Supervising masters and doctoral dissertations is a key function of teaching in higher education and giving written feedback on draft sections is an essential component of this function. However, the specific types of response that supervisors give to their dissertation students' written work have received limited research interest to date. The…

This paper presents an exploratory analysis of treatment-control differences in the quality of classroom interactions in 4th through 7th grade urban classrooms. Word Generation (WG) is a research-based academic language program for middle school students designed to teach novel vocabulary and literacy through language arts, math, science, and…

In an effort to improve our understanding of intellectual discussion in the undergraduate seminar and how it may be enhanced, three interdisciplinary discussion-based classes taken by primarily first-year students at a liberal arts college were studied ethnographically. Specifically, this article explores the struggles experienced by the students…

Recent ESP research into academic writing has shown how writers convey their stance and interact with readers across different disciplines. However, little research has been carried out into the disciplinary writing practices of the pure mathematics academic community from an ESP genre analysis perspective. This study begins to address this gap by…

In attempts to find appropriate and authentic materials for students who are developing their academic writing skills, instructors often turn to works written by professional academics. However, genres such as published research articles and textbooks in specific disciplines may not be the most suitable models for what first year composition…

This article deals with how economists present their new knowledge claim in the genre of the research article. In the discipline of economics today, the claim is typically included not only in the obvious results/discussion section(s) but also in three other locations of the article: the abstract, the introduction, and the conclusion. The present…

A cross-cultural approach is taken to analyse Linguistics research articles in English and Italian in terms of 1) the use of exclusive first-person subject pronouns in English and first-person inflected verbs in Italian, and 2) the passive voice in both languages and "si" constructions in Italian. The aim is to determine whether personal and…

Recent South African meditations on the complex nature of post graduate supervision and teaching by Fataar (2005) and Waghid (2005; 2007) provide excellent accounts of the dialogic space between lecturer/supervisor and student. However, these accounts need to be supplemented by an explicit discussion of the broader academic communities of practice…

This article is the result of a grounded theory investigation into the ways PhD topics are assigned by supervisors in engineering and selected by students in the social sciences/humanities in UK universities, broadly referred to as "topic arrangement", which can be regarded as one aspect of academic socialisation into academic Discourse…

This paper presents a review of 39 empirical studies that investigated multilingual scholars' participation in core/global academic communities through article and research publication. These studies were analyzed in terms of multilingual scholars' reasons for publishing in English, the obstacles that stand in their way of international…

While academic discourse communities have been extensively studied as social contexts of forms/functions, and teachers, lessons, and students have been researched from every imaginable angle, the prevailing view of academic writing conventions is still quite normative. The conventions of the academy are often regarded as a stable collection of…

The increasing use of computers to enable or replace face-to-face tutorial discussion groups in higher education is creating a new form of academic writing. This small-scale study of 43 students and three tutors identifies ways in which students present their opinions in a forum which allows greater time for reflection, but also creates a…

In this study we examine how university plagiarism policies interact with international graduate students' academic writing in English as they develop identities as authors and students. The study is informed by the sociocultural theoretical perspective [Vygotsky, L. (1978). "Mind in society: The development of higher mental processes." Cambridge,…

This study reports the perceptions of students and lecturers on the effectiveness of the foreign language instruction in relation to students' academic needs in an English-medium university in Turkey. The theoretical framework of the study draws upon a discourse community (DC) perspective, which considers writing as a socio-cultural practice and…

Adopting the social theory of writing and new rhetorical genre studies (Bakhtin, 1986; Dias, Freedman, Medway, & Pare, 1999; Freedman & Medway, 1994; Miller, 1984/1994) as the theoretical framework in this study I made an attempt to explore graduate students' perceptions of academic writing as a mode of communication in academia. I interviewed…