What started as a mission to help the author's journalism students develop employability skills, opened up their practice to the area of 'mindful play'. From this, the author started to develop a creative, holistic and student-centred teaching and learning strategy, using simple, workable interventions to stimulate dialogic learning, strengthen…

A growing body of academic literacies research has enhanced our understanding of university writing as contested, institutionally situated practice with important consequences, particularly for students as they learn to negotiate the writing demands of university study. Less empirical attention has been paid to the practices of subject academics…

Online education can be leveraged to help current students complete their degrees and to attract new students. While online learning is not new, in recent years, it has been moving away from the periphery of higher education and becoming a central component of institutional strategies for increasing student enrollment, retention, and completion.…

There is growing concern among many regarding plagiarism within student writing. This has promoted investigation into both the factors that predict plagiarism and potential methods of reducing plagiarism. Consequently, we developed and evaluated an intervention to enhance good practice within academic writing through the use of the plagiarism…

The current higher education climate seems to be demanding increasing levels of written output from doctoral researchers during candidature. In this context this study employed an online questionnaire, individual interviews and focus group discussions to collect information on the challenges and successes of doctoral writing. It was found that…

Teachers' feedback on students' written work is an important aspect of pedagogy. However, theoretical views differ on what constitutes "good" feedback, both among applied linguists and academics in other disciplines. In-depth research needs to be carried out into the contextual difficulties of evaluating and assessing academic…

Describes the use in the classroom of students' phone messages and casual notes to illustrate the relationship between composition class and writing in students' daily lives, that writing defines itself according to the purpose and audience of each task, and that they already know a great deal about writing. (SR)

Describes a teaching method which can be used in college level sociology classes to improve student writing. The teacher provides students with concrete examples of well-written work by other students in the class to compare with their own. The example clearly illustrates what the teacher expects from the students. (AM)

The intention of this book is to introduce college students to the genre of poetry from the writer's point of view by presenting them with the same problems that aspiring poets encounter as they develop into accomplished poets. The book proceeds from some general observations to simple exercises, and then to more complex exercises, with many…

Describes a unit for a basic writing course using broadcast journalism to strengthen students' critical thinking skills and improve their writing facility. (MM)

Distinguishes between monitoring and evaluating student writing, discusses the rationale for monitoring, demonstrates monitoring procedures, and summarizes major considerations to remember when monitoring writing. (JAD)

Notes that, although many composition teachers talk about the need to find "organic" forms in composing, students are often content to organize their writing in formulaic ways. Discusses the difficulties in teaching form arising from students focusing on a particular form's requirements instead of its functions. Discusses using the counterpoint…

Cites essays by Joan Didion, John Berryman, and Martin Luther King in arguing that the essay, no matter how serious, can be considered as a fiction and a playful, exploratory and deeply interesting rhetorical game. Describes how these works were used to teach students that the essay is a living document calling for interaction. (SG)

For teachers of speech-oriented basic writers, the choices of what to teach--and what to count as learning--ought to be guided by those requirements of academic culture that are indispensable for basic writers to know, specifically the use of written language, a discourse specialized in both form and function and differing substantially from…

This article describes an autobiographical technique of learning wherein students relate psychology course material to their individual thoughts and experiences. (Author)