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In this diary study, the author draws from journals written over the course of 8 years working as an English instructor at a Japanese university, with the aim of documenting the influences on her desire to invest effort in the self-study of Japanese (what she refers to as the "ecology of effort"). An ecological perspective reveals the idiosyncratic and fluctuating nature of motivation due to daily contextual, personal, and emotional factors that interacted in unpredictable ways. One point of interest to researchers is that important ecological and relational influences on and emotional reactions to language learning cannot be uncovered with traditional motivation research. A second point of interest to adult language learners is that when full-time language study is not possible or desired, "dabbling" is an excellent way to stay connected to active but low-pressure language learning and to maintain a sense of wonder at the miracle of language. (Contains 2 footnotes.)

In this paper we report a case study of two first-year students at a university in Hong Kong doing the same writing assignment that required the use of sources. We explore the students' understanding of plagiarism, their strategies for composing, the similarity between their texts and source texts, and the lecturer's assessment of their work. The analyses in the study drew upon textual comparisons between student texts and source texts, interview data, and observation notes. The data indicated that both students appeared to understand the university's plagiarism policy yet their texts were characterized by patchwriting and inappropriate citation. Only one student's problems were spotted by the lecturer and checked with Turnitin while the other's was hidden to the lecturer. We speculate about the reasons, and then discuss these issues related to students' writing from sources: the place of reading in a source-based assignment, the difficulty level of sources for an assignment in an introductory course, complexities of attribution in source-based writing assignments, and the place of patchwriting in the work of novice writers. We conclude by highlighting the challenges faced by teachers and researchers and echo with others that different labels need to be given to plagiarism as cheating versus misuse of source texts. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

The formulaic styles of dissertation writing inherited from the sciences continue to influence dissertation writers in social sciences, and in particular TESOL and applied linguistics. Some scholars both within and outside the U.S. recommend that we expand the options for dissertation writers beyond these narrow conventions ([Eisner, 1997]; [Schroeder et al., 2002]; [Starfield & Ravelli, 2006]; [Welch et al., 2002]). However, the risks involved in nontraditional styles of dissertation writing may be great for students, particularly for second language writers, given the conservative and politically charged nature of the dissertation tradition. In this paper, I review these issues, and then discuss the views of dissertation writing of three Japanese students who were writing dissertations in a doctoral program at an American university in Japan with my support as advisor. Within the context of their program, these students chose unconventional theoretical frameworks and narrative inquiry for their qualitative research projects and developed writing styles that included more personal, narrative, and literary elements than were typical of dissertations in their program. The paper concludes with reasons why change is important and with questions about what role graduate advisors should play in encouraging students to take risks with their writing and so help change the discourse of the field.

The way we use words to discuss complex phenomena such as writing for scholarly publication matters greatly, particularly if we are distinguishing between EAL writers and English L1 gatekeepers. In this response to Flowerdew, I argue that using Goffman's concept of stigma to discuss possible discrimination against EAL writers serves only to oversimplify complex issues and to obscure the great diversity within groups that get lumped under the labels of EAL scholarly writers (the "stigmatized") and L1 writers, journal editors, and reviewers (the "normals"). The realities of scholarly publishing for all writers need to be addressed in less dichotomizing ways.

Discusses ways that applied linguistics literature can be used in a multidisciplinary graduate-level English for academic purposes class. Focuses on three main uses: (1) providing students with information about issues in academic and professional writing; (2) helping them make comparisons of form and style with academic articles in their own fields; and (3) serving as resources for common and formulaic expressions that can be incorporated into their own writing. (Author/VWL)

Argues that three familiar areas of inquiry in future second language (L2) writing research need to be investigated in more sociopolitically-oriented ways: written products, writing processes, and writer identity, and that qualitative case studies are well suited to explore the extraordinary diversity of L2 writers and writing contexts from an expanded sociopolitical perspective. (Author/VWL)

Asked graduate faculty to provide information about writing requirements of first-year doctoral students, criteria they use to evaluate students' writing, and writing problems of native- and nonnative-English-speaking students. Survey results raise pedagogical issues concerning global versus local writing problems, role of vocabulary instruction, need for discipline-specific writing instruction, and English second-language support service writing classes for graduate students. (JL)

A process approach to writing instruction is intended to create a humanistic, nonevaluative classroom atmosphere in which students learn discovery-oriented composing strategies. Numerous assumptions are embedded in this perspective—for example, that expert writers compose in similar ways and that novice writers can become better writers by behaving like experts. These and other assumptions need to be questioned and explored within a broader social context than that provided us by cognitive process research. These social issues include purposes for writing, the role of evaluation in school writing, and the communicative nature of the writing act. A process approach can thus be viewed as a set of instructional techniques appropriate for some purposes and some writing tasks, rather than as a theoretically based research program.