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Difficulties with academic writing tasks, such as the literature review, impact students' timely completion of graduate degrees. A better understanding of graduate students' perceptions of writing the literature review could enable supervisors, administrators, service providers, and graduate students themselves to overcome these difficulties. This paper presents a case study of graduate students at a secondary campus of a Canadian research university. It describes survey data and results from focus groups conducted between 2014 and 2015 by communications faculty, writing centre staff, and librarians. The focus group participants were Master's and Doctoral students, including students situated within one discipline and those in interdisciplinary programs. The questions focused on the students' experiences of writing the literature review as well as the supports both accessed and desired. Data analysis revealed four themes: (1) literature review as a new and fundamental genre; (2) literature review for multiple purposes, in multiple forms, and during multiple stages of a graduate program; (3) difficulties with managing large amounts of information; and (4) various approaches and tools are used for research and writing. Using an academic literacies approach, the paper addresses implications for campus program development and writing centre interventions and furthers research into graduate students' experiences of writing literature reviews.

This paper describes a pilot blended learning format for a first-year genre-based Canadian composition course. It measures responses to the online learning materials and hybrid class schedule by comparing student writing skill perception questionnaires, teaching evaluation questionnaires, and written assignments for control and experimental groups. Findings suggest that a blended approach can offer flexibility for a wider range of learners, address larger class size concerns, and provide additional learning materials, all of which add options for composition delivery in the as-yet sparsely researched Canadian context.