Rachel Hall Buck’s research while affiliated with American University of Sharjah and other places

This article shares a year-long qualitative study of six writing instructors' experiences with genre-based pedagogy (GBP). Through a collaborative research approach, the study examines these teachers' perspectives on their challenges and successes with GBP in an English for general academic purposes writing classroom. Findings highlight challenges related to course aims, content, and structure, as well as successes related to the ability to use their content knowledge of genre to troubleshoot and further develop their use of GBP in the classroom. The findings suggest that teacher pedagogical content knowledge of genre develops in interaction with teachers’ practice and should be supported by robust and on-going teacher training and support. The paper concludes by offering examples of how teacher support might address the challenges unique to genre-based pedagogy.

This chapter presents results from a study with first-year university students completing online courses during the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of the study is to further understand how the same genre of music might impact the completion of two very different assessment tasks. Students in the study participated in two different virtual “study halls” in order to study for their semester final assessments. While further research is needed, results do highlight the need for students to be aware of which type of music to listen to while studying and specifically what kind of cognitive task they are completing.

Much of the discourse surrounding plagiarism is one of fear—a fear of being caught and punished, but many plagiarism examples happen unintentionally as students struggle with a new language, new ideas, and new communities in tertiary education. Specifically, many students are challenged with the task of writing a research paper, which involves finding academic sources, reading those sources to answer a research question, and integrating direct quotations and paraphrasing. Because novice writers often struggle with these skills, what is a developmental stage is instead interpreted as plagiarism. Much of the discussion of plagiarism involves implicit and explicit definitions of ownership, but there is little research about how students understand the concept of ownership in relation to ideas and language. In this qualitative study, we present data from 18 international students at an American-style university in the Middle East who write an introductory research paper as part of a composition course. Results show that perceptions of plagiarism changed in relation to owning ideas, owning language, and owning time spent on the research process and that distinguishing these boundaries is often difficult for students even within their own final research papers. We suggest teaching more robust note-taking strategies, discussing ownership in terms of a writer’s choices in guiding readers through the paper, and creating an environment where students can understand the complexities of plagiarism rather than simply fearing being caught.

Learning to argue in higher education can be a challenge for many L2 learners. Arguing is a discipline-specific skill—what to argue and how that argument looks differs across disciplinary contexts, but students may not understand this as the term “arguing” has various meanings. In this chapter, I present results of a pilot study of 32 L2 learners at a Middle Eastern university in a generalized writing course. Students were asked about their definitions of arguing and persuading and also perceptions of disciplinary arguments. Student insights from completing a disciplinary arguing assignment are reported and conclusions made about how generalized writing courses might achieve the goals of an EAP course.