Book

Teaching Second Language Academic Writing

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Abstract

This Element offers readers an overview of the theory, research, and practice of teaching academic writing to second language/multilingual (L2) students. The Element begins with a discussion of contextual features and some of the most common settings in which L2AW is taught. The Element then defines and shares examples of several concepts, pedagogical approaches, and teaching practices that are particularly relevant to L2AW instruction. Reflective questions guide readers to consider how these aspects of L2AW might be carried out within their own educational settings. Finally, the Element considers the rapid changes in technology and their influences on texts and academic writing.
... It is quite uncontroversial that writing skills for university students, irrespective of their subjects, is a vexing issue (Brooks, 2013;Harvey, 2003;Tardy, 2025). In foreign language programs, writing is an indispensable, basic, yet cumbersome, language skill (Tardy, 2025), and evaluating it is even more complex. ...
... It is quite uncontroversial that writing skills for university students, irrespective of their subjects, is a vexing issue (Brooks, 2013;Harvey, 2003;Tardy, 2025). In foreign language programs, writing is an indispensable, basic, yet cumbersome, language skill (Tardy, 2025), and evaluating it is even more complex. Researchers such as Alexander et al. (2023), Barrett and Pack (2023), Giray et al. (2025), Moqbel and Al-Kadi (2023), and Zare et al. (2025) pointed out that this was true before the emergence of the many recent artificial intelligence (AI) tools and applications, which have largely enhanced foreign language learning, teaching, and evaluation. ...
... Digital advances have, observably, made their way into language education, initiating a shift "from the reliable certainties of instruction and assessment in a print environment to the wonky contingencies involved in digital communication" (Elliot & Klobucar, 2013, p. 18). Today's learners are in need of a writing medium and evaluation system that is attentive to this shift (Moqbel & Al-Kadi, 2023;Giray, 2025;Tardy, 2025). Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE), which has developed from machine learning and AI (Barrett & Pack, 2023;Zare et al., 2025), corresponds to this development. ...
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With the increasing interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) within academia, Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) has gained significant traction. However, its full impact on writing skills remains a topic of contention. This paper examines how AI-based feedback helps undergraduate students overcome challenges they encounter when they write essays as part of their university studies. A text-oriented approach to writing evaluation was adopted to demonstrate how Grammarly was utilized to screen and score a sample of 22 short essays (11,050 words). In addition to assigning numerical scores to the essays, Grammarly provided student writers with detailed feedback, including error reports that were subsequently analyzed. Then, two focus group discussions were administered to shed more light on Grammarly-based evaluation. Findings showed that AWE encourages learners to observe their errors and refine their essays accordingly before submitting them to teachers for scoring. Nevertheless, such a tool per se is short to provide a thorough evaluation. It could be used in tandem with peer review and teachers’ evaluation. The paper closes on some implications and suggestions to foreground AWE in academic writing courses besides, but not a surrogate to, human raters’ feedback.
Article
Full-text available
With the increasing interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) within academia, Automated Writing Evaluation (AWE) has gained significant traction. However, its full impact on writing skills remains a topic of contention. This paper examines how AI-based feedback helps undergraduate students overcome challenges they encounter when they write essays as part of their university studies. A text-oriented approach to writing evaluation was adopted to demonstrate how Grammarly was utilized to screen and score a sample of 22 short essays (11,050 words). In addition to assigning numerical scores to the essays, Grammarly provided student writers with detailed feedback, including error reports that were subsequently analyzed. Then, two focus group discussions were administered to shed more light on Grammarly-based evaluation. Findings showed that AWE encourages learners to observe their errors and refine their essays accordingly before submitting them to teachers for scoring. Nevertheless, such a tool per se is short to provide a thorough evaluation. It could be used in tandem with peer review and teachers’ evaluation. The paper closes on some implications and suggestions to foreground AWE in academic writing courses besides, but not a surrogate to, human raters’ feedback.
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Language standards in academic writing ensure clear communication, rigorous scholarship, and inclusivity. As English dominates academia, standards often reflect Anglosphere norms. However, the rise of diverse English usages from global scholars calls for reconceptualizing these standards. This chapter reviews discussions around language standards, balancing these objectives with insights from my own work and its critiques. It also examines the impact of generative AI on writing standards, integrating broader scholarly perspectives, and suggests future directions for the field.
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Research on digital multimodal composing (DMC) in second language (L2) classrooms has proliferated considerably in recent years, to a large extent in response to the changing digital and multimodal communication landscape. This article offers a research agenda on DMC in L2 classrooms. We begin with a theoretically oriented overview of DMC scholarship. We then examine seven research themes for future research inquiry, from which we draw seven research tasks. The seven themes are: (1) the effectiveness of DMC for L2 writing development; (2) DMC task design; (3) L2 teacher education/training for implementing DMC; (4) feedback practice for DMC; (5) DMC assessment; (6) collaborative DMC as a translanguaging space; and (7) the deployment of DMC for critical digital literacies. Throughout the article, we refer to interdisciplinary scholarship and methods from multimodality, L2 writing, composition studies, new literacy studies, language teacher education, and computer-assisted language learning. The seven research tasks represent what we see as the essential next steps for understanding DMC, which is a young domain that has great potential to advance L2 language and literacy education in the digital age.
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Despite the growing popularity of ChatGPT and chatbot-assisted writing, research on the use of ChatGPT in second language (L2) writing classrooms remains insufficient. Using reflection papers and focus group interviews, the qualitative study examined doctoral students’ views on the impact of using ChatGPT on L2 writing and their expected responses. Thematic analysis revealed that ChatGPT could support writers at the pre-writing, during-writing and post-writing stages and serve as a self-learning tool for writing and thinking development with its human and non-human features. Nonetheless, its generative nature also gave rise to concerns for learning loss, authorial voice, unintelligent texts, academic integrity as well as social and safety risks. Based on the benefits and drawbacks, the doctoral students expected the education sector to make concerted efforts for the effective, ethical and responsible use of ChatGPT in L2 writing. Suggestions are accordingly provided for future considerations in teaching and research to leverage ChatGPT for L2 writing.
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In English as an additional language writing, error correction or error feedback is most commonly referred to as ‘written corrective feedback (WCF)’. The emphasis on ‘correctness’ in ‘WCF’ suggests native-speakerist standards or norms, which are controversial in an increasingly globalized world. In this Forum article, I discuss the problems associated with WCF from a Global Englishes perspective and suggest broadening the notion by removing the ‘corrective’ emphasis to encompass a focus on language use. I then examine the benefits of the broadened perspective on ‘feedback on language use’, which will steer research attention away from a narrow focus on error and standards in writing, with useful pedagogical implications that reflect English as a global language in the 21st century.
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This article discusses how academic writing pedagogies for multilingual students can be transformed by the literacy traditions that these students bring to North American classrooms. This is an embodied and personal rendition, situated in the author's South Asian literacies as illustrative of Global South traditions, and draws from his own empirical research and teaching practices for writing instructors in TESOL. Informed by developments in decolonization, the article highlights the principles of embodiment and relationality as significant for Indigenous and Southern communities, and contrasts them with texts being treated as autonomous and instrumental in the European tradition. It reviews the different pedagogical models in the disciplinary field of “L1 composition,” which also influence academic programs labeled as “L2 composition,” to demonstrate how recent revisions to accommodate social and material influences are still influenced by Eurocentric epistemological values of logocentrism, cognitivism, and individualism. After reporting from the author's study of scientific research writing to illustrate how its entextualization demonstrates the distributed practice of diverse social networks, material resources, and semiotic repertoires across expansive space and time, the article recommends an ecological writing pedagogy that draws from situated learning and embodied apprenticeship as practiced by Southern communities. (Translations of abstract in https://www.iris‐database.org/details/rV5zj‐95Z8L ).
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Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have contributed significantly to the advancement of society. In recent years, AI-powered writing assistants have received increasing attention among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) communities. However, most of these digital writing tools focus on the revision and editing stages. Few digital tools are developed to help users during the writing process, such as assisting users in formulating or translating their ideas into writing. Wordtune is an AI-powered writing assistant that understands the writer’s ideas and suggests options for rewriting them using different tones (e.g. casual, formal) and lengths (e.g. shorten, expand). This tool can help EFL writers maintain a continuous flow and learn useful ways to express their ideas in written English. This tech review aims to provide an overview of Wordtune and its affordance in English writing for EFL writers, while also addressing the benefits and limitations of this technology.
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This article draws from scalar theory to examine how textual diversification can engage with linguistic and social structures to both pluralize academic writing and facilitate an alternate structuration of publishing policies and practices. It adopts indexical analysis to demonstrate how non-normative linguistic choices can gain uptake for meanings and status in academic communication, leading to the rescaling of vernacular resources in global publishing contexts. The author illustrates from his own academic publishing to demonstrate how he engaged with the different communicative contexts and changing geopolitical and epistemological conditions to introduce his heritage languages and literacy practices towards decolonizing academic writing. The article demonstrates the possibility of paradoxical outcomes such as the following: it is possible to have norms and also variation at the same time; structure and change can be simultaneous; the diverse spaces between the macro and micro might allow for different representational possibilities; and the rhizomatic and layered social, spatial and temporal scales mediate structures and agency for new alternatives.
Article
Although the number of nonnative speakers of English in U.S. institutions of higher education has been increasing continuously during the last four decades, the development of composition studies does not seem to reflect this trend.
Article
In this article, we identify in the formation of U.S. college composition courses a tacit policy of English monolingualism based on a chain of reifications of languages and social identity. We show this policy continuing in assumptions underlying arguments for and against English Only legislation and basic writers. And we call for an internationalist perspective on written English in relation to other languages and the dynamics of globalization.
Article
The author suggests that models positioning the multilingual writer as passively conditioned by “interference” from his or her first language, as well as more correlative models of the interrelationships of multiple languages in writing, need to be revised. Analyzing works written to different audiences, in different contexts, and in different languages by a prominent Sri Lankan intellectual, the author instead suggests a way of understanding multilingual writing as a process engaged in multiple contexts of communication, and multilingual writers as agentive rather than passive, shuttling creatively among languages, discourses, and identities to achieve their communicative and rhetorical objectives.
Book
This book proposes to expand multiliteracies frameworks in second language education, by recognizing that learning a new language and culture involves both designs and desires, the affects and emotions that feed our responses to particular ways of making meaning. Over the past two decades, multiliteracies approaches to second language education have brought attention to the diversity of modes, media, language varieties, and discourses involved in what we often shorthand as language learning. A core concept in these discussions is the idea of meaning design, the idea that languages are dynamic, culturally-shaped systems of resources for engaging with and making sense of the world. Building on these discussions and drawing inspiration and practical examples from a variety of modern language classes in higher education in the USA, the book demonstrates how poetic and playful language can be embedded in multiliteracies pedagogy in ways that foster learners’ and teachers’ awareness of designs, while also making space for desires that are harder to script or plan for. In addition to building a conceptual map around poetics and play for researchers and teachers in language education, the book offers concrete examples of what a multiliteracies approach emphasizing designs and desires can look like in classrooms and curricula.
Article
Learner corpora have been used extensively in corpus research to identify gaps and errors within learner writing but have rarely been directly used in corpus‐informed instruction (CII). Importantly, scholars in CII have pointed out that “it is as important to see what learners can do as well as what they can't” when using learner corpora (Boulton & Thomas, 2012; p. 13). Learner corpora can also offer greater alignment with the genres students are writing (Seidlhofer, 2002). In our Brief Report, we take up Lu, Casal, and Liu's (2021) call for greater synergy of genre and corpus pedagogy by examining the impact of using a learner corpus to enhance students' language awareness and genre‐specific knowledge within an English as an Additional Language (EAL) first‐year writing classroom. We also move beyond error analysis to encourage an asset‐based model to learner CII (Staples, 2022).
Book
This Element offers a comprehensive account of the unprecedented spread of English as a global language by taking historical, sociolinguistic, and pedagogical perspectives. To realize this mission, it opens with an accessible discussion of the historical trajectory of the English language with qualitative and quantitative connections to its contemporary diversity in terms of forms, roles, functions, uses, users, and contexts of English as a global and multilingual franca. Built upon this synchronic-diachronic symbiosis, the discussion is complemented by an overview of major analytical paradigms and trends that promote systematical scrutiny of the English language and its sociolinguistic and educational implications. It ends by showcasing instructional practices, recommendations, reflective questions, and future directions for language educators to revamp their beliefs, commitments, and practices considering the changing needs and realities of the present-day global sociolinguistic ecology and individuals therein.
Book
In Writing Without Teachers, well-known advocate of innovative teaching methods Peter Elbow outlines a practical program for learning how to write. His approach is especially helpful to people who get ‘‘stuck’’ or blocked in their writing, and is equally useful for writing fiction, poetry, and essays, as well as reports, lectures, and memos. The core of Elbow’s thinking is a challenge against traditional writing methods. Instead of editing and outlining material in the initial steps of the writing process, Elbow celebrates non-stop or free uncensored writing, without editorial checkpoints first, followed much later by the editorial process. This approach turns the focus towards encouraging ways of developing confidence and inspiration through free writing, multiple drafts, diaries, and notes. Elbow guides the reader through his metaphor of writing as ‘‘cooking:’’ his term for heating up the creative process where the subconscious bubbles up to the surface and the writing gets good. 1998 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Writing Without Teachers. In this edition, Elbow reexamines his program and the subsequent influence his techniques have had on writers, students, and teachers. This invaluable guide will benefit anyone, whether in the classroom, boardroom, or living room, who has ever had trouble writing.
Chapter
Running counter to prevailing monolingual instruction practices, a multilingualism‐as‐a‐writing‐resource orientation views the development of writing expertise as closely interdependent across languages and encourages multilingual writers to shuttle across languages, modalities, and communities by drawing on their entire linguistic repertoires as a resource for composing. Empirical and theoretical support for this orientation arises from research at the intersection of bilingual education, multilingualism, literacy, and second language writing studies. To be successful, pedagogical implementation must go beyond instructional strategies in the classroom and also assess possibilities and enact changes at the curricular and institutional levels in specific contexts.
Chapter
Recent technological advances have made it easy for writing students to consult many different corpora using web‐based tools. Large general corpora, specialized corpora, for example of academic or professional writing, and learner corpora are all freely accessible. Several Web sites also provide free tools to help writers build do‐it‐yourself corpora and concordance software for installation on the student's computer. The concordance tool is widely used, as it supplies lexicogrammatical information which may not be readily available in other reference sources and thus allows students to discover or check collocations and phraseology. Corpus tools also provide lists of words and phrases with their frequency and distribution in numerical or chart form. These are useful for comparing similar items to help writers make appropriate choices. Corpus tools have an important role to play at all stages of the writing process and are considered to foster student writer autonomy and long‐term language acquisition.
Article
Recent advances in artificial intelligence have given rise to the use of chatbots as a viable tool for language learning. One such tool is ChatGPT, which engages users in natural and human-like interactive experiences. While ChatGPT has the potential to be an effective tutor and source of language input, some academics have expressed concerns about its impact on writing pedagogy and academic integrity. Thus, this tech review aims to explore the potential benefits and challenges of using ChatGPT for second language (L2) writing. This review concludes with some recommendations for L2 writing classroom practices.
Article
In response to mixed perceptions about the digital multimodal composing (DMC) approach to conceptualizing and teaching second language (L2) writing, the purpose of the current study is to compare students’ linguistic performance on traditional monomodal writing and DMC tasks, as well as writing development over time under traditional and DMC instructional conditions. A total of 41 Korean university English as a foreign language (EFL) students were randomly assigned to two instructional groups: traditional writing and DMC. Over one semester, both the DMC and the traditional writing groups completed TOEFL-style independent writing pretests andposttests, and depending on their intervention condition, they completed either monomodal writing or DMC tasks for two elemental genres (causal analysis and argumentation). For the first research question, focused on output of traditional writing and DMC tasks, the two groups’ language use on each of the two assigned genres (causal analysis and argumentation) was analyzed separately, and their linguistic performance was compared using independent t-tests. For the second research question, the pretest and posttest essays were scored using an analytic rubric focused on content, organization and language, and the two groups’ timed writing performance was compared using linear mixed effect models. The findings indicated that students produced longer texts for DMC tasks, and that there were significant gains in writing development over time for both DMC and traditional writing instructed groups. The DMC-integrated group, however, showed greater gains. Pedagogical implications for the use of DMC in L2 writing instruction are discussed.
Book
Disciplinary Identities uses findings from corpus research to present fascinating insights into the relationship between author identity and disciplinarity in academic writing. Ken Hyland draws on a number of sources, including acknowledgements texts, academic homepages and biographies, to explore how authors convey aspects of their identities within the constraints placed upon them by their disciplines' rhetorical conventions. He promotes corpus methods as important tools in identity research, demonstrating the effectiveness of keyword and collocation analysis in highlighting both the norms of a particular genre and an author's idiosyncratic choices. Identity is conceived as multi-faceted and socially negotiated, and writing is seen as the contextualised performance of the author's identity to a community of readers. Hyland concludes by outlining a way forward for encouraging individuality as well as conventionality in students of EAP.
Chapter
Introduction Since the mid 1990s, dictionaries based on corpora (collections of naturally occurring texts) have been widespread in English as a second language (ESL) classrooms. These dictionaries, based on large collections of natural language, not only provide learners with information about word meanings, but also provide important information about word use. As a natural extension of using dictionaries based on corpora, teachers have become increasingly interested in using information from corpora to inform and create language-learning materials. In the 1990s resources such as Johns (1994) and Tribble and Jones (1997) provided teachers with some ideas and guidelines for ways to use corpus information in the classroom. Now, with more and more corpus-informed or corpus-based teaching resources becoming available (such as: Focus on Vocabulary (Schmitt and Schmitt 2005); the Touchstone series (McCarthy, McCarten and Sandiford 2006/2006); and Real Grammar (Conrad and Biber 2009)), this interest has continued to grow and has even expanded to teachers themselves wanting to bring corpora into language classrooms. Using corpora in the language classroom can provide teachers and students with several advantages. Corpora can provide a rich source of authentic material, and, therefore, examples of the language students will encounter outside the language classroom. Corpora can also provide students with many examples of the target feature (e.g. a vocabulary item or grammatical structure) in a concentrated manner, to help them better understand the feature and its contexts and cotexts of use. Before discussing some ways to bring corpora into a classroom, a word about corpora and corpus linguistics is in order. A corpus is a collection of naturally occurring texts that is usually stored on a computer (see Biber, Conrad and Reppen 1998 for more on the characteristics of corpora). If the texts are stored on a computer, it is possible to search texts for particular features. A number of tools are available for searching corpora (e.g. AntConc, MonoConc, WordSmith – see the Appendix for more information). It is also important to note that the term ‘text’ is used to refer to either spoken or written discourse. The spoken texts are usually transcribed into a written version, and in most cases the audio files are not available.
Article
In recent years, multimodal composing has attracted much attention in the field of second language (L2) writing. Previous research focused heavily on the pedagogical effects of teaching multimodal writing to L2 students. Less investigated is students' cognitive engagement in the complicated processes of composing multimodal texts. To bridge the research gap, this qualitative study examines the composing processes of two groups of L2 writers over five weeks, as one group completed a multimodal video project and the other one completed a traditional essay project. Data consist of students' screen recordings with the think-aloud protocol, written and multimodal products, and post-project interviews. This study shows that the two groups shared common behavioral patterns of consulting outside sources and initiating revisions, which might be attributed to similar writing schemas. Students who were tasked to create a video showed more autonomous writing and inconsistent text-borrowing behaviors. Pedagogical implications and research suggestions are discussed in light of the findings.
Article
This review discursively addresses questions about (1) what digital genres are, in the context of genre theory and social practices, and (2) what the impact of these new-media genres may be on how we theorize and analyze genre, engage in genre-informed teaching, and, more generally, produce and interact with genre-mediated information.
Book
This Element focuses on English-Medium instruction (EMI), an educational approach that is spreading widely and rapidly in higher education institutions throughout the world because it is regarded as a lynchpin of the internationalisation process. The main aim of the Element is to provide critical insights into EMI implementation and the results obtained so far in diverse university contexts. After defining EMI and analysing the rapid extension it has experienced, the volume tackles issues such as stakeholders' views on how EMI programmes are being implemented, the impact of teaching and learning both content and language in a foreign language, translanguaging practices in English-medium lectures, and how assessment has hitherto been addressed. Each section aims to bring to light new avenues for research. The Element wraps up with a description of the many challenges ahead.