their students' writing tasks. It also highlights the purposes of integrating digital tools for the writing classes and the challenges they face while adapting digital writing. The data are collected from teachers who work at schools, colleges, and universities, through a survey generated by Google forms. The findings show that integrating suitable digital tools requires mastering the use of technologies by supporting teachers' digital literacy skills before integrating them into classes to overcome any emerging challenges. This is to reinforce students to improve their writing levels. The chapter suggests more extended studies to examine students' attitudes and experiences with using digital tools and the impact of coronavirus pandemic on education.

Digital Storytelling

Storytelling has been widely used as a strategy to develop language-related skills. Storytelling and learning are interwoven since composing a story is an inseparable component of the meaning-making process. Serving as a link between the act of imagination and perceiving the world, storytelling has been applied to promote effective language learning outcomes. Storytelling offers a language-based approach in literature by means of its activity-based, student-centered, and process-oriented nature, and storytelling supports students' negotiation of meaning by engaging and motivating them within the creative learning process. By this definition, the purpose of this research study is to initiate a scholarly discussion on innovative techniques in digital storytelling to support second language writing instruction along with significant strategies that employ 21st century learning skills.

Reducing Second Language Writing Anxiety

Academic writing is a difficult task for many post-secondary students in the U.S. However, it is particularly challenging for ESL students due to linguistic and cognitive factors. This challenge may lead to second language writing anxiety (SLWA), as a result of which some students may perform poorly on writing assignments and eventually fail the course. Although previous research studies offer instructional strategies to address SLWA, they are insufficient in their theoretical basis and practical application. Thus, this paper fills that gap by situating those pedagogical recommendations within their theoretical foundations and includes a sample writing assignment with a student self-regulation checklist.

Identity Formation in Second Language Writing

Part of the researcher's duties towards his supervisees is to guide them in their postgraduate research journeys. Two important questions were raised by his supervisees. One of them is why the majority of studies follow Hyland's framework in analysing identity. The other question is why we do not follow Hyland's (framework in analysing the reporting verbs instead of Halliday's transitivity system. Is it because the latter is so difficult to understand? Therefore, this chapter aims at focusing on identity in second language (L2) writing, comparing between Halliday's modality, Vande Kopple's taxonomy, Crismore et al.'s taxonomy, and Hyland's model of metadiscourse. The findings showed a sort of similarity as well as variety, thus resulting in overlapping and lacking a solid model for analysing how writers reveal their identity. Therefore, a necessity arises to present a comprehensive model that can be used to identify all the categories and subcategories related to interpersonal meanings.

Second-Language-Writing Skills

In this quantitative inquiry, instead of gathering data to answer a research question, the author developed a research question based on the data she gathered. As the author explored the answers the Chinese international students in her first-year writing seminar course provided on a second language background skills assessment, she became curious about what their answers revealed about their identities. Data collected consisted of 165 English skills assessments completed by her second language writing students over four semesters, from Fall 2018 to Spring 2020. The skills assessed were speaking, listening, reading, writing, and grammar. Partial results indicated that the students assessed their speaking, listening, reading, and grammar skills as average; they assessed their writing skills as poor. The author explored the possible reasons behind the students' self-assessments and how the students' identities were expressed through their answers.

Academic Knowledge Formation Through Blogs

Blogs are an integral component of blended learning environments in English as a second language (ESL)/English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts. Although they are used in higher education to promote language learning, their impact on EFL preservice teachers' writer identity development in academic writing is underexplored. Utilizing Hyland's metadiscourse model, this qualitative case study in the Turkish higher education context investigated EFL preservice teachers' writer identity development on blogs. The data were collected via reflective journals, semi-structured interviews and reflective essays. Triangulation and corpus-based analysis of Hyland's metadiscourse markers were used in the data analysis. The findings revealed the EFL preservice teachers' multifaceted and even contradictory academic writer identities on blogs and numerous challenges they encountered regarding their identity displays. This study highlighted a blended and corpus-based futuristic perspective on the exploration of EFL writer identities.