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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.

The article discusses the cultural hybridity theory as seen in the novel "The Icarus Girl," by Nigerian-British author Helen Oyeyemi. The issue of hybridity is also cited in the book "The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism," by Rey Chow. The hybridity theory is examined by such authors as Pheng Cheah, James Clifford and Homi Bhabha.

The article explores how Shani Mootoo negotiates a sense of belonging tied to the land first in Canada and then in the fictional Caribbean setting of Paradise in Lantanacamara. The literatures including Mootoo's "Cereus Blooms at Night" and "A Garden of Her Own," from the collection "Out on Main Street" engages in the issue whether it conservatively articulates a desire for home and it radically challenges traditional identity constructs. It pointed out that Mootoo's work questions how people think of identity in relation to space and how one seek to construct a revised sense of space without the definitively located discourses that existed within the colonial nation.