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Undergraduate research paper has long been a tradition in US freshman composition programs, although whether the research paper should or can be taught in the English department continues to be debated. In many of the English departments in Taiwan, students are also required to compose a research paper for their composition class. However, there has been little research conducted on the writing process and on the student perceptions of this specific genre in an EFL learning context. This qualitative study, involving one American instructor and seven Taiwanese college students majoring in English, traced a research writing project, carried out as part of the writing curriculum, from start to finish. Three semi-structured interviews were conducted with each of the students in the beginning, middle and end of the research project. The findings indicate that the students saw information arrangement and display as the main purpose of the research paper. For various reasons, the students perceived the research project as beneficial, although during the implementation of the project they encountered difficulties such as time and resource constraints, problems with using sources in Chinese, difficulties with synthesizing information from multiple sources, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study used e-notes, focus group interviews and a questionnaire to explore 51 participants' learning from e-notes in three courses in a northwest university in Taiwan. This study presents the following major findings. First, writing and reading e-notes, and providing comments on group members' e-notes, helped these emergent researchers become familiar with academic writing. Secondly, however, participants exhibited different levels of engagement in the academic community of practice, from simply writing e-notes as peripheral members to becoming fully engaged core members. Thirdly, the challenges and problems these emergent researchers faced in taking e-notes within the academic community of practice included organising the notes, the structure of the platform, participants' different levels of engagement, and participation. A model on helping emergent researchers become academic writers was proposed in terms of setting a goal-oriented community and being a core member. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study delineates two Taiwanese TESOL teachers' efforts of combining English writing with entrepreneurship education to cultivate English majors' interdisciplinary competence in academic writing classes. An integrated business-and-writing approach was proposed to foster English majors' academic writing skills and entrepreneurial capacities. In this study, farming metaphors ("The two farmers," Planting the seed," "Growing the seed," and "Harvest") will be used to portray the instructors' shared journey of guiding students to complete a creative business planning project. Feedback from students reveals that students gained content knowledge about the business world, and they learned how to write a business plan. For the two instructors, their endeavors to transform English writing courses to link academic knowledge with real-world purposes have encouraged them for more cross-campus collaborations to inject new energy into higher education institutions. To conclude the paper, pedagogical recommendations are provided to foster English majors' learning of English beyond disciplinary boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this study is to investigate to what extent there is a rhetorical variation (if there is any) between research article abstracts written by American academic writers and those written by Taiwanese, and Turkish academic writers in the area of social sciences. This study presents a contrastive analysis of 138 article abstracts (46 by American academic writers, 46 by Taiwanese academic writers, and 46 by Turkish academic writers) published in a refereed online journal 'Social Behavior and Personality'. The purpose of the study was to ascertain whether these article abstracts, which focus on the same issue but written by authors from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds and addressing audiences from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, employed the same rhetorical strategies to introduce their works. For this purpose, the generic structures of these texts were analyzed. The analysis follows the Swalesian approach. The article abstracts seem to share a number of important rhetorical strategies. It appears that these abstracts conform closely to the M2-M3-M4 arrangement. On the whole, the rhetorical strategies shared by the groups in this section of the research articles outweigh the rhetorical strategies not so commonly employed. However, the abstracts written by Turkish speaking academic and Taiwanese speaking academic writers tend to underline their contribution to the field of study much further. Discussions and implications related to the findings will be presented in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]