ABSTRACT. COST Action 15221, We ReLaTe: Advancing Effective Institutional Models towards Cohesive Teaching, addresses ‘the challenge of creating synergy among the increasingly more specialised and centralised supports for four key higher education activities – research, writing, teaching, and learning – which frequently fail to capitalise on their shared territories and common ground’ (COST Action 15221, 2016). The presentations that comprise this symposium provide insights from pieces of research that have been conducted with a view to addressing this challenge. The first focuses on the rapid development of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) and explores how cohesive teaching practices might establish better supports for students who research, learn, and write in non-native languages. The second identifies key factors for ‘stellar’ teaching practices, shedding new light on the individual purposes, processes, knowledge, skills, and values that lead to optimum productivity and maximum effectiveness. The final presentation presents a blended centralised supports model for teaching, learning, research, and writing in higher education based on an analysis of the functional and dysfunctional supports that currently exist in the home institutions of the COST Action’s Management Committee members. Collectively, these presentations respond to some of the We ReLaTe COST Action’s key objectives and highlight the ways in which these objectives are being achieved.

Vasiliki Gountsidou, Sonia Oliver del Olmo, and Matthew Fogarty

ABSTRACT. This experimental workshop has three aims: (1) to explore the relationships between voice and text ownership in postgraduate writing; (2) to devise a menu of activities that maximises text ownership for postgraduate writers; and, most ambitiously, (3) to harness all of this into a syllabus for a new kind of postgraduate writing course.

Empirical and conceptual explorations of voice and identity in writing (e.g. Casanave 2003; Lillis 2009; Ivanič & Camps, 2001) have shown the importance of developing text ownership as part of writing development. The course we would seek to devise in this workshop would maximise text ownership for postgraduates by constructing a syllabus around the idea of “writing differently” (Lykke & Brewster 2014). The aim of the course would be to give postgraduates the opportunity to experiment with imaginative relations between voice, style and subject matter; to open up the idea that some subject matter might benefit from more experimental writing, and some writing produces a different kind of thinking. It would take participants beyond “plain style” and towards Swales’s (2017) call for “experimentation in both style and substance” that “should be open to all the bolder-hearted, to all the malcontents of excessive and stultifying standardisation.”

This is not a typical workshop, in which the presenters have solutions to impart or wisdom to instil. It is properly experimental in that the outcomes depend on the thoughts, tools, techniques and knowledge of the participants.

The workshop will be run using the world café method, whereby participants circulate between tables to discuss such topics as session structures and themes; planning experimental writing tasks; and using examples of extant experimental academic writing. After three rounds of 20-minute conversations, the workshop will conclude with a final plenary discussion.

Bring your imagination, bring your knowledge, bring your passion for writing!

ABSTRACT. Training audience awareness requires for students to become aware of the importance of thinking about audiences while writing (non-)academic texts and to learn to adjust to different discourse communities (Beaufort, College Writing, Logan: Utah State UP, 2007). In my talk, I present my experience with and my students’ evaluation of teaching audience awareness in a writing-intensive BA seminar in the English department of a German university in 2015. To train audience awareness, I chose a rhetorical approach and provided a complex writing assignment.

While the students’ evaluative portfolios confirmed their awareness of the importance of incorporating audience-specific elements in their writing, they also indicated that the task had created major obstacles for them. I will address the question what writing across and beyond disciplinary audiences might (not) entail from a BA student’s perspective, and make suggestions for conceptualizing writing assignments. I will also ask what the challenges of writing development and disciplinary learning are when it comes to writing about discipline-specific texts across and beyond disciplinary audiences, and discuss why reading rather than writing difficulties might have created an obstacle for the students regarding their subject-matter and genre knowledge. I, therewith, aim to contribute to furthering teaching writing across and beyond disciplinary audiences in writing-intensive courses.

In addition, I will provide an outlook as my teaching experience generated a superordinate question for me that I would like to put up for discussion: European academia has recently been under pressure to communicate research to the public. While it poses a challenge to the resources of faculties to take care of research communication beyond academia, this could be a chance for students to position themselves as translators of academic knowledge in society. How can teaching writing across and beyond disciplinary audiences contribute to this development? What would be the next step for teaching writing possibly across and beyond the university classroom?

ABSTRACT. This contribution presents conclusions drawn from a quasi-interventional study on the development of advanced English writing skills in an interdisciplinary English-medium instruction (EMI) management degree program at a German university. The study was completed collaboratively by two ESP writing instructors and 9 discipline-based lecturers in the life and social sciences in team-teaching partnerships (cf. Lasagabaster 2018). The degree program accepts national and international graduate students from economics, social, political, and life sciences, nutrition, and agricultural sciences. Specifically for the development of advanced English writing skills, a range of discipline-based EMI graduate degree programs tend to aim no higher than socializing students into discipline-based discourse communities (Lea & Street 2004, Gustafsson 2011). In contrast, this interdisciplinary EMI program offers an institutional opportunity to foster students’ academic literacies by transcending disciplinary boundaries (Barrie 2006, Gustafsson 2011). Insights from survey- as well as product-based data collections will be presented to discuss how ESP writing instructors can (a) bridge the gaps between discipline-based lecturers’ priorities and EFL students’ priorities for multilingual writing training in interdisciplinary EMI modules, (b) cater to student and lecturer groups highly diverse in terms of national, cultural, and disciplinary backgrounds, and English-language proficiency, (c) design writing training materials allowing multilingual students to concomitantly develop disciplinary and interdisciplinary writing skills in English and other languages, and (d) promote collaborative development of writing skills in highly diverse student populations.

Barrie, S.C. (2006). Understanding what we mean by the generic attributes of graduates. Higher Education, 51, 215-241.

Gustafsson, M. (2011). Academic literacies approaches for facilitating language for specific purposes. Iberíca, 22, 101‐122.

Lasagabaster, D. (2018). Fostering team teaching: Mapping out a research agenda for English-medium instruction at university level. Language Teaching, 51(3), 400‒416.

Lea, M., & Street, B. (2004). The ‘Academic Literacies’ model: Theory and applications. Theory into Practice, 45(4), 368-377.

ABSTRACT. “We want a workshop on supervising students on their research questions for their BA theses, because we are afraid of criticism from our external examiners on exactly this” – an associate professor mailed me to motivate a workshop. Teaching research question (=problem formulation) workshops for teachers in HE universities and university colleges and for their students from BA to Master thesis levels, I find it quite difficult to find examples of good (= inviting analytical and research-based inquiry) research questions to use as model examples in a genre pedagogy to model participants’ academic writing – or their supervision of it. In a quest not only to find model examples, but even more importantly, for supervisors in HE to scaffold and supervise students on how to formulate not only good, adequate, but competency-raising research questions, I will exemplify “good” research questions for HE papers, present a research question “checklist”/framework to scaffold research question design, and raise a discussion on relevant across- the-disciplines frameworks such as the research paper genre, the European Qualification Framework, Bloom’s taxonomy, and research library key words. Ref.: Rienecker et al. (2017): The Good Paper – a Handbook for Writing Papers in Higher Education. Frederiksberg, Samfundslitteratur.

ABSTRACT. Students at the School of Engineering of the University of Applied Sciences in Northwestern Switzerland obtain about a quarter of their ECTS credit points in project work; usually in six sequential projects throughout their entire curriculum. Students need to apply scientific as well as non-academic skills when writing in their projects, which have been initiated by clients who are not part of the academic system. In the final technical reports, thus, students face the challenge of having to address a wide, non-scientific, audience: frequently including local policymakers. Teaching, therefore, needs to convey how to tailor project reports to specific audiences.

In fact, certain components of the reports – management summaries, introductions, conclusions, and especially recommendations – require special attention. Not only scientific and disciplinary but also writing requirements increase continuously from projects one to six, making teaching equally more complex and demanding. The lecturer’s part involves input on academic writing, giving feedback and grading the written reports. This compound of methods teaching academic writing, or rather coaching based on students’ needs, have not been explored yet and are in want of precise description.

On the basis of a selection of typical reports from the course of study Energy and Environmental Engineering, we aim to show how students become incrementally familiar with the report as a scientific genre and how students grow accustomed to tailoring their writing to specific lay audiences in certain sections of the reports (such as management summaries, introductions, conclusions, and recommendations). The talk will show the challenges arising from the current compound of need-based coaching in academic writing between input, feedback and grading and discuss how teaching methods can be fine-tuned in order to develop writing skills further.

ABSTRACT. Researchers have found strong connections among the linguistic features of academic speaking and writing (Cosomay, 2006) which suggests a reciprocal relationship as students develop both capacities. Speaking can also be used to scaffold the gradual development of students’ writing capacity (Belcher & Hirvela, 2011). Finally, speaking practice can help L2 writers develop an individual voice in their writing (Weissberg, 2009) as well as navigate the difference between oral and written language. The authors of this study are working as consultants with a required year 1 statistics course, which aims to introduce students to statistical concepts and to develop their ability to communicate these concepts in written and spoken English. Nearly all the students are international and/or are more comfortable in another language. The course consultants’ goal is to use theory related to the oral-literate connection to simultaneously develop students’ speaking and writing capacity in English. The course combines academic speaking tasks about statistical concepts with a series of short writing assignments and a poster presentation. The graduate student instructors are required to have a strong statistical background but not any background in English language instruction.

The study is focused on the teaching of speech and writing in this context. Our research question is: which training methods do instructors find most useful in preparing for the complex task of fostering students’ ability to communicate statistical concepts in speech and writing? The training methods we are currently investigating include group grading of written assignments; discussion of hypothetical teaching scenarios; discussion of selected scholarly readings; and simulations of upcoming class sessions. In the current semester, we are gathering qualitative responses of the 24 graduate student instructors through focus groups and quantitative (and qualitative) responses through surveys. Our findings will be relevant for WAC instructors and researchers communicating in an intercultural, multilingual context.

ABSTRACT. In Europe and other parts of the world, there has been a growing interest in understanding how Taught Postgraduate (TPg) study at Master-level may influence teacher practitioners’ professional development. Depending on the nature and orientation of a study programme, the amount of writing and the kinds of writing tasks that the teacher students need to fulfil may vary; however, writing has typically remained the primary means of assessment in coursework-based postgraduate programmes across the board. The literature contains evidence of the positive role of written assignments and dissertations in prompting teacher practitioners to link theory with practice. On the whole, however, the question of how school teachers may engage with university’s writing tasks remains under-researched. The question is important because written assignments, from the perspective of the Vygotskian cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), potentially provide a developmental space whereby boundary-crossing between two activity systems, i.e., the university and the workplace, can be achieved. Such boundary-crossing essentially constitutes practitioners’ trajectory of professional development through in-service credit-bearing academic study. Aimed to address the question of how school teachers may engage with university’s writing tasks, our study draws upon interview and textual data gathered from a sample of school teachers studying in a Master of Education (MEd) programme at an English-medium university in Hong Kong. Our findings revealed that the teachers derived satisfaction from completing assignments that were practical and challenging in certain ways; and issues of time management and study strategies stood out for them as they juggle between school commitments and the demands of the MEd programme. Our study has implications for the design of written assignments in TPg programmes and for the provision of academic support to TPg students.

ABSTRACT. Effective ‘discipline and context specific’ (Wingate & Tribble, 2012, p. 492) academic writing provision requires up-to-date, evidence-based understandings of degree programme writing expectations. This paper describes a systematic genre-focused analysis of writing requirements on core modules across eleven master’s programmes at a UK Business School, providing a contemporary ‘snapshot’ of the range and distribution of assignments types, undertaken to inform a major revision to a discipline-specific writing course. The provision’s focus needed to shift from ‘mapping’ (Sloan and Porter, 2010) a previously core module across all degree programmes, to a broader ‘genre’ approach (Swales, 1990; Nesi and Gardner, 2012; Gardner and Nesi, 2013) which allowed for developing the knowledge and skills required for the common types of coursework assignments occurring across many different Business School modules on which different students were enrolled. We identified all modules, twenty-four in total, which were (a) core to at least one target degree programme and (b) contained assessed coursework writing tasks. From these 24 modules we identified 30 writing assignments. Following Zhu (2004), we analyse wording of the assignment briefs themselves as well as instructions in related course documentation. We adopt Nesi and Gardner’s (2012) framework of ‘social purposes’ and ‘genre families’ to categorise assignment briefs, allowing for ‘hybridity’ at both levels of analysis, and noting whether assignments involved individual, pair or group work. We find fewer hybrid genre assignments than initially anticipated, but, noticeably different distributions for social purpose and genre compared to holdings at the equivalent discipline/level in the BAWE corpus. The analysis also revealed three different intended audiences: the instructor, an imaginary professional reader, and a real world entity. We discuss how our findings relate to previous studies of Business School writing (e.g. Zhu, 2004; Nathan, 2016), and implications for institutional context both in terms of pedagogy and cross-departmental Teaching-and-Learning-related dialogue.

ABSTRACT. Master’s thesis students are faced with multiple implicit and explicit expectations from their supervisors, the administration, the job marked and writing support initiatives. In order to develop their authorial identity and voice (Ivanič, 1998), Master's thesis students need to actively engage with these expectations.

Supervision plays a central role in the Master’s thesis process, and this calls for an investigation of how supervisors conceptualize the meaning of the Master’s thesis, its function in Higher education and how these understandings shape their expectations of Master’s thesis writers. In order to answer these questions, twenty semi-structured interviews with thesis supervisors across three faculties at a Danish University was conducted. Drawing on grounded theory methods (Charmaz, 2006) and discourse analysis (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985), it is shown how the concept of autonomy plays a key role in the understanding of the Master’s thesis and in assuming a Master’s thesis writer identity. The complexity of the concept is mapped and presented as a “wheel of autonomy”, a model comprising of eleven data-based dimensions.

The findings indicate that it is impossible for the student to simultaneously realize every dimension’s interpretation of the concept of autonomy and that this affects the student’s ability to develop an identity as a Master’s thesis writer. The Master’s thesis student identity is characterized by presenting the student with multiple incompatible demands and interpretations of autonomy, and this results in the student being faced with a series of difficult choices concerning how to handle the expectation of autonomy. One interpretation could be that it is precisely through facing the impossibility of meeting every expectation of autonomy that the Master’s thesis student shapes their authorial identity and voice (Jensen, 2018).

These findings have implications for writing support initiatives and offers an analytical framework for identifying and discussing issues connected to autonomy, authorial identity and voice.

ABSTRACT. This qualitative study explores doctoral candidates’ lived experiences with writing dissertation proposals and their challenges in becoming researchers through the process.

In developing dissertation proposals, doctoral candidates negotiate the discourses of their supervisors, committees, and their discipline. By means of aligning with and against multiple discourses, a researcher identity gradually emerges (Ivanič, 1998). This gradual shift can be reflected in the evolving written drafts of proposals and observed in the interactions and dialogues happening about and around these drafts with others and more primarily with supervisors.

Research questions: 1) How do doctoral candidates understand and negotiate the discourses of the discipline and integrate them with their own discourse? 2) How do these practices evolve as the drafts progress from the initial draft to the middle and late revisions? 3) What role do dialogic interactions play in this evolution?

My study uses Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of ‘dialogicality of voices’ to understand the discursive dynamics of proposal writing. Bakhtin (1981) argues that the dialogical interactions between ‘authoritative’ institutional discourses and ‘internally persuasive’ private discourses contribute to the evolution of ‘ideological becoming’ (Bakhtin, 1981).

Data collection is currently under way with two doctoral candidates and their supervisors in humanities at a Canadian university. The completed data will consist of: 1) three separate interviews with the student participants and their supervisors following the completion of the initial proposal draft, the mid-point and late revisions, 2) recordings of three supervisory meetings where the three drafts are discussed, 3) copies of three proposal drafts, and 4) supervisors’ written feedback on the three proposal drafts.

Drawing on Bakhtin’ concepts, I analyze the ways in which the doctoral candidates resist, incorporate, or productively and creatively re-invent the voices of their supervisors and finally make them their own voice.

The findings of the study highlight spoken discourse as one of the important modes of meaning making in proposal writing.

ABSTRACT. It is widely acknowledged that academic writing plays an important role in students’ success in higher education (e.g., Lillis, 2001). Yet much of the scholarship in our field focuses primarily on academic and curricular issues—e.g., the needs of first-year students transitioning into higher education, students’ writing development across and within disciplines, and their transfer of learning from one writing context to another. Indeed, few studies have examined the role of the writing classroom in facilitating students’ broader social and cultural adjustment at institutions of higher education. What role might academic writing instruction play in facilitating students’ sense of belonging? More specifically, how might students’ experiences in our writing classrooms intersect with--or work against--the ideal of inclusivity in higher education? This presentation explores the above questions, drawing on interviews with thirty-five undergraduates at a small, liberal arts college in the northeastern United States. Interviews focused on students’ conceptual understandings of inclusivity, their experiences of inclusion/exclusion on campus, and their experiences of inclusive (or alienating) classroom practices. Two key findings have particular relevance to the academic writing classroom: First is that students believe that inclusivity must be cultivated intentionally, and does not happen automatically, even with a diverse student body. Second is that instructors who do not openly acknowledge the “unlevel playing field” of higher education may, perhaps inadvertently, alienate underprepared writers. Not acknowledging inequality, in other words, hinders inclusivity. Implications of these findings include: 1. The need for ongoing community-building, both inside and outside of the classroom; 2. The value of assignments and activities that courage deep listening and dialogue-across-difference; 3. The importance of pedagogical approaches that assume educational differences—e.g., Universal Design for Learning. The presenter concludes with suggestions for how professional development can prepare academic writing instructors to promote inclusivity more intentionally in their classrooms and curricula.

Lillis, T. (2001) Student Writing. London and New York: Routledge.

ABSTRACT. Students learning to write essays may be confronted by seemingly contradictory advice: While being told that academic writing is formal, depersonalised and objective, they are, at the same time, encouraged to include their own critical response to the ideas and theories under discussion. Students attempting to develop an authorial voice that meets both these requirements can easily become confused and either overstate their personal views or else just summarise the main concepts without meaningful engagement or a sense of ownership. Starting from the premise that at the centre of each student essay is an embodied subject who brings their own histories, affective responses and agency to their writing, we considered whether foregrounding the subjective aspects of writing implicit in a traditional discursive essay might encourage students to develop a stronger authorial voice in their arguments. Hence, a reflective journal was created to enhance the scaffolding of an essay writing assignment for students studying on the international pre-master's programme at Goldsmiths, University of London. This represents a 'transitional space' (Winnicott) to foreground the subjective dimension in the process, even if this would ultimately be effaced in the final essay. This paper will report on the context, rationale and experience of using this reflective journal, illustrated with a case study showing one student’s progress from the personal to the critical.

Select bibliography Creme, P. and Hunt, C. 2002 Creative Participation in the Essay Writing Process. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education Vol 1 (2) 145-166 Ivanič, R. 1998 Writing and Identity: The Discoursal Construction of Identity in Academic Writing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Kitchenham, A. 2008 The Evolution of John Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory. Journal of Transformative Education 6:2, pp.104-123 Winnicott, D. 1978 The Child, the Family, and the Outside World. Harmondsworth: Penguin Winnicott, D. 2005 Playing and Reality. Routledge: London and New York

ABSTRACT. Academic writing has always been guided by conventions established by native English writer norms, while today, the majority of academic writers, and their readers, are non-native. When guiding novice non-native writers, who are being initiated into the world of academic writing and publishing, it is imperative to teach them these conventions so that their papers meet publications standards. Yet, we often wonder whether their individual plurilingual voices, identities, and styles get lost in the process.

An ideal “lab” for examining these multilingual issues is Israeli higher education, where students are bi- or trilingual, speaking Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Amharic, French, Spanish, Chinese, etc. At Tel Aviv University, we teach graduate writing courses in the major disciplines, which help prepare these plurilingual students for publishing in peer-reviewed journals. After instructing these populations for over 10 years, we have come to realize the immense complexity involved in the juxtaposition of our students’ voices, which are often colored by the special “music” born of their multiple languages, with the academic publishing world.

In this paper, we present a content analysis of 16 in-depth interviews we conducted with plurilingual novice writing students, writing teachers and tutors, as well as with expert writers, journal reviewers, and journal editors. From the results of this qualitative research, we identify the processes students undergo, as well as the losses and benefits these novice writers experience, which can inform pedagogy for multilingual classrooms. Additionally, we discuss the challenges that may be encountered on the road to publication and consider ways in which academic writing boundaries can become more elastic and inclusive in order for the global academic community to gain from these different voices.

ABSTRACT. Since the Syrian Crisis broke out in 2011, more than 2000 academics have fled the country (King, 2016; Sheikh, 2016), with less than 10% of those in exile continuing their academic work (Sheikh, 2016). Despite the growing interest in the perspectives of exiled academics (e.g. Alachkar, 2016; Parkinson et al, in press), the difficulties they face in exile while trying to publish in English as an Additional Language (EAL) have not been sufficiently explored. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating the specific difficulties faced by Syrian academics in exile while trying to re-establish their academic careers outside of Syria. The participants are academics supported by the Council of at-Risk Academics (CARA) in two locations: Turkey and the UK. Using a mixed-methods approach, we collected data via two questionnaires, for exiled Syrian academics (n=70) and their EAP tutors (n=10), as well as interviews with Syrian academics (n=16). Our preliminary findings show that some of the challenges faced by our participants are similar to those identified by previous studies that investigated EAL academics’ efforts to publish in English (e.g. Canagarajah, 1996; Englander, 2014; Hyland, 2016), such as mastering academic language and genre conventions. However, we also identified writing-related challenges specific to EAL academics in exile, who are in the process of reorienting themselves to continue their academic work in a new context, such as issues concerning authorial identity construction, conflicting affiliations with their prior and new disciplinary discourse communities, and concerns about the perceived value of their previous academic work in their new contexts. Our findings regarding the participants’ ways of dealing with these challenges will also be presented. We close by addressing the pedagogical implications of the findings for support programmes and universities hosting academics in exile.

ABSTRACT. Mobilities within the Erasmus+ program across Europe have set out from the assumption that student exchanges will facilitate intercultural communication and multilingualism, which is seen as “one of the cornerstones of the European project” and a tool to “enhance cultural understanding” (European Commission 2019). However, studying in a different country also creates adaptation issues and tensions. A number of studies have examined the professional, cultural, social and language-related benefits and challenges of the Erasmus mobility program, and some highlight written communication is one of the important areas where difficulties arise (Klimova 2013), but little is known as yet about the ways in which students and higher education institutions negotiate these challenges.

The present paper explores the ways in which European universities have accommodated differences in writing cultures, genres and practices during Erasmus+ mobilities, outlining several of the teaching strategies, institutional policies and forms of support used to this end. We will draw on information on university websites and a qualitative study including 10 semi-structured interviews with incoming and outgoing Erasmus students from our university, as well as open-ended questionnaires sent out to teachers and writing centre staff in several countries across Europe. Our results suggest that many of the solutions to writing-related difficulties have been hands-on, immediate responses to practical teaching situations, rather than coherent institutional, national or European policies. While many of these can be immediately effective and provide many positive examples of how to deal with writing in a multicultural setting, our findings also suggest that there might be issues of equity, power relations and reciprocity involved in such exchanges. When adapting their courses to an international class, instructors should be aware of these challenges that extend beyond the curriculum.

References European Commission. (2019). Erasmus+ Programme Guide 2019. Available: https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/resources/documents/erasmus-programme-guide-2019_en Klimova, B.F. (2013). Czech ERASMUS students and their EAP needs. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 112, 152-157.

ABSTRACT. Second language learners’ (L2 learners) textual borrowing behavior in academic writing has attracted widespread attention in recent years. Given that translation can be a common textual borrowing behavior among L2 learners in academic discourse, investigating learner employment of this strategy in terms of its distribution patterns would contribute to a better understanding of cross-linguistic textual borrowing behavior.

Based on Weigle and Parker's textual borrowing analytical framework, this study categorizes translation in textual borrowing along length of the borrowed string and degree of modification in the borrowed string. The former is sub-categorized into the translations of a word, a phrase and a clause. The latter is sub-categorized into modified translation and non-modified translation. Modified translation consists of explicit modification and implicit modification.

Focusing on ten graduate students majoring in linguistics from a key university in eastern China, this study describes and explains the way the students cite research literatures in Chinese through translation for a course paper written in English. Based on analyses of written texts, the study finds that first, one fifth of the total words (20.2%) in students’ course paper involves translation from the source texts. In terms of the acknowledgement of translated texts, about one tenth (11.1%) of student texts involves translation without attributing ideas to the original sources. More specifically, clause translation and non-modified translation are most frequent types in both attributed and unattributed translation.

This exploratory study shows translation as a cross-linguistic textual borrowing behavior can take on various forms. Pedagogically, it may promote writing teachers’ awareness that translation in L2 academic writing is a common phenomenon with its complexities in use. It can also potentially provide a sight to future studies concerning cross-linguistic textual borrowing behaviors in other languages.

ABSTRACT. The field of academic writing sits at the intersection of several disciplines, including Learning Development, EAP, Academic Literacies, Education Studies, Linguistics, and Composition, among others. EATAW’s own Journal of Academic Writing illustrates well these intersecting theoretical and methodological approaches. We explore this via a bibliographical analysis of the 2018 Special Issue of the Journal of Academic Writing, addressing the following questions: What intellectual traditions are being drawn upon by contributors to the journal? Who is citing whom? How does this relate to the institutional positioning of contributors? After this initial presentation, participants will be invited to consider and discuss how these findings relate to their own specific teaching and research contexts.

The second part of the workshop introduces insights from other ‘meta-studies’, most notably Driscoll and Perdue’s (2012) study of The Writing Center Journal, and Hewings, Lillis and Vladimirou’s (2010) study of citation practices in psychology journals. We also present an adaptation of Haswell’s (2005) ‘RAD model’ for evaluating research papers as a catalyst for contextualising research and scholarship in our interlinked disciplines, and discuss to what extent the type of research valorised in this model reflected our experience of accepting or rejecting articles as guest editors of the Special Issue. Participants will be asked to share their insights on the value of ‘RAD-compliant’ research in their own teaching and development. Does this model offer a useful mechanism for evaluating research, or privilege a certain way of knowing that precludes other modes of enquiry? What pedagogical impact does published research have on the teaching of student writing in a complex world of hybridised, digitised writing in an increasingly intercultural context? Does the privileging of certain types of research in academic journals have an impact on the ability of academic writing professionals to negotiate their identities within varying institutional contexts?

ABSTRACT. Digital learning and teaching includes, of course, the familiarisation of students and teachers with the newest technologies and methods. A goal of our blended learning workshop "Academic Writing Partnerships" is to enable students to use digital genres (i.e. emails, websites, documents, ether pads) to complete a writing project such as a report, essay or term paper. Our understanding of digital genres is based on Swales (1990) three-level model of genre: they serve a communicative purpose, and are realized through a move structure and through rhetorical strategies. We understand digital to refer to [online or computer-based?] means of obtaining information or publishing and digital genres are therefore complex, non-linear, multi-modal, web-mediated and interactive (Nielsen, Askehave, 2005). Blended learning can be a means to acquire competencies in writing the above-mentioned texts through a variety of settings (Alonso, López, Manrique & Viñes, 2007) and models (Christensen, Horn, Stalker, 2013), using various digital genres. Based on collaborative blended learning (Bruffee 1998, Braukhoff 2017) our workshop Academic Writing Partnerships combines traditional classroom learning and online work. Students use digital genres such as emails and ether pads to work collaboratively. They get peer feedback and use information websites to complete their writing assignments. During our presentation, we want to show examples of the digital texts students create in working towards their final writing project. We use these examples to explain how students might develop their writing skills by using digital genres. Finally, we to discuss how lecturers could adapt the concept of Academic Writing Partnerships to their own teaching practice.

ABSTRACT. Many of today’s engineers are first and foremost communicators: They present, explain, consult, and they write. The texts that engineers produce address a wide range of audiences, purposes, and communication channels, and they must function in various online and offline contexts.

The Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften (ZHAW) addresses this reality in a Communication Competence (ComCom) course for BSc students at the School of Engineering. ComCom is a Blended Learning course which aims to reflect the real-life communicative tasks awaiting our engineering students in their future workplaces. English and German are used interchangeably in the course as they are our students’ most common working languages and each semester covers different types and examples of written and verbal communication. In terms of preparation for an increasingly digital workplace, ComCom

- introduces students to writing as a collaborative (digital) process including giving and receiving peer feedback. As team and project work are integral parts of any engineer’s job description, we highlight the importance of successful collaboration in writing processes especially when it comes to peer feedback: → How do I give feedback that is intelligible and free of judgement? How do I ask for feedback that is truly useful to me?

- encourages students to expand their understanding of texts to include both traditional formats (e.g. technical reports) as well as web-based content (e.g. e-portfolios). We want our students to be able to present information in convincing ways to different audiences. E-portfolios provide an easy way for students to combine textual elements with (audio)visual materials and create web-pages that are both informative and appealing even to a non-expert audience.

As ComCom is a relatively new concept at our university, we would very much welcome an opportunity to present this course to a group of peers and have an exchange of experience regarding classes of a similar nature.

ABSTRACT. We have further developed an existing teaching concept of an interdisciplinary academic writing course in a blended learning format to give students more opportunities to combine the general conventions of academic writing that we teach with their own experiences in their subject. After a presence day the students have to work on a number of tasks in the digital learning environment Ilias. We use forums to present the tasks so that students can write their answers directly to our threads or upload documents. Each participant can immediately see everything they have written or uploaded, so they can interact and comment on their fellow students' posts. In this teaching practice presentation, I will present two examples of the tasks. The first task is to become aware of one's own ideas of academic language and style. Students have to write a short text on an everyday topic and read two texts from others and comment on how they correspond to an academic style. The second task deals with the functions of references in academic texts such as supporting the own argument or defining a concept. After matching examples to selected functions, students discuss which functions are important in their own writing. I will show how students have dealt with these tasks in the digital forum and how they have discussed general und subject specific conventions of academic writing. Overall, we found that the students in this format were more intensively engaged with the course content than before. The aim of the presentation is a discussion of student learning in a digital environment: How do they use a forum for discussions and how can this contribute to them becoming aware of subject-specific writing conventions? The presentation will thus exemplify the possibilities and disadvantages of a blended learning format in an academic writing class.

ABSTRACT. Students increasingly encounter data and its representations in academic and non-academic contexts--in their courses in the sciences, social sciences, and (digital) humanities and in their daily lives as citizens, consumers, and networked individuals. Their ability to understand, question, and use the data they encounter, and to create and represent data themselves, is a kind of literacy that can be developed in academic writing courses, where the goal is not to produce data scientists but rather to build critical thinking about data and an awareness of its fundamentally rhetorical character. Indeed, the intersection of academic writing and critical data studies (e.g, Drucker, 2011; Gitelman, 2013) is rich with opportunities to help students develop a key literacy in an increasingly data-driven world.

This presentation describes two teaching practices that introduce students to data literacy, including the creation, analysis, and representation of data. The first teaching practice focuses on personal data, as students complete projects modeled after Dear Data (http://www.dear-data.com/theproject) by Lupi and Posavec (2016). Students have responded very positively to learning about data, identity, and design via this exercise working with small, mundane, personal datasets. The second teaching practice, planned for a future course, asks students to create narratives from larger existing datasets (e.g., Segal & Heer, 2010; Dourish & Cruz, 2018). This project should engage students by asking them to work with data on a topic of consequence to them; closely reading that data in order to elicit the stories it tells and omits; and representing those stories in text and image.

These teaching practices offer two analytical entry points to data literacy as they ask students to produce, analyze, and communicate with data. Attendees will leave with two specific student projects focused on data literacy that they can integrate into their academic writing classes, as well as other approaches to data literacy that will hopefully emerge during the discussion.

ABSTRACT. Since the early 2000s, Writing Studies scholarship in North America has studied the value of multidisciplinarity to introduce first-year writing students to the interplay between disciplinary content and conventions. At the same time, it has interrogated the role scholars from language-focused disciplines (e.g., Comp/Rhet, Literature, Creative Writing) should play in training faculty who teach writing in diverse disciplines (Harris 2004, Hjortshoj 2016, Moskovitz and Petit 2007, Scott 2013). At the George Washington University, the University Writing Program (UWP) has built a program that thrives on multidisciplinary connections within its divisions and in outreach to the wider curriculum. This symposium foregrounds the work of the UWP and the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) program to teach students newly encountering disciplinary writing, to support writing instruction across the university, and to shape a culture of writing practice across disciplines.

The UWP is the largest instructional unit at our university. Founded in 2003, the UWP consists of three divisions: The First Year Writing Program, within which a multidisciplinary program faculty teach the required University Writing course; The Writing in the Disciplines program, which certifies departments’ undergraduate courses as Writing Intensive, and trains faculty and graduate students in the teaching of writing; and The Writing Center, which provides peer writing services and trains undergraduate and graduate consultants to work with student writing from all disciplines. The closely allied EAP Program teaches academic writing to international students, preparing them for the academic literacy expectations of U.S. higher education, and its faculty offer expertise not just in TESOL and applied linguistics, but also from an array of disciplinary backgrounds.

This symposium features directors who have been instrumental in designing an award-winning academic writing program, discussing critical and pedagogical developments and arguing the benefits of multidisciplinary faculty to sequence a coherent university writing curriculum.

ABSTRACT. What is the role that research genres play in Higher Education? When, how and why to encourage and facilitate students’ research writing? Through this keynote I will discuss these issues looking at the contradictions underlying the intersection between the academic and professional writing that characterises research writing inside the academia and reflect on some answers and their associated consequences, according to recent empirical evidence. I will first address the situation of research-related writing genres in Higher Education. Then, I will focus on challenges that both students and teachers face when they deal with these genres, and finally, I will discuss some pedagogical proposals that proved useful to help students to develop their researcher voice and sense of authorship, as well as to dialogue with other voices of their disciplinary, cultural or social communities.

ABSTRACT. Forming and negotiating scholarly identities is a challenge when the norms for the discursive practices that shape those identities are invisible (Carter 1990; Russell 2002; Paré 2011, Swales 1996, 2004) or seen as “common sense” (Starke-Meyerring 2011, Starke-Meyerring et al. 2014). These challenges are amplified when, as in the US context, students from underrepresented groups, including multilingual immigrant and international students, are increasingly recruited and welcomed for graduate study. Whatever their identities when they enter graduate study, writing professionals are tasked with supporting the complex, challenging process of academic and disciplinary identity formation, and need to explore strategies for doing so.

In this roundtable, North American scholars affiliated with the Consortium on Graduate Communication lead a discussion about supporting graduate writers’ identify formation. Leaders will frame the conversation with vignettes of identity-related issues faced by diverse writers along with successful strategies before moving to open discussion. Questions include:

*What are key issues that emerge for graduate writers around forming appropriate discursive identities?

*How can we help normalize graduate writers’ feelings around the identity formation processes they experience?

*What specific strategies can foster the development of appropriate, context-specific discursive identities?

*What strategies can foster the co-construction of academic identities and allow diverse voices to be heard? How can we foster hybrid genres, etc. that may emerge?

*What kinds of administrative support are needed for us to provide effective writing assistance? How can we gain that support?

ABSTRACT. A report by the World Economic Forum estimates that in 2020, creativity will be the third most sought after skill by employers. Despite this, creativity as a skill in its own right continues to receive insufficient attention within higher education.

Academic writing provides an excellent vehicle to remedy this; the process of writing an essay is inherently creative, though this is often neglected as we focus on structure and form.

This workshop aims to investigate how we as academic writing teachers can help students understand, explore and develop their own creative process.

The workshop will be split into three sections:

Presentation

Short presentation outlining a working definition of creativity and barriers to teaching it. This will be followed by a brief discussion of the presenter’s experience designing and running a creative thinking course for HE students.

Practical

Participants will engage in five activities in small groups. Each activity introduces a different stage of the creative process, all chosen for their direct benefit to writing. These are: Tolerating Ambiguity; Idea Abundance; Cross Pollination; Growth Mindset; Challenging Assumptions. At this stage activities are not writing based, but designed to present the concepts in isolation. For example, a problem solving activity based on De Bono’s random word generator serves to demonstrate Cross Pollination.

Discussion

In the same groups participants will be given a short set of questions which ask them to reflect on their own experience of teaching academic writing in relation to the creative stages presented and suggest approaches that could fit each of them. They may like to suggest other stages of the creative process here also.

The presenter will share their own approaches to helping students draw the link between academic writing and the creative skills presented and elicit feedback from groups. All suggestions will be collected and distributed among participants following the session, hopefully stimulating further discussion and sharing.

ABSTRACT. At Chalmers University of Technology, writing pedagogy intersects with many disciplinary writing tasks. In this particular course, summary tasks aim to foster the writing skills and language proficiency of L2 students to prepare them in their studies in English at Chalmers. This teaching intervention gives intermediate English students three summary tasks, each based on notes the students have taken during a talk – the first talk given by an expert within the discipline they are studying and the other two by their course peers, thus in disciplines less familiar to them. In writing the three summaries, the students practice and improve upon typical characteristics of academic writing, such as the standard three-part structure, organised paragraphing and effective cohesion/coherence. The feature of interest in this intervention is that students receive constructive teacher feedback on these characteristics as well as on grammatical and/or lexical errors; thereafter, rather than focusing on revising each text, the students are instead encouraged to learn from, recognise and understand the feedback to generate a better summary for the next task. Through this process-oriented approach, the students establish a self-awareness of the communication errors in their writing and other possible ones that could occur. The goal of this intervention is for the students to gain tools and knowledge that they can apply in their writing development even after the course is over, something emphasised by one student who claimed “the course was not only for the semester but also for life”. This presentation examines the scaffolding of the summary tasks as well as the progression of writing skills and language proficiency of students through a couple of examples. It also suggests possible pathways for further applications, as well as research examining the students’ summaries. Would such an analysis confirm that students are making the progress that appears to be happening?

ABSTRACT. This study aims to find whether the genre change from argumentative essay to response paper in ENG 101 course in a Turkish foundation university has contributed to students’ course satisfaction and success rate. ENG 101 is a compulsory course for all students in English medium instruction programs. It used to have a content focusing on sustainability and business ethics through which students used to learn how to write an argumentative essay. However, based on the low success rates and the comments from course evaluation forms by both the students and instructors, a need to make some changes in the writing genre of the course became apparent. The literature shows that academic writing is defined by flexible and adaptable conventions rather than rules. In addition, Allen et al. (2016) state that students’ flexibility in writing leads to higher quality of essays, thus they perform better on general assessments of literacy and prior knowledge. Thus, argumentative essay writing genre based on highly-structured rules has been replaced with critical respond writing genre since it is considered to provide students with more flexibility and practicality. The new version of the course has been delivered in 2018-2019 Academic year. Accordingly, the students who failed the course in 2017-2018 Academic year twice and who took ENG 101 in 2018-2019 Fall semester have been chosen as the subject group of the study. The research has been conducted through both qualitative and quantitative research methods. For the quantitative part of the research, the 2018-2019 Fall semester statistics of pass/fail rates of these students have been analyzed. For the quantitative part of the study, randomly chosen students among these students have been individually interviewed and the data gained from them have been analyzed.

ABSTRACT. The Academic Writing Centre at Higher School of Economics provides language services to support Russian academics in publishing their research in English. In order to provide targeted support, the Centre has to have a detailed profile of its clients, who differ in previous language training background, particular language needs, and discipline fields. To this end, we launched a diagnostic module Finding Your Route to Research Writing for a high-potential group of researchers (n=100). The trainers assessed participants’ writing samples about their writing challenges and oral presentations of metaphors of learning English. The module aimed to identify researchers’ language needs and provide them with personalised feedback and recommendations for improvement. The diagnostic module allowed us to collect participants’ requests and learn about common writing/speaking challenges. Although the majority of the group demonstrated B2+ level of proficiency (76 % in speaking and 60% in writing), they all experience problems with text organisation, logical development of ideas, and formulating the main message clearly and succinctly. They use a different from English argumentation paradigm, transferring own cultural academic conventions. These may be the barriers that prevent Russian researchers from publishing their papers in English-medium journals. We classified participants’ metaphors and made interesting observations about a positive/negative previous experience of learning English and its link with the English level. Positive exposure to English correlates with the level of learning autonomy. The knowledge about academics’ psychological attitude towards learning English and teacher/learner roles, as well as learners’ requests and challenges will help the Centre to better cater for academics’ needs. The design of the module as a needs analysis instrument can be used by other course designers working with multi-lingual authors in the area of writing for publication.

ABSTRACT. This presentation will report on a multi-institutional research project which investigated the use of the poster and the poster presentation session as academic genres in Art and Design higher education (see Thomas & Lees-Maffei, 2018). It will propose that they offer a challenge to the hegemony of the essay in this context; a challenge which is founded on the notion of regenring (English, 2011) and an understanding of text as social semiotic resource. The paper will argue that the poster and the poster session are examples of genres which address two significant context-specific issues more successfully than the essay: • An increasing and multi-faceted diversity within HE art and design • A recurring reluctance among art and design students to engage with theory-based writing The study was partly action research, which took the form of a series of taught sessions (at two universities in the UK and one in the Netherlands), after which participants completed a questionnaire about their perceptions of academic posters and poster sessions. Patterns of perceptions emerged from a grounded analysis of the questionnaire data, interpretations of which will be discussed in the presentation. The findings of this research have informed strategic pedagogic discussions at the universities involved, some of the results of which (decisions to use alternatives to essays) will also be presented.

References Biggs, M. and Buchler, D. (2012) Text-Led and Object-Led Research Paradigms: Doing without Words. in Writing Design: Words and Objects, edited by Grace Lees-Maffei, pp. 231-141. London: Bloomsbury. English, F. (2011) Student Writing and Genre. London and New York: Continuum. Thomas, P. and Lees-Maffei, G. (2018) The Poster Session as Fusing Theory and Practice in Art and Design Education: Exhibiting an Occluded Genre. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. 11 (2) pp. 233–25.

ABSTRACT. In some European Countries, such as Portugal, the access to some professional activities depends on having a master degree. In such cases, the achievement of that degree usually implies a training period in a professional context, which serves as the basis for the construction of the master dissertation. This dissertation is then the result of a complex process at the intersection of two different contexts and cultures, the academic and the professional worlds. This intersection affects the dissertation construction from the beginning, with implications at many different levels. Taking into account the importance of this issue and the inherent hybridization of academic genres it implies, our presentation aims at describing how master students cope with this process, how they combine the academic and the professional perspectives in the construction of their master dissertation. In order to achieve our goal, we developed an exploratory case study, analysing the interview of an Engineering student, who had just finished her dissertation focused on her work as a trainee engineer in a factory. This interview was selected from a corpus collected in the context of a broader study about the dissertation construction processes (Carvalho, Pereira & Laranjeira, 2018). We also analysed the dissertation, previously discussed and approved at the University, in order to see how the academic and professional contexts interact and the effects of this interaction on the dissertation construction process and on the features of the text produced. The analyses of both the interview and the dissertation show that different aspects are affected in this intersection of the academic and professional perspectives: supervision, activities, timing, methodologies, as well as the writing process and the characteristics of the text which has to convey different aspects and patterns in the description of a reality that goes beyond the academic universe.

ABSTRACT. Historical discourse analysis (Brinton, 2001) has proven useful to denaturalize taken-for-granted discourse patters in present-day academic writing, such as evaluation (Salager-Meyer & Zambrano, 2001), nominalization (Halliday, 2004) or impersonalization (Atkinson, 1999). It can help novice writers understand regularities, symbolic choices and practices within communities and systems of activity that vary through time (Bazerman, 1988) and therefore it can promote critical awareness and heightened sensitivity for writing variation, a key feature in skilled and effective writers (Devitt, 2009). Central to academic writing instruction is intertextuality: including, appropriating and assessing knowledge, sources and authorized disciplinary voices while building and negotiating a self, authorial voice (Hyland, 2004). Intertextuality has been extensively studied in experts and students’ academic writing across disciplines, as it relates to writers’ disciplinary identities and promotes disciplinary learning, but little is known about how students’ intertextuality practices have varied diachronically. This exploratory research aims to contrast intertextuality patterns in 10 undergraduate History major dissertations written in Spanish between 1930 (creation of the first national History Department) and 1990 (expansion of Higher Education) at the two most important universities in Chile. Two independent researchers qualitatively coded explicit techniques of intertextual representation (Bazerman, 2004) in the corpus using NVivo12. Interrater reliability and number of occurrences are calculated. Results show that explicit intertextuality is a stable feature in History students’ academic writing in Spanish across time. However, the number of references (particularly, international History papers) increases, students’ critical stance becomes more common, footnotes expand to account for supporting sources, and dissertations’ introductions gather more authorial references that validate the research purpose. These complex intertextuality patters are interpreted as a recent feature of writing in History that has emerged to meet a gradual professionalization and globalization of the field and a pressing expectation for novice writers to systematically engage in disciplinary consensual knowledge.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to show through which mechanisms a strong focus on plagiarism and the use of plagiarism detection software impacts students' identity construction as writers. Through an analysis of questions posted to a Q&A-function part of an online plagiarism tutorial, we show how 1) students internalize a legal discourse as a framework for their own writing and 2) students lack access to contesting discourses through which to articulate issues connected to learning and ownership of their own writing. We show how these findings can hinder the development of authorial identity and voice (Ivanič,1998), which is key to students becoming part of their disciplinary community.

Data consist of 50 questions posted to a Q&A function part of an online plagiarism tutorial in a five-year period. The tutorial was created in collaboration between Danish University libraries. Data were coded thematically using grounded theory methods (Charmaz, 2006) independently by two researchers, and a comparison of the themes informed a discourse analysis of the material (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001.)

This paper joins an ongoing critical discussion of the implication of plagiarism software on writing development (Vardi, 2012; Silvey et al., 2016; Zwagerman, 2008), and contributes an empirically grounded mapping of how a strong focus on plagiarism and the use of plagiarism detection software shapes how students articulate questions and issues connected to writing, the discourses available to them for this articulation and their limitations. We show how, paradoxically, a legal discourse as a framework for writing denies students ownership of their own writing, making it very difficult for them to carve out a space to develop their own authorial identity and voice. By offering contesting discourses to those that are limited to producing non-cheaters, writing support practices can play an important role in supporting students negotiating an identity as writers.

ABSTRACT. Identity in student writing is mostly discussed as a matter of compromise and a process involving the loss of voice. Understanding the hidden power relations in writing in this way helps to reveal the alienating and marginalising nature of writing for undergraduate students in particular (Lea and Street 1998).

But what is missing from these debates is a challenge to the scant attention paid to the possibilities, opportunities and privileges that students may experience as writers. And yet such a discussion can contribute additionality both in terms of understanding identity-work in writing, and the potential to steer writing pedagogies in new and novel ways (Thesen and Cooper 2014).

This paper therefore attempts to plug this apparent gap by drawing from a series of semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students that unexpectantly included the gains of writing from the student point of view. These gains were diverse and involved concerns to do with agency, accessibility and advocacy.

In particular, the paper discusses the ways in which some student writers spoke of audiences beyond academia and their sense of responsibility and power towards them as student writers. The paper also explores the way that some students spoke about deliberately resisting academic conventions, and the ways they sought to implant aspects of themselves in writing through a number of linguistic devices that they saw as available to them.

The findings highlight the ways in which students maintain and assert voice in academic writing and the complex ways in which students view the play out of power within academia, which they see themselves as part of. The implications are that new ways of viewing student agency in writing might be made use of in relation to assessment design and supporting writing development.

ABSTRACT. This paper will report the main findings of a study aimed at identifying patterns in the use of evaluative resources in texts written by undergraduate students of Spanish. By highlighting these resources it is possible to see how these students construct both a stance and an effective voice in their texts. In addition, we compare patterns used by first- and fourth-year students to see how the construction of voice develops and differs in the course of a four-year university program. The study was based, theoretically and methodologically, on the Appraisal system as proposed by Martin & White (2005), which offers a framework for examining evaluative aspects of language. It is divided into three subsystems: ATTITUDE, which includes options to express emotions and evaluations towards persons, and/or entities; GRADUATION which includes resources that allow for the increase or decrease in the force of the evaluations; and ENGAGEMENT that accounts for those resources that help develop a stance towards other voices. Taking these three subsystems into consideration, twenty literary essays were analyzed with the objective of identifying distinctive evaluative patterns. These essays were written by students –ten sophomores and ten seniors- of Spanish Literature at a university in Mexico. Results show differences in the way students use evaluative resources in all three subsystems mentioned above and, consequently, show how they influence the reader´s perception of students’ assertiveness and familiarity with disciplinary conventions. The description of these linguistic resources helps shed light on the strategies that students use for presenting a stance as well as negotiating a voice in their texts. At the same time, by identifying these strategies, it is possible for teachers to help students work at different stages towards a more effective use of evaluative resources and therefore help them establish a more successful authorial voice in their texts.

ABSTRACT. As a group of language experts, we teach academic writing courses in English and Dutch embedded within degrees at various faculties. This means we need to take into account differences between disciplines in terms of writing styles and cultures. Moreover, the increasing internationalization means we are working with students with different language backgrounds, different levels of proficiency, and with varying levels of analytical knowledge about language.

Our way of meeting these challenges is a feedback system which we have developed in the past years. Teachers mark student work by adding ‘codes’ to a text, for instance ‘tense’ or ‘comma’. Students see this code, and can click on a link to go directly to the relevant page on a purpose-built feedback website, which contains an explanation of the topic, lists common errors and offers exercises. The codes and website were developed based on error categorization of hundreds of student texts from a wide range of disciplines. We have not only aimed to develop a system for providing effective corrective feedback (cf. Ferris 2003), but also aimed to gain insight into differences between disciplines in terms of linguistic features, following Hyland’s (2016) distinction between English for general and specific academic purposes. This not only includes attention to technical vocabulary in addition to general academic vocabulary (cf. Coxhead, 2016), but also the type of grammatical complexity in a particular discipline (see Biber & Gray 2016).

In this talk, we will briefly report on the categorization of errors by students. More importantly, we will then present what we have learned about the effectiveness of these tools and students’ experiences, which we have investigated in several projects using questionnaires, analysis of teachers’ marking and analysis of students' text improvement. These results provide valuable insight into the needs that students in different disciplines have when it comes to language skills and language support.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents the initial phase of a research project aimed to create opportunities for faculty to scaffold students’ development as writers. Multiple methodological approaches are applied, including the mapping of writing instructions at the University of N and a needs analysis related to the establishment of a WAC-programme.

As a traditional research university, writing support at N has generally been sparse and reliant on individual teachers. However, with a more diversified student population – along with a new-found interest in students’ learning – opportunities for renewing pedagogical practices are emerging, related especially to digital learning management systems.

Our study elucidates how writing is (not) conceptualised across the university in policy processes, course designs and assignment/thesis criteria. In addition to the analysis of documents, we draw perspectives from interviews of international students and a small teacher survey. In order to design writing support services where students and teachers can interact in relationships of mutual recognition, the analysis focuses on questions of academic literacies, voice, identity and subject positions.

We find that attention to writing is absent even in settings where it would have been natural, such as central recommendations for improving feedback and the design of (digital) learning environments. There are generally few writing instructions in the university’s course pages, and explicit requirements tend to be formalistic and/or unsystematic. Teachers in the survey wish for institutional and collegial support in order to scaffold students’ development as writers, while the interviewed students express frustration at being judged by style-related criteria that they struggle to identify, thus causing stress and reduced performance.

In short, there is a mismatch between aims and means in the university’s strategies which could arguably be remedied by increased attention to students’ writing. Instead, there is a struggle for recognition (Honneth) that affects both teachers, students and the relationship between them.

ABSTRACT. The aim with this study is to explore how students make use of digital writing tools while writing an academic essay. In order to examine how students make use of such tools I have followed ten students during their ten weeks essay writing. In this paper specifically I will present data generated by the recording of the students’ screens while writing. This methodological approach, which is grounded in sociomaterial theory (e.g. Gourlay and Oliver 2018) provides information about students’ different digital strategies, that is, the tools student mobilize, and how their texts are affected by these strategies. In my analysis of the data I have related to the field of academic literacies (Lea and Street 1998) as well as to the field of digital literacies (e.g. Goodfellow and Lea 2013). My results show that students rarely make use of other tools than the conventional, and by the university amended writing tools, such as Microsoft Word. However, I show that mobilizing different digital tools might open up for new learning processes while writing. In the presentation I argue that awareness of digital strategies could be an important contribution to the teaching of academic writing. Universities often take digital abilities for granted, in line with an overall view of the students as “digitally natives” (Thomas 2011), however such ability may be shallow, or unevenly distributed in the student population.

Goodfellow, R., & Lea, M. R. (2013). Literacy in the digital university : critical perspectives on learning, scholarship, and technology: New York : Routledge. Gourlay, L., & Oliver, M. (2018). Student Engagement in the Digital University: Sociomaterial Assemblages. New York: Routledge. Lea, M., & Street, B. (1998). Student writing in higher education: An academic literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education, 23(2), 157-172. doi:10.1080/03075079812331380364 Thomas, M. (2011). Deconstructing digital natives: young people, technology, and the new literacies. New York Routledge.

ABSTRACT. Writing is an important part of most academics’ daily work, but it is very rarely discussed at universities: “all academics write; few talk about it” (Murray, 2015:2). As a result, academics may struggle to find their identity as writers. Structured writing retreats (cf. Moore 2003; Murray 2008; Murray & Newton 2009; Petrova & Coughlin 2012) have developed in order to give academics time and space for writing in a place where they can also reflect on their writing practice, thus possibly (re-)connecting with their writer identity. At the Unit for Academic Language (ASK), a university-wide unit catering for writing and language development for students and staff at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, structured writing retreats for academics (doctoral students and researchers) have recently been implemented. One important aspect of retreats is writing together with other writers, i.e. a socialization of writing (Murray 2015) and a way of ”mov[ing] academics from a position of peripherality into a community of writers” (Murray & Newton 2009:542). Therefore, an overall aim with ASK’s retreats is to encourage participants to, after the retreats, form their own writing groups with colleagues at their respective departments. A small-scale survey initiated by ASK in 2018 shows that many participants have actually done so when returning to their everyday work environment. In the present study, we revisit the retreat participants and qualitatively explore how joining a writing group after a retreat may have developed the participants’ writing practice and their view of writing in various ways. Preliminary findings show that forming writing groups and thus incorporating the writing retreat pedagogy into the “normal business” (Aitchison & Lee 2006) at departmental level may be one step towards legitimizing writing (Murray 2015) in academia as well as a way for academics to find a stronger identity as writers.

ABSTRACT. During the past couple of decades, higher education institutions have been enhancing supervision practices and academic support for increasingly large and diverse cohorts of doctoral students (Andres et al, 2015). To help these students transition into scholarly writers and successfully complete their dissertations, writing centers frequently provide writing support, including writing retreats. Writing retreats for doctoral students usually stress either individual writing time or formal, generic training of writing skills isolated from the broader learning processes in which students develop their scholarly identity and autonomy.

This paper presents a peer group approach to doctoral writing retreats aimed at strengthening students’ informal learning and identity development within a formal disciplinary context (Starke-Meyering, 2011). Developed and facilitated by the authors at Aarhus University in Denmark, the retreat combines formal and informal learning about sustainable writing habits in a community of practice that supports individual and collective identity development (Murray and Newton, 2009; Boud & Lee, 2005). We will discuss the development and results of three separate retreats run between 2017 and 2019, based on action research. The data includes facilitator experiences, observations and reflections, the writing retreat design, student answers to open-ended questions, and student evaluations. The retreat is innovative in actively using peer groups in the learning process and in being embedded within a formal research program consisting of several adjacent disciplines. The retreats focused on the writing process, (cross-)disciplinary negotiation of meaning through supervisor feedback and peer review, writing time, and individual and social development. The learning thus occurred at several intersections: in generic, cross-disciplinary, and disciplinary frameworks, as well as in formal and informal and individual and collective learning processes. Our findings indicate that the retreat helped strengthen students' confidence and skills as writers, their individual and collective identities as doctoral students and emerging scholars, and their institutional ties.

ABSTRACT. In UK HE practical writing support has not kept pace with advances in our understanding of how students learn to write in their disciplines or greater comprehension of the nature of these discourses they are acquiring (Nesi & Gardener 2012). In spite of such approaches being theoretically discredited (Lea and Street 1998, Lillis 2003, Wingate 2006) current provision can still be characterized as fragmented offering generic, deficit focused, skills based instruction. This presentation reports on our attempts to bridge this gap and embed writing development work within a department. We report on an extended action research project which aimed to increase student academic literacy within one department with a specific focus on students from a widening participation background. We assume "all students require tuition that helps them develop conversancy with the academic literacies of their discipline" (Murray 2016:1296) and that our institution bears responsibility for providing opportunities to do this. The pilot focused on supporting development of independent control of the writing process; recognising the features of high quality disciplinary academic writing (Sadler 2010, Scoles 2013, Mitchell & Riddle 2000), and developing practices of expert writers. The project provided three distinct interventions; creation of exemplars of high scoring student writing with staff commentary, providing writing retreats to generate text (Petrova et al 2009) and writing circles to collaboratively develop editing skills (Roberts et al 2017). Focus groups were used to evaluate the pilot, capturing staff and student experiences. Now in the second year the project has moved from co-curricular position to more fully embedded in the curriculum, and we are adding to focus group data with pre and post measures of confidence and self-efficacy drawn from self -report questionnaires. We will share findings & some of the challenges of researching developments in writing practices across a large department and our initial thoughts of the viability of this approach.

ABSTRACT. Writing expectations vary across cultures; language differences, information emphases, even vocabulary and style vary wildly among cultural groups. When students enter a new culture with new expectations for writing, the academic writing instructor’s job involves more than teaching citation or marking grammar. My university (LCC International University) is an English-medium university in Lithuania that teaches an international student body who are not native English speakers. The university’s freshman writing program exists to help students acclimate to a North American style of academic writing that differs from their previous experiences with academic writing. My challenge as a first-year writing instructor is to respect the cultural identity and the education the students have earned while also providing tools to succeed in future university coursework. Adapting writing to students and students to writing is complicated; I propose three activities that help instructors engaging with new student cultures. First, we will analyze academic writing from several cultures to identify what those cultures value in academic writing. Participants are asked to bring a 1-2 page sample of student writing to the workshop so that more than one perspective on what makes “good academic writing” can be analyzed, helping participants explore traits of good writing. Next, we will conduct a brainstorming session where we identify our views of “good academic writing.” Each element should have a reason why (e.g., why is there “no first person”?), giving participants opportunities to identify unspoken expectations brought to the writing class. Finally--and admittedly a difficult task--we will make connections between cultural expectations of writing in other parts of the world and “standard academic writing” in more Western-centric academic writing classrooms. How can writing instructors recognize our students’ values and help them merge with our classrooms’ values so that students validate identity while adapting to a new way of writing?

ABSTRACT. Visualisation tasks and tools in academic writing pedagogy

Reflecting on one’s writing experience facilitates writing development; however, some students find it difficult to engage in reflection on their writing processes and experiences. This teaching practice presentation aims to promote visualisation tasks and tools as powerful pedagogical means which can be fruitfully used for this purpose. I will first present a rationale for the use of visualisation in the academic writing classroom as a pedagogical device for supporting writing development by raising writer awareness and stimulating reflection and discussion about writing. This will be followed by a brief introduction of visualisation tasks and tools that have recently been used in academic writing research, such as the genre visualisation task (e.g. Negretti & McGrath, 2018), the journey plot tool (e.g. Sala-Bubaré & Castelló, 2017) and writers’ social networks maps (e.g. Lillis & Curry, 2010). Ways in which these tasks and tools can be adapted for pedagogical purposes to support writing development will then be suggested and their strengths and limitations will be discussed. In the second part of the session I will invite questions, comments and further suggestions from the audience.

References

Lillis, T., & Curry, M.J. (2010). Academic writing in a global context. The politics and practices of publishing in English. Routledge: London.

Negretti, R., & McGrath, L. (2017). Scaffolding genre knowledge and metacognition: Insights from an L2 doctoral research writing course. Journal of Second Language Writing, 40, 12-31.

Sala-Bubaré A. & Castelló, M. (2017). Exploring the relationship between doctoral students’ experiences and research community positioning. Studies in Continuing Education, 39, 16-34.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this teaching practice is to develop students’ ability to structure an academic text and integrate the reader’s perspective into the writing process.

A key challenge for life science students at the University of Oslo is that they meet only a few writing assignments before writing their master thesis. Master students must rapidly mature from writing undergraduate lab reports to presenting independent research results, and this process requires complex disciplinary learning.

This presentation will demonstrate how teaching with a visual organizer can support the students in their writing development in two steps. The teaching practice is easy to use and can be adapted to teachers and writers at different stages.

First, the writer uses visual organizers (for example PostIT-notes) to structure and explore the elements of a paper or a section of the paper. The visual organizer provides an overall picture of what the writer wants to communicate, and facilitates reflection and discussion concerning the role of structure in academic writing.

The second step is an innovative aspect of the teaching practice. Here, the writer takes the perspective of the intended reader and re-examines the outlined text. The key learning activity is to articulate the readers’ questions that guide the text. If necessary, the student re-structures and adapts the outline to meet the readers’ needs.

The teaching practice contributes to writing development by encouraging discussion and reflection on the role of structure in an academic text, and by training students to alternate between reader/writer –perspectives during the writing process.

In addition, the teaching practice can also stimulate disciplinary learning, as the disciplinary content forms the basis for understanding the discipline-specific genre features. The visual organizer teaches the students about the intimate relationship between the structure and content of an academic text.

ABSTRACT. This teaching practice demonstration will suggest practical ways to incorporate commonplace books into courses across disciplines to help students engage and understand ideas, their relevance, and interconnectedness.

Historically, a commonplace book was a handwritten notebook, a deeply personal place to store materials for future reference. John Locke developed an intricate system for categorizing and indexing to ease the process of finding material inside. Many writers adopted commonplace book practices, including Auden, Wilde, Hardy, Forster. The commonplace book tradition, stemming from the Renaissance, offers places to structure ideas and information for today’s writing students.

Integrating commonplace books enables me to make the reading and writing process central to each class, and enables students to creatively engage with and collect language of others, grapple with it at a deeper level, and in turn, to create and to expand their own understanding. Commonplace books allow students to think as writers, and become aware of the critical importance of observation and collection for producing an effective written product (Gaillet). They invite students into the scholarly tradition, where the “reader becomes the author” (Garvey, Darnton), and where reading and writing are connected activities. Students leave the course with a personal companion text that reflects their development and interests as writers and readers.

Unlike journaling, commonplace books’ emphasis is on providing a personal format for thinking and understanding. They offer a richer approach than journaling by identifying and selecting worthy ideas and phrases, copying and manually transcribing passages from readings and conversations, indexing, classifying, and then actively engaging with these passages. Students internalize complex material, and negotiate new stylistic preferences in their expression and writing habits. Commonplace books positively impact writing, and they can be an effective tool for students to learn course content across disciplines. This demonstration will provide samples from writing, art, and mathematics.

ABSTRACT. The Text Trainer is a teaching methodology that enables students to write better texts and, at the same time, to become more acquainted with the content of the disciplines they are working in. In this study, the Text Trainer is applied to academic writing skills. The methodology consists of a step-by-step-plan and instruments, used by teacher (T) and student (S):

(S) Using a sample text to set clear expectations for the paper assignment (S) Deducing characteristics from an example text and arriving at a checklist (teacher combines with theoretical explanation) (T) Familiarizing students with research skills (set of tools) (S) Learning how to use the checklist (T/S) Strategies on structuring a text (S/T) Checking structures/having them checked through (peer) feedback (checklist) (S/T) Writing a text (tools) (S) Checking texts/having them checked through (peer) feedback (checklist) (S) Rewriting the text

In the study we present, the Text Trainer was used for a (1st year) writing assignment in the Journalism Program at Howest University College (disciplines Research, Current History and Academic Writing). Students write a paper on the history of a country, by doing profound research. They develop their writing skills, disciplinary knowledge of history and research skills: the writing support is embedded in those disciplines. In this case, the Text Trainer instruments form an integral part of the Journalism training program (teachers in the team are all involved). The strategy fits into a learning pathway of academic writing towards the bachelor paper students have to write in their 3rd year. The examples, the checklist and peer feedback are crucial steps in the methodology of Text Trainer: Students gradually learn how to be critical about their own writing, acquire a better insight in the writing process, understand the intensity of setting up a (small) research project, gaining knowledge in history, critically deal with sources and summarize the information provided in these sources.

ABSTRACT. Teachers will increasingly become teachers of reading and writing. However, research shows that teacher candidates seem to experience substantial difficulties with reading and writing – especially when it comes to academic reading and writing. In our symposium we shed some light on the reading and writing abilities based on three longitudinal studies from German speaking regions. These studies capture reading and writing measures during regular teacher education with challenging reading and writing tasks. Yet, they employ quantitative and qualitative approaches and use unique but complementary points of view, which are useful to get a better picture of emerging writing skills and demanding writing requirements. Talk 1 (Rickert, Philipp & Furer) draws attention to reading abilities. The Swiss study uses a small set of discourse syntheses. The underlying texts were thoroughly analyzed in order to trace processes of informational selection and transformation. This particular perspective aims at a clear-cut intersection of reading and writing and is useful for capturing both skills. Talk 2 (Furer, Philipp & Rickert) is a follow-up study focusing writing measures. A small-scale pilot study was conducted during a portfolio course in which students had to cope with a difficult writing problem. The measures comprise motivational beliefs as well as a new instrument capturing conditional writing knowledge. The latter approach is quite new and deserves more attention considering that knowledge is a necessary precursor of writing success. Talk 3 (Schindler) deals with a longitudinal analysis of the changing nature of research questions that are developed during the practical term. During the practical term teacher students must tackle different environmentally driven affordances during a couple of months. The talk gives linguistic insights into academic writing at the intersection of university and school.

ABSTRACT. This study contributes to the field of (teaching) academic writing by refining a methodology for compiling academic phrasebanks. A phrasebank is a collection of typical phrases in academic texts and can be used as a pedagogical tool to support students’ writing. Using such resources can help students find appropriate rhetorical and linguistic means when writing academic texts (Morley n.d.). As such, phrasebanks help students to shape their writing so that is meets the expectations of their disciplinary audiences. The aim of this paper is to validate the methodology for building an Academic Phrasebank for Writing in Estonian (Jürine 2019). The Estonian phrasebank which has been compiled using a corpus-based bottom-up approach that relies on frequent N-grams (see Cortes 2013). This method is efficient as it allows identifying the most typical expressions and their functions across large bodies of text. However, the method has been criticized it for being too coarse-grained to identify all relevant functions (Moreno and Swales, 2018). In this study, we compare the functions and expressions in the Introduction section obtained with the bottom-up approach to that of top-down approach. The preliminary results indicate that while there are differences in the expressions obtained with the bottom-up and top-down approach, there is considerable overlap in the functions identified with the two approaches.

References Cortes, V. (2013). The purpose of this study is to: Connecting lexical bundles and moves in research article introductions. Journal of English for academic purposes, 12(1), 33-43. Jürine, A. (2019). Akadeemiliste Väljendite Varamu [Academic Phrasebank for Writing in Estonian]. Accessible at (in April 2019): teadustekst.ut.ee (March, 2019). Moreno, A. I., & Swales, J. M. (2018). Strengthening move analysis methodology towards bridging the function-form gap. English for Specific Purposes, 50, 40-63. Morley, J. (n.d). Phrasebank: a University-wide Online Writing Resource. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/lgbsxd6.

ABSTRACT. The issue of the value of 'general' academic literacies (AL) courses vis-a-vis 'faculty-specific' ones surfaced at the University of the West Indies in 2018 when a quality assurance review team recommended a change to the academic literacies programme. Instead of mixed-faculty groupings of Jamaican Creole-speaking students with substandard English language proficiency (ELP) pursuing a two-semester 'general' AL course, it was proposed that those successful in semester one of this course be transferred into faculty-specific courses for students deemed to have satisfactory ELP levels. The reviewers' rationale was that the non-faculty-specific course, Foun1019, disadvantaged students, failing to provide a disciplinary orientation. This recommendation was rejected by Foun1019 lecturers who had fought to introduce the course for a student population adjudged 'at risk', and who had been witnessing increasing Foun1019 pass rates. This research compares the academic outcomes of Social Sciences students who passed the general AL course with those of their counterparts who pursued a Social Sciences-specific one. To interpret the findings, the two courses' structure, content, delivery and assessment are analysed with a view to determining if, and how effectively, disciplinary intersections inform the pedagogy of the general AL course, and its efficacy in meeting its Social Sciences students' AL needs.

Research Question:

Is placement in general or faculty-specific UWI Mona academic literacies courses correlated to the academic outcomes of students in their discipline-specific courses?

Subquestions: 1) In what ways, if any, do the Year 1 GPA and course pass rates of successful Foun1019 students differ from those of successful Year 1 students in the Social Sciences faculty-specific Foun1013 course.

2) What educational variables, if any, might account for differences or lack of differences found in the two groups of students' academic outcomes?

3) Does the Foun1019 course pedagogy leverage disciplinary intersections effectively in developing students' academic literacies? If so, how is this achieved?

ABSTRACT. The main objective of this research is to create an "ideal map" which is the inventory or snapshot of the academic genres which constitute the writing requirements of all the subjects in the curriculum of the different levels of the Spanish educational system. The framework is based on writing model of the Didactext Group (www.didactext.es, www.redactext.es) and refers to the writing models of Hayes & Flower (1980), Bereiter & Scardamalia (1987), among others. The school in which the preliminary study was carried out belongs to the public education network of the Madrid Region. We designed a questionnaire aimed at the teachers of the school (Compulsory Secondary Education, Baccalaureate, and Higher Vocational Training, from ages 12 to 18). This questionnaire was validated by teachers from the school from different subject areas, as well as by experts in statistics. Then, we applied the questionnaire to obtain a picture of the uses and requirements of writing at the school, and to diagnose their writing situation. The predominance of the 10 most required academic genres (7 expository, 2 narrative and 1 descriptive) confirm the expository academic orientation of the teachers' requirements. The relevance of this work stems from the fact that the school uses and requires a diversity of academic genres in the process of teaching and learning. Both teachers and students use academic genres in order to facilitate the learning process and make it more effective. Thus, a map including academic genre (AG) was created using the data obtained, from which a series of proposals for the improvement of the writing process have been drawn up. The application of the teaching of the AG in the classroom will provide the opportunity to verify the results of the students’ learning.

ABSTRACT. PhD students are at a level in their careers where they begin to write for a “real” disciplinary community of which they want to become a member. This process is frequently referred to as developing one’s ‘disciplinary identity’ and includes two major tasks when it comes to writing their PhD dissertations: Conforming to textual conventions prevailing within their disciplines and simultaneously expressing their individuality in order to become self-determined researchers within the field (cf. Hyland 2012: 35). The aim of investigating this issue in different local university communities at a particular German university more closely is to be able to formulate recommendations to improve academic writing support for its junior researchers. I will focus on the disciplines of business studies and technical electronics/information sciences, since these are especially faced with the growing demand of writing a PhD thesis in English as a foreign language (cf. Rabe 2016: 17). As a starting point, two supervisors from each discipline were interviewed with the help of guideline-based interviews in order to retrieve information concerning circumstances and textual standards related to (writing) the PhD thesis and therefore developing one’s disciplinary identity in the given context. These were transcribed and analysed with the help of a qualitative content analysis (cf. Bogner, Littig & Menz 2014: 72ff). In this talk, I will present and discuss first findings concerning the use of first person pronouns. The data reveal that there are not only differences in treatment between the two disciplines but even within the disciplines. All supervisors uttered their view on whether to use them or not rather as clear conventions, whereas the different functions of the pronouns (cf. Hyland 2002: 1100ff) as well as possible options to avoid I or we were stated as leaving more room for individual choices, at least in business studies.

ABSTRACT. In this poster, we share our experience of organizing and teaching the compulsory academic writing course Writing in the Engineering Profession (4.5 ECTS credits) in the first term of The Masters's Programme in Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The language instruction is Swedish, the L1 of the majority of students. Up until 2016, the course was held by the School of Computer Science and Communication, but since fall 2016 the responsibility now lies on KTH Language and Communication. Planning and giving such a course poses a number of organizational and pedagogical challenges. The 230 students have diverse levels of writing experience and need different levels of introductions to Academic Writing and other written assignments at university. As Engineering Students in Computer Science at KTH, they write different types of texts, for example, code commentaries and project descriptions, and would, therefore benefit from a broader understanding of the various text types they may encounter during their studies and future workplaces. As is well known, the importance of excellent communication skills for a successful Engineering Career cannot be emphasized enough, as discussed by e.g. Lappalainen (2009) and Gustafsson et al. (2014). Therefore, the course is under re-development to include other text types, more aligned with other courses and written assignments within the programme and in the Engineering workplace, to further the students Engineering Proficiency in Literacy. We propose that a general principle of academic writing could well be used as a starting point for the teaching of other text types. We problematize the relationship between writing academically (as part of a university degree) and writing in the engineer's workplace. We discuss why and how the course needs to be further developed and integrated with other courses throughout the programme, in order to meet the requirements from both programme directors and the industry, and the challenges that such development provides.

ABSTRACT. Compared to writing for general purposes, academic writing contains rigid linguistic features student writers are expected to demonstrate in their compositions. This is often at the cost of freedom of expression stifling linguistic originality and arguably the most frustrating consequence, sufficiently establishing one’s own identity and voice. This research applies Koestler’s (1964) definition of creativity, namely, “uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties and skills” (p.120) and uses findings by Allison (2004) on the neglect of creativity in EAP in an attempt to review its potential relevance to academic writing in the minds of teachers and students. Data is drawn from interview transcripts from 5 Japanese university students who recently completed an introductory course in academic writing in the EAP department. The questions asked concern what constitutes good writing, whether the sample essays introduced during the course, demonstrating frequent deviation from the academic norm, were useful for student development and whether the participants valued discourse conformity over approaching the essay in their own way. The results suggest that the kind of genre-bending and rhetorical playfulness illustrated in the samples be a focus of instruction. Yet others felt practice and eventual mastery of the academic discourse was necessary before learning and applying such rhetorical flourishes. Lastly, the fear of being penalized and denigrating the essay’s acceptability were additional views reported by participants. A case is made for reviewing the relevance of creativity in EAP writing instruction and the extent to which it may be involved in EAP pedagogy.

ABSTRACT. The publication activities of senior academics tend to be closely related to those of their PhD students as the relationship of a supervisor and a PhD student is supposed to work on a mentorship basis. In cultures where academic writing and composition are not taught, a novice researcher may rely on their mentor even more. This poster reports results from interviews with supervisors and needs analysis among doctoral students at a Czech technical university where we investigated the respondents’ beliefs about writing and their attitudes to teaching and learning academic writing. Our preliminary results seem to confirm our hypothesis that those Czech supervisors who had had some exposure to structured writing support, e.g. during their stay abroad, are more likely to be the agents of change calling for writing support for their supervisees. On the other hand, those who themselves learned to write by trial and error seem to remain unaware of the possibility to teach (and learn) writing. The results are important for further progress as the presented research constitutes a part of an applied research project which will culminate in the development of blended-learning courses of academic writing and publication practice for PhD students in English at a non-English engineering university. The research results will be used in shaping the courses on academic writing and publishing, accompanying materials and workshops. Besides a didactic manual to train new writing instructors to teach the courses, we will prepare workshops for supervisors to equip them with the competence of providing quality feedback on writing as we would like them to remain important agents in the learning process.

supervisors as agents of change English as the big culture courses for PhD students workshops for supervisors didactic manual for teachers

ABSTRACT. Academic writing professionals continuously work on expanding the scope of writing genres so that students and researchers could find stimuli to present their research outcomes most effectively. Expanding the boundaries of possibility in academic writing can encourage students and early-career researchers to take their first steps on the publishing path. One of the genres that can help novice writers build confidence in practical skills is a science essay. Being concise, this genre is a perfect tool for conveying scientific insights that can emerge from in-depth studies. A science essay may also suit those who seek to present their original research findings that, on the one hand, may lack in scale but, on the other hand, may put a broader perspective on well-established issues. The poster describes a project – a scientific essay competition – initiated by the National Consortium of Writing Centers (Russia) in collaboration with North American writing centers. The competition was created to inspire students and researchers to look back over some of the scientific breakthroughs of the past and consider what discoveries and inventions will advance science, engineering, and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of the humanity in future. Tutors from well-established North American writing centers double peer-reviewed the submissions. The tutors were involved through the partnership established via the Consortium’s engagement in the “Developing Academic Writing Centers” program funded by the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Both the participants and the tutors took advantage of the opportunity to improve their research writing skills, explore educational settings across many disciplines, and learn within various science domains. The poster maps out a coherent strategy for using a science essay competition to establish international collaborations. The poster also highlights approaches to using science essay as a most effective writing genre to teach research writing skills outside the classroom.

ABSTRACT. Nowadays, there is a trend towards informality and a shift away from formal and impersonal style of academic writing to one that allows more personal comment, narration and stylistic variation. Based on recent research, traditional emails may be regarded as an obsolete medium of communication. However, lacking other options, they are still an indispensable tool for efficient communication in increasingly blended academic learning environment, representing a hybrid form of writing, an asynchronous dialogue between students and professors. Hence, the purpose of this poster presentation is to draw attention to and provide guidelines for teachers for new style and language used in emails written by students to their professors in university context, enabling better understanding of this form of academic writing, providing reasons for accepting email informality as a novel emailing style, and linking this novel informal stylistic features to other academic genres students would write in their future academic careers. In order to observe whether the new informal approach prevailed over the standardized email template, the authors collected and analyzed 200 students’ emails. After quantitative and qualitative content analysis, results reveal that students tend to generally write more informally: they simplify the standardized structure, lacking opening phrase, concrete request and/or closing statement with signature; they address their professors as equals rather than respectful higher social hierarchy members; they do not use formal and polite phrases to explain their demands; and they generally care more about the demand than style or language. The poster will emphasize the stylistic, structural and linguistic elements of contemporary emails whose norm is becoming less formal, with the objective of raising awareness to potential new standards in emails as academic means of communication, as well as potential informal features that might occur in other academic writing genres.

ABSTRACT. This poster presents a collaborative study between the Physics Department and the University Writing Program at the George Washington University that studies genre-based writing skills in Physics. Our study was initiated by an observation among STEM faculty that undergraduate students lack STEM specific writing skills. Our response was to design a collaborative research study with Physics faculty. Our goal is to demonstrate to scientists through their own disciplinary values that students can be taught STEM writing genres, and that STEM faculty can do this teaching. For STEM faculty the idea that faculty can teach—and have students learn—how to write in disciplinary genres is novel. Our research examines how teaching Physics genres enables students to conceptualize themselves as emerging scientists engaged in professional communication. Our longitudinal analysis investigates student writing from three sequenced Physics courses, evaluating student writing taught before faculty developed genre assignments, and student writing that responds to genre assignments. Analysis is based on a rubric collaboratively developed that evaluates general learning outcomes: attention to audience, genre, structure, style, as well as specialized learning outcomes: acknowledgement of past scholarship, working with models, incorporating scholarship, articulation of research questions, working with graphs, and articulation of methods. Initial analysis of student writing shows that teaching genre increases student ability to write in Physics, and that students demonstrate identifications as scientists. We are receiving attention from Physics and STEM audiences as the research is a cross-disciplinary collaboration that is produced from within their discipline. Based on initial results, we are working with our Physicist colleagues to redesign their undergraduate major and writing assignments that teach Physics genres with a goal to expand STEM faculty who are expert teachers of writing. This collaboration, its initial empirical results, and curricular materials offer a model for curricular and assignment design, cross-disciplinary research collaboration, and for demonstrating the value of writing to colleagues.

ABSTRACT. While article-based dissertations (or “PhD by compilation,” “thesis by publication,” or “alternative format thesis”) have been common in STEM fields for some time, they are now becoming increasingly common in doctoral programs in the humanities, social sciences, and professional fields as well (Jackson, 2013; Mason & Merga, 2018). Yet, as both discussions in social media (e.g. Alexander, 2014; Carling, 2017; Thomson, 2013) and a growing body of research (e.g. Frick, 2019; Pretorius, 2017; Niven, 2012) show, this development is not without controversy.

The goal of this roundtable is to explore some the debates and discussions about the emergence of this genre in new fields, with a particular emphasis on potential implications for writing pedagogy. By gathering panelists from South Africa, the UK, Germany, Estonia, and Norway, the roundtable will examine different ways of thinking about this genre from a range of geographical and institutional contexts. Some of the key questions the roundtable will use as a starting point are:

• How do the controversies surrounding the article-based thesis reflect larger debates about the role of doctoral education? • What are some of the different views on this genre across geographical, disciplinary, and institutional contexts? • What kind of support can writing specialists provide to doctoral students, supervisors and doctoral programs that use this dissertation format?

Roundtable panelists will briefly address one aspect of one of these questions from the vantage point of the speaker’s institutional context. Next, the roundtable conveners will invite audience members to contribute to the discussion with their perspectives on and experiences with this format. Ultimately, we hope to stimulate further discussion and thinking about doctoral writing, researcher development, and doctoral writing support.

ABSTRACT. Academic writing research has often analyzed students’ written discourse to provide evidence on learner writing development. This contribution explores students’ academic texts in order to identify their strengths and weaknesses and inform the design of courses supporting the mastering of disciplinary content and familiarization with target genres. It studies coherence development in L2 novice academic texts by focusing on the thematic element of the sentence, termed ‘theme zone’ (Halliday 1994, Hannay 2007). We analyse the discursive function of the three types of theme: the textual, usually represented by linking adverbials, the interpersonal, conveying the writer’s attitude, and the topical, typically the subject. By considering thematic variation in a corpus of English-medium diploma theses (1 million words) by Czech students in the fields of linguistics, literature and didactics, this study seeks to identify the patterning of multiple themes, their realizations and contribution to discourse coherence. Theme patterning and realizations are also studied in a reference corpus of research articles (75 000 words) by Anglophone scholars in the same fields. The same analytical procedure is applied to both corpora: first, theme patterns are analyzed to identify their types and range; secondly, corpus-based analysis is used for identifying the frequency and distribution of textual and interpersonal themes. The results show that Czech students tend to use primarily textual and topical themes whereas interpersonal themes are strongly underused. In comparison with the expert native speaker corpus, the range of realizations of textual and interpersonal themes in the theses is rather restricted. This seems to reflect a difference in scholarly maturity and a possible transference from L1 writing typical of novice writers. This suggests that writing development of all L2 novice writers should focus on raising students’ awareness of the wide range of rhetorical resources in the soft sciences and extending the range of devices, e.g. linking constructions and dialogic features, for improving textual coherence.

ABSTRACT. The objective of this paper is to compare student texts of two genres and two disciplines in academic writing in Spanish in order to see how the linguistic resources students choose to express appraisal vary from genre to genre and from discipline to discipline. This work forms part of the on-going research project Verbal typology and evaluation in the academic writing of the humanities, which intends to explore how lexicogrammar is related to the expression of appraisal in student texts. Our study draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and, in particular, on the Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005), which explores evaluative meanings in language, here we shall analyze only one of its subsystems, ATTITUDE. The analysis is based on student texts belonging to two genres (question-answer and essay), and two disciplines (history and literature). Within the SFL framework we explored three types of processes in academic texts: verbal, mental and relational. Then we registered the clauses that express appraisal and classified them according to the three domains of the ATTITUDE system: AFFECT, JUDGMENT and APPRECIATION. The preliminary results show more differences than similarities between the two corpora of the same genre belonging to two different disciplines: in the literature texts clauses with appraisal prevail and JUDGMENT is the preferred means of expressing ATTITUDE, while the history texts prefer neutral clauses and APPRECIATION prevails among the subtypes of ATTITUDE. At the same time there are more similarities than differences between the two genres of the same discipline (history): the prevalence of relational processes and the dominance of APPRECIATION as the preferred means of expressing ATTITUDE. These and other findings will be presented within a small discussion about the interaction of genre and discipline characteristics of academic texts and their didactic implications.

Martin, J. R., & P. R. White (2005). The language of evaluation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

ABSTRACT. With regard to writing centers and writing pedagogy in higher education, Germany seems to be one of the countries with ‘the fastest growing outside of North America’ (Scott 2017, 42). The foundation of the ‘Gesellschaft für Schreibdidaktik und Schreibforschung e.V. (gefsus)’ (Association for Writing Pedagogy and Research) in 2013 was an effort to accompany this rapid growing and to care for quality, because until then no policies with regard to academic writing existed. However,the problem remained: How could we influence higher education policies that did not even mention academic writing explicitly at this point? And how could we get influence on hiring processes of peer tutors for writing and of writing center staff? This roundtable shares trials and experiences with caring for quality in writing pedagogy on a national level. The ‘gefsus’ organizes its work in special interest groups (sigs). One of those sigs worked for several years on a position statement about peer writing tutor education. Another sig went through a collaborative writing process to work on a position statement on the development of writing competences in higher education that in the beginning was oriented towards the WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition (WPA 2014), but then developed into a more specific paper for the German context. Current efforts aim at a position statement on working conditions for writing center staff. We would like to discuss the following questions: What experiences do other associations have with processes like these? How can we make use of position papers of policies on a national level as well as on a regional level? What creative approaches can we develop to make those policies visible and used?

ABSTRACT. To foster professional development in teacher education, student teachers are asked to relate and analyze some professional experiences in academic reflective texts assembled in a portfolio, using theoretical resources to support their analysis. These texts can be considered as a “hybrid genre” in the sense that they include features of different text genres. Parts of these texts can for example be narrative when students recount a specific event; epistemic when they present and discuss knowledge; or analytical and interpretative. As a result of this hybrid character, student writers face a series of issues: how to insert academic authors’ speeches in a personal narrative? How to use theoretical knowledge to analyze professional experience? How to switch from an epistemic enunciative positioning (where the social physical author fades away) to a deictic enunciative positioning (where the social physical author is highlighted)? To answer these questions, this research analyses with a mixed method 10 randomly selected (from a corpus of 60) portfolios (10-15 pages) produced by students in the context of secondary teacher training. We quantify, in each portfolio, the scientific authors mentioned; the concepts and quotations cited and identify the way authors are quoted. We then analyze – in a qualitative manner – how the student, as an author, move from one enunciative positioning to another. Finally we study the way theoretical resources are used. Our results show: 1) important differences in the number of authors, concepts and quotations mentioned; 2) three main ways of switching from one positioning to another (with explicit, subtle indicators or no indicators); 3) different ways of mobilizing theoretical resources (from using theory as a solution to a problem to conceptualizing a situation). Our results question the way students understand and mobilize “theoretical resources” and how it affects their professional development.

ABSTRACT. Genres are socially recognized ways of using language, and in the university context various assignment papers constitute important instantiation of genres in networks of communication. Genres are not static but instead are shaped by emerging and shifting sociorhetorical situations. Although it has been acknowledged that writing practices to establish originality and significance may lead to new genres based on transformation of old genres through displacement or hybridization, little is known to what extent and in what ways such processes of genre innovation may be present in university assignment writing. Perhaps driven by analytical convenience, research into genres of student texts has often undervalued generic complexity, with insufficient attention paid to the potentially hybridized nature of assignment genres. Postgraduate written assignments provide a fertile ground for investigating such hybridization, given that postgraduate students are typically required to link theory with practice in writing, and such linkage can manifest in diverse forms of mixing, embedding, and combination of genres. Our study utilizes database of an under-construction academic writing corpus which comprises exemplary MEd and MSc assignment papers gathered in the Faculty of Education of an English-medium university in Hong Kong. We examine these papers using genre analysis and corpus methods with reference to assignment prompts, aiming to explore generic features of the hybridized student texts that help to explain their success. In particular, we focus on identifying characteristic rhetorical functions and lexico-grammatical fulfilment across the texts. Our results highlight the multiplicity of rhetorical functions in hybridized assignment papers in postgraduate courses and the complexity in which the linkage between academia and the professional world can be achieved textually by students. Our study sheds light on how writing promotes learning at the postgraduate level with findings feeding into the provision of discipline-integrated writing support targeting postgraduate students, which in turn would have implications for their employability and communication success in the professional world.

ABSTRACT. A growing body of research has reported scholars’ self-perceived disadvantages across disciplines to publish articles in English (Lillis & Curry, 2010). For example, Smith (2006), who was the editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group for 13 years, openly stated that while he was an editor, he regularly received letters from researchers who were upset because the BMJ rejected their paper and then the journal published what they perceived to be a much inferior paper on the same subject. Ken Hyland (2016), who is one of the prolific researchers in ESP, called for a more inclusive and balanced view of academic publishing. The present study investigates academic writing and publishing experiences in English among engineers who are non-native speakers of English. In-depth data were collected using semi-structured interviews (n=6) and observations. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) apprenticeship model was used as a theoretical framework that pinpoints that the social context in which learning takes place is one of the key concerns. The findings showed that regarding discursive (language related) challenges, there is an experienced disadvantage compared to native speakers, e.g. problems associated with the use of English, such as influences of L1, grammar and the quality of English language. And also, there was a self-perceived prejudice because of the reviewers’ insulting comments. The salient themes were the significance of community of practice and apprenticeship, the need for literacy brokering, i.e. different kinds of direct and indirect intervention by different people, such as editing service, other than the authors of the manuscripts, and the effects of legitimate peripheral participation, namely “learning through apprenticeship”, which suggests publishing is a process of internalization in learning and we should develop intellectually in a community and acquire knowledge. This study calls for the fairness of the review process with its quality and reliability while reviewing.

ABSTRACT. The purpose of this presentation is to provide an analytical description of the main genre features of anonymous peer reviews and to discuss appropriate pedagogical implications. As known, the anonymous review is an unpublished pre-publication review which evaluates research articles submitted to journals. The researchers, who intend to publish, encounter this genre as its recipients and periodically ‒ as producers, thus experiencing a need in developing appropriate knowledge and skills.

Despite existing research (Bocanegra-Valle 2015; Gosden 2001, 2003; Feak 2009; Fortanet 2008; Paltridge 2017, 2018), which mostly focuses on various pedagogically-relevant aspects of reviews, the anonymous referee’s report as a format of research communication has not so far become an object of holistic genre analysis, which implies consistent and consecutive consideration of communicative, compositional and language features of the texts belonging to a genre. In this paper, such an analysis is based upon a corpus of English texts which evaluated the papers in the fields of applied linguistics and applied mathematics submitted to international journals within the last 10 years. The methodological framework of the investigation combines Bakhtinian vision of genre, Swales’ move analysis, and a functional stylistic perspective developed within East European linguistic context.

As the results of this study show, the anonymous review is marked by the presence of several distinct functional moves, axiological imbalance, explicit didactic orientation and specific stylistic accents. It is anticipated that the awareness of these prominent features will help researchers to successfully produce the texts of the genre and, furthermore, to perceive it as a valuable source of professional assistance and enlightenment.

ABSTRACT. This presentation and the subsequent offers results of a development and research project aimed to strengthen and develop writing and writing practices in BA programmes at the Faculty of Humanities at University of Southern Denmark. The project is described within the framework of academic literacies (Lea & Street, 1998) and based on the understanding that academic writing supports disciplinary learning, provides access to the disciplinary research community and contributes to the development of scholar identity. The study holds two parts, a systematic investigation of discourses of writing in course regulations (this presentation) followed by intervention studies (presented by Peter Hobel). The analysis of course regulations is conducted with the purpose of gaining knowledge about the representation, position and conceptualisation of academic writing in the regulatory documents. The theoretical framework for analysis in this part of the project is discourse theory (Ivanič, 2004) and theory of academic writing competences. The document analysis is accomplished in three steps: firstly, a quantitative examination of the occurrence of key terms — secondly, an investigation of claims to students’ writing competences. Based on the first two steps and close reading, the dominating discourse(s) is identified. The results show great variation in extent and explicitness of academic writing. Differences relate to the history of the BA programmes. Programmes with a long tradition tend to treat writing more implicit than newer programs. Different conceptualisations of academic writing partly correlate with the weighting of a double purpose for BA programmes: to qualify for a postgraduate degree and to prepare for a profession. Skills and genre discourse are dominating though a few wordings indicate other discourses.

Ivanič, R. (2004). Discourses of writing and learning to write. Language and Education, 18(3) Lea, M. R., & Street, B. V. (1998). Student writing in higher education: An academic literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education, 23(2).

ABSTRACT. In order to strengthen writing practice in teaching at the BA programmes, graduate students are employed to supervise BA students’ academic writing assignments in the disciplines. As preparation the graduate students are offered a three-day course about academic writing and writing processes based on social-cultural theory on writing in the disciplines, disciplinary literacy and feedback (Black and Williams 1998, Shanahan 2012, Hillocks 1987). This paper examines the feedback offered by the disciplinary writing supervisors and their supervising role. Data consists partly of the written feedback given to the BA students by the supervisors, partly of semi structured interviews with the supervisors, BA students and teachers conducted after the writing supervision. Data is analysed within the framework of social cultural writing theory, textual theory and feedback theory. These theories emphasize that feedback supports learning and that writing is a mediating tool for learning. Four preliminary findings will be discussed: • By attending the course, the supervisors develop a reflexive perspective on the writing cultures of the disciplines • The supervisors become mediators between the students and the teachers in the process of enculturating the students in the writing cultures of the disciplines • In a few cases the authority of the supervisors has been questioned • The feedback of the supervisors addresses to a limited extent the meso level of the students’ texts

Shanahan and Shanahan (2012). What is disciplinary literacy and why does it matter? Top Lang Disorders, Vol. 32 Black and Williams (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in education, vol. 5 Hillocks (1987). Synthesis on research on teaching writing. Educational leadership, May

ABSTRACT. Being able to communicate well online has become a universal key competence (Kreulich et al 2016). Teaching online writing is important as well as potentially fruitful and rewarding. It is, however, also challenging. Not only are online compositions often hybrid texts, combining elements from academic, professional and journalistic writing, which poses a complex set of tasks for learners, but instructors are also sometimes ill-equipped for teaching in this setting. Institutional concerns regarding privacy and cost can be prohibitive and often it is “digital immigrants” who teach “digital natives”, which can affect learning outcomes and rearrange faculty-student constellations.

In this session, we will discuss what works and what does not. Key questions include: How do we manage institutional restrictions and conservativism regarding online writing? How do teachers of academic writing encourage critical thinking among students who increasingly treat knowledge as data nuggets? What happens to the instructor-student-dynamic when the student is more internet savvy than the instructor? And is generation Z really more internet savvy than instructors?

This session is designed as a knowledge exchange (Ravn 2007) to enable participants to network and share experience. In a series of small group discussions with changing members, participants ask questions relevant to their practice and share knowledge and resources with others. This participant-driven format initiates conversations that can continue throughout the conference and beyond.

Kreulich, K.; Dellmann, F.; Schutz, T., Harth, T. & Zwingmann, K (2016): Digitalization. Strategische Entwicklung einer kompetenzorientierten Lehre für die digitale Gesellschaft und Arbeitswelt. Die Position der UAS7-Hochschulen für angewandte Wissenschaft. Berlin: UAS7 e.V.

Ravn, I. (2007): The learning conference. In: Journal of European Industrial Training. 31 (3), pp. 212-222.

ABSTRACT. In launching the Peer Writing Tutor Alumni Research Project, Gillespie, Hughes, and Kail (2010) state that they “wanted to learn which abilities, values, and skills tutors developed from their education and experience as peer writing tutors and how, if at all, they had used those abilities, values, and skills in their lives beyond graduation.” Their analysis of 126 survey responses led to conclusions about the lasting impact of the writing center experience on tutors’ professional lives. Specifically, the authors found that the collaborative learning model underpinning most writing centers “inevitably puts the issue of authority on the table,” placing centers “at the core of the movement from perceiving education only as a hierarchical relationship to one that is also collaborative” (2010).

We intend to extend this project to include the other writing center “alumni,” namely directors. If the collaborative nature of writing centers constitutes them as communities of practice (Lave 1993; Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998, 2007), then directors learn as much from the experience as do tutors. This would suggest that just as tutors’ writing center experience influences their subsequent work, so too has that experience marked the work of directors as they move to other ventures both within and beyond the academy. We plan to test this hypothesis by surveying former writing center directors in order to determine 1) the extent to which their identity as members of a community of practice has influenced them as they re-shape their professional identities, and 2) the ways in which they have adapted their scholarly and professional expertise to address issues and audiences beyond the discipline.

Opening with our initial responses to these questions and a tentative plan for conducting the survey, we will then invite participants to discuss our assumptions, hypothesis, and methodology, as well as the implications of the project within and beyond the discipline.

ABSTRACT. The genre of the study-abroad blog prompts American students abroad to identify with marginalized populations, a practice that is particularly exigent amid the increasing commercialization of the international study-abroad industry. Yet faculty who teach study-abroad students are ill-equipped to disrupt the ideological assumptions about exceptionalism and privilege embedded in the genre. As genres organize ideologies into action (C. Miller), faculty leading study-abroad courses—and European faculty who teach American students studying abroad—must be aware of the ethical challenges presented by the genre and explicitly teach against the ideological assumptions that support it. My 2018 study of how students navigate the genre addresses the complicated rhetorical needs of students abroad and recommends reflection strategies for faculty who interact with students on foreign study. The relevance to EATAW is highlighted by an explosion of American study abroad initiatives, wherein 54% of students choose European destinations (IEE “Open Doors Report” 2018).

This presentation describes the genre of the American study-abroad blog as exemplified by the International Student Exchange Program (ISEP), which that provides travel logistics between American and European institutions. The conventions of the study abroad genre include “make it exciting,” a recommendation which ultimately encourages rhetors to emphasize their own privilege. The proposed genre analysis lesson acquaints students with the conventions of the study abroad blog so they may better navigate audience expectations. Participants will review public student-written study abroad blogs and social media posts, identifying problematic genre conventions and rewriting elements to correct issues of overidentification that obstruct the “genuine conversation” that precedes identification from difference (Ratcliffe). The lesson is relevant for instructors who lead students abroad or European faculty who teach classes at their home institutions where American students are currently studying. As more Americans study in Europe, faculty must be prepared to challenge the neoliberal values associated with the study-abroad blog genre.

ABSTRACT. Vienna University’s Center for Teaching and Learning started its writing peer-tutor (“Writing Mentoring” or Schreibmentoring) programme in 2013. What first began as a small pilot for two departments has evolved into a cooperation with 28 departments, and about 60 tutors receiving initial training per year. What makes our peer-tutor education unique is the peer-tutors’ immersion into practice from the very beginning. Before the semester starts, they will go through a short, but intense training phase, which consists of seven workshops (writing, research and Moodle). After these initial workshops a weekly class starts, with an initial focus on the development of the semester programme, before they are “thrown in at the deep end”: in teams of two they offer weekly “writing mentoring groups” (altogether 21) for 28 BA-programmes. During the semester, the class continues by alternating classical teaching of didactical methods and academic German with supervision sessions in order to foster students’ newly developing competencies as peer-tutors. In dealing with the uncertainties and difficulties they are faced with in their role, the format of supervision (with elements from coaching) allows for turning incidents which students may initially experience as emotionally upsetting or even failure into crystallization points for learning about organizational contexts as well as for personal development. In other words, analogously to the idea that writing didactics means working with the writer we are working with the peer-tutor. Data from the (primarily quantitative) evaluation surveys and a qualitative analysis of reflection papers written for class allow us to trace how the peer tutors rise to the challenge. Almost all describe their education as rewarding and state that this format has helped them not only to become better tutors, but has also aided them in their academic and personal development.

ABSTRACT. How do other universities / colleges define L2 students? Should there be a distinction between L2 students and native speakers, or should we look at them all as multilingual students, for whom lack of proficiency cannot form a threshold? If we need remediation, how do we know it is effective? Also, do those remedial interventions have the effect we are aiming for? Do we need to adapt assessment for L2 students? If so, can we assess L2 students differently from native speakers, for instance by not focusing on proficiency, but only on content? Is that even possible?