Academic literacies research has tended to focus on writers in context, while systemic functional linguistic research has tended to focus on texts in context. While literacy practices and written texts may be usefully analysed independently, this paper describes how an investigation of genres of academic writing in the BAWE (British Academic…

As an area of research that continues to develop, the study of linguistics worldwide presents the opportunity for the improvement of cross-cultural communication through education and research. Language educators are charged with the task of instructing students to effectively communicate across cultures in a multi-lingual world. The…

This study utilizes a pre-test/post-test assessment to investigate the instructional efficacy of a genre-based approach to teaching summary writing. Forty-one EFL university students in Taiwan were asked before and after the instruction to summarize a simplified version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in a maximum of 500 words. All the students'…

Although extensive research has been done on teaching emails and on the use of emails in organisations, little research exists about how to incorporate organizational practitioners' views as the voices of the community of social practice. To remedy this pedagogical gap, this article uses a genre approach to discuss organizational practitioners'…

This article examines the role of linguistic and sociolinguistic factors in the second language (L2) acquisition of Spanish vibrants. The data consist of 2 sets of recordings from 37 students enrolled in a Spanish pronunciation class. The statistical program VarbRul was used to analyze 7,597 samples. The vibration (simple or multiple) and the…

This article describes the effects of an interventionist form-focused course on the written English of first-year second language university learners. For two semester courses the form (or grammar) of the language was concentrated upon. During the first semester the use of correct grammar was focussed on intensively, while during the second…

This paper presents a novel collaborative tool--AWESOME Dissertation Environment (ADE)--which facilitates student learning through semantic social scaffolding: a new approach to dissertation writing challenges. These challenges revolve around three issues: timing of support; collective intelligence, and sense making strategies in tension with the…

Using textual analysis and interviews with student writers, this study aims to provide an insight into second language students' use of direct quotations in their MA theses by comparing direct quotations in high-rated and low-rated Master's theses, and by exploring student writers' own motivations to quote directly from sources. The corpus…

This action research study investigates how genre theory can be integrated into the practice of a writing enrichment program and how the frameworks of Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodal Analysis can help assess and improve both student learning and teacher practice. A multilayered exploration of teacher-student discourse in an urban public…

How a person teaches grammar depends on what he or she believes it does. Some see grammar as a set of rules, inherited from wise forefathers. For them, teaching grammar means making students aware of, and then holding them to, these rules. Others see grammar as an expression of style, an invitation to the writer to explore how to create a…

This study examines how novice foreign language (FL) writers develop their genre awareness, linguistic knowledge, and writing competence in a genre-based writing course that incorporates email-writing tasks. To define genre, the study draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) that sees language as a resource for making meaning in a particular…

This article discusses challenges involved in contrastive discourse analysis that emerged while carrying out a follow-up study into a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) program in Spain. Reversing the focus on English of much contrastive rhetoric work, the study investigates the effect of second-language-English on…

Background: In an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course offered to a department in a university in Hong Kong preparing the students for their internship, students were expected to learn to write and engage in spoken activities related to a number of documents over a period of 13 weeks. Having to achieve so many learning outcomes within so…

This article explores the design and implementation of critical action research undertaken to encourage equal classroom participation. Building on a body of literature on critical action research and oral participation, the author reports her research project undertaken in a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic class in Japan to examine practices of how…

As university students are frequently given the tasks of writing research reports to fulfil their respective programme requirements, teaching novice writers to present the results of their reports understandably constitutes an essential component of English lessons at tertiary level. While past research has shown that results are consistently…