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This paper discusses the role of formative feedback in teaching academic writing for a large class of first-year business students. The paper contributes to our knowledge on how to design an effective formative feedback process for a class in excess of 300 students. Based on survey data from 2018 the paper addresses how the students respond to being taught academic writing in two different feedback modalities: face-to-face interaction and electronic annotations. Our findings indicate that there are no significant differences between the two modalities and that the students are relatively satisfied with the feedback they received. The majority of the students report that feedback has helped them accomplish their learning goals, they pay attention to feedback, and feedback motivates them in their studies. Even with these positive responses from the students, we question whether our approach is sustainable in the long run. Unless smarter and more efficient ways of providing personalised feedback are developed for large student groups, the transition to the new paradigm for feedback, where the emphasis is placed on dialogic interaction, will not be practicable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Persuasive arguments attribute academics' persistent struggles in making time for writing to the increasing demands of a marketised sector on the academic role (Dickson-Swift et al. 2009; Macleod, Steckley, and Murray 2012). Whilst a significant body of literature promotes different writing interventions as potential solutions, the challenge of building and sustaining a culture in which their positive outcomes are maintained remains. In this paper, I explore the practices of academics writing for publication purposes. Drawing on the concept of academic writing as 'identity work (French 2020), I demonstrate that writing practices are entwined with wider academic and institutional identities, which either work for or against building sustainable writing cultures. I argue for a methodological shift in how writing initiatives are researched, drawing a distinction between my ethnographic case study of one writing group and others that focus either on retrospective accounts or analysing correlations between writing groups and productivity. Specifically, I argue for a focus on the ongoing process of becoming a writer rather than on its production. The study builds on existing literature to explain why writing groups are experienced as valuable to participants. It argues that they offer more than simply protected space for writing; they reframe participants' understandings of themselves and their academic identities and reintegrate research writing with other aspects of their role. This identity work occurs within visible, protected spaces for writing, where participants work both individually and in community, and reflection and dialogue are central. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a study conducted at Wuhan University in China that explores the role of metacognitive awareness in academic writing among Chinese multilingual students. The study validates an instrument for assessing metacognitive knowledge and strategies in academic writing and examines how these factors influence the writing process. The findings reveal a five-factor model of metacognitive strategies, metacognitive knowledge, planning, monitoring, and evaluating. The study highlights the importance of metacognition in developing multilingual students' academic writing competence and provides insights for theoretical and pedagogical implications. This research would be valuable for researchers and educators interested in understanding and improving the academic writing skills of multilingual students. [Extracted from the article]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has increasingly influenced higher education, notably in academic writing where AI-powered assisting tools offer both opportunities and challenges. Recently, the rapid growth of generative AI (GAI) has brought its impacts into sharper focus, yet the dynamics of its utilisation in academic writing remain largely unexplored. This paper focuses on examining the nature of human-AI interactions in academic writing, specifically investigating the strategies doctoral students employ when collaborating with a GAI-powered assisting tool. This study involves 626 recorded activities on how ten doctoral students interact with GAI-powered assisting tool during academic writing. AI-driven learning analytics approach was adopted for three layered analyses: (1) data pre-processing and analysis with quantitative content analysis, (2) sequence analysis with Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and hierarchical sequence clustering, and (3) pattern analysis with process mining. Findings indicate that doctoral students engaging in iterative, highly interactive processes with the GAI-powered assisting tool generally achieve better performance in the writing task. In contrast, those who use GAI merely as a supplementary information source, maintaining a linear writing approach, tend to get lower writing performance. This study points to the need for further investigations into human-AI collaboration in learning in higher education, with implications for tailored educational strategies and solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we build an argument for studying and promoting teacher development in dialectical teacher-researcher partnership, praxis, which is informed by perezhivanie, a dialectical unity of emotion and intellect. We will study the developmental trajectory of an in-service L2 teacher striving to give her learners agency in the teaching-learning process while navigating institutional structures. We guide the reader through this teacher’s development in a year-and-a-half praxis with two researchers, illustrating the joint process of sense-making to resolve tensions stemming from institutional constraints, learner expectations, and own practices. The data come from (a) teacher-researcher discussions, (b) a teacher interview, and (c) data sessions. Perezhivanie informed the design, researchers’ mediation, and data analysis. We illustrate how the teacher moved towards and realised her commitment to enabling learner agency in language teaching. We discuss the implications of making perezhivanie a central concept in teacher education with in-service L2 teachers, realised through praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unintentional plagiarism abounds at universities. The literature offers several explanations for students’ difficulties with acquiring standards of good academic practice. In this paper, I propose an alternative account: unintentional plagiarism can only be understood in the context of implicit but irreconcilable forms of knowledge. While higher education institutions mainly operate within the framework of propositional epistemology, institutions of primary and secondary education tend to furnish students with encyclopedic epistemology. Accordingly, universities and institutions of pre-college education tend to propagate conflicting assumptions regarding the nature of knowledge. Put simply, propositional epistemology is characterized by dialogue, agency and the exchange of ideas, which are ideally made explicit in academic writing. By contrast, encyclopedic epistemology tends to present knowledge monologically, leaving the scholarly conversation around it out. It is highly likely that the hardwired legacy of encyclopedic epistemology among students impedes the acquisition of the dialogism of academic inquiry at universities, resulting in cases of unintentional plagiarism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subject–verb agreement is an overlooked grammatical aspect of Philippine English especially in academic registers. This study analyses Philippine English subject–verb agreement in published research articles (RAs) written by Filipino researchers across disciplines. Using Bautista's subject–verb agreement framework and D'Souza's criteria for linguistic innovation, disciplinary RAs were analyzed through manual coding and independent inter-coding. Being widespread, systematic, rule-governed, and formally and competently used, only the intervening prepositional phrase under verb-related agreement was consistently present across 11 qualitative and quantitative disciplinary RA sub-registers. It appears that this could be an acceptable Philippine English grammatical innovation in academic research writing across disciplines. The study yields implications for Philippine English itself, academic writing instructions, and academic research journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates graduate students' experiences with English medium instruction (EMI) in Kazakhstan. The data reported here were collected through an online survey conducted in 10 public and private universities in Kazakhstan in March–July 2021. This survey received a total of 320 responses from graduate students with diverse age, gender, disciplinary, educational, and linguistic profiles. Through a combination of closed and open-ended questions, we aimed to determine how graduate students coped with EMI in their programs. We found that most respondents are struggling with various aspects of academic reading and writing. Low English proficiency is often cited as a cause of these struggles, but so are specific elements of academic writing. Inadequate socialization in English together with gaps in existing language and writing support are also seen as factors. Overall, the data confirm the existence of deep ecological tensions between policy aspirations and enactment conditions on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]