The purpose of this action research study is to challenge accepted practice in ESL writing with the implementation of an experimental syllabus informed by a sociocultural approach, specifically Vygotsky's (1987) assertion of the key role that awareness and control of theoretical concepts plays in cognitive development. Following Gal'perin and Davydov, the classroom approach implemented here is essentially concerned with L2 development as the internalization, appropriation and control of conceptual meaning in the context of the goal-oriented activities of teaching and learning. This research and pedagogy calls attention to the importance of the quality and sequence of instruction, in which full and explicit attention is given to an abstract conceptual framework before learners proceed to explore concrete instantiations of the abstract concepts in question.Halliday's (1978) social semiotic understanding of language, text and context was the central concept presented to a mixed ESL and native-speaking composition class, and various activities and exercises were designed in keeping with the principles guiding this 16-week research project. Learners made use of didactic models and verbalization activities, including extensive collaborative writing, as they worked with the concepts and explored the ways in which the target academic discourse reflects Halliday's theory of language in use. These concepts were then applied in the writing of research, re-writing for a new audience, and reflection papers. Writing development was tracked using T-Unit analysis, lexical density measures, rhetorical move analysis and the ratings from three expert raters, who graded the resulting papers for language use, analysis and organization. In analysis, this proficiency development is related to evidence of re-mediated thought as the students collaborate to complete the assigned writing tasks.The findings of three case studies provide general support for the implementation of concept-based instruction and a theoretical and explicit attention to requisite aspects of the target discourse in ESL writing pedagogy. There is clear evidence that the concept-based approach fosters awareness and control over relevant features of the target language necessary for successful participation in academic discourse communities.

This study compares the teaching practices of English academic writing teachers from China and the US. Research methods as questionnaire and interview were used to collect teacher's teaching practices, ways of constructing feedback, teaching philosophy and improvements in teaching. Participants of the current study were two teachers from two universities of China and three ESL academic writing teachers from a university in the US. The collected data were compared base on two themes: one was produce and process approaches; the other one was teacher's status in classroom and teaching. Based on the findings, American teachers' approaches were primarily process-based, and they also used studentcentered way of teaching, which puts students' needs and feelings on a considerable place. Chinese teachers' approaches were gradually changing to process-based, however, they were the authority in both teaching and providing feedback. The reason for Chinese teachers' ways of teaching can be attributed to the deep-rooted influence of the traditional teaching method, which sees teacher as the superior mentor. Also, it is necessary to introduce the process approach into Chinese universities to teach English academic writing and put it into practice

The present study replicated the research framework of a previous study (Biber, Gray, & Poonpon, 2011) that identifies the grammatical complexity of L1 professional academic prose as strongly favoring a dense use of phrasal nominal modifiers such as prepositional phrases as postmodifiers, attributive adjectives, and nouns as premodifiers which characterize its unique structurally compressed discourse style. The main purpose of the present study was to explore syntactic similarities and differences between L1 professional and L2 student academic writing in terms of their reliance on phrasal/nominal compression features to determine characteristics of the grammatical complexity of advanced ESL academic writing. To this end, the distributional patterns of use for 25 specific grammatical complexity features of structural elaboration and compression were investigated in a corpus of 128 short academic essays collected from 16 advanced ESL learners and 16 L1 university students (as comparison data).The results showed a heavier reliance of both the advanced ESL and L1 student academic writing on phrasal nominal modifiers (attributive adjectives and prepositional phrases as postmodifiers) of structural compression than on clausal elaboration features, which lent empirical support to Biber, Gray, and Poonpon’s (2011) findings. In addition to the phrasal compression features, both the advanced ESL and L1 student academic writing were also characterized by a prominent use of specific colloquial grammatical devices such as adverbs as adverbials. Compared to the advanced ESL writing, the L1 student academic writing showed a significantly more preference for one particular colloquial feature: ZERO relative clauses where relative pronouns replacing relativized objects are omitted. This combined reliance on both phrasal compression devices and colloquial features in both the advanced ESL and L1 student academic writing distinguished their grammatical complexities from that of L1 professional academic prose and signaled a possibility for recognizing them as a transitional developmental stage from more casual to more academic writing.

Pre-writing strategies are conscious thoughts, actions, or behaviors used by writers when they plan before writing. Research in second language writing suggests that specific writing strategies related to writing purposes, audience, brainstorming, and organizing ideas are teachable and have a potential to improve the quantity and quality of writing produced by English as second language (ESL) learners. This study investigated the effects of computer-based pre-writing strategy training guided by procedural facilitation (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987) on intermediate ESL students' writing strategy use, writing quantity, and writing quality. A sequential mixed methods design was utilized with an initial quasi-experimental phase followed by semi-structured interviews. Forty-one participants from four intact intermediate-writing classes in an intensive English program participated in the quasi-experimental phase of the study. The classes were randomly assigned into two control and two experimental groups. The instructional modules for the control groups included writing instruction related to paragraph writing, essay writing, and opinion essays whereas the training modules for the experimental groups consisted of pre-writing strategies related to writing purposes, audience, and idea generation and organization. In addition, the experimental groups were trained to generate and organize ideas using Inspiration 6, an idea graphic organizer software program. The participants' writing performances and uses of pre-writing strategies prior to and after the training were analyzed. In addition, six semi-structured interviews conducted shortly after the post-test helped to illuminate the quantitative results. Results demonstrate a significant training impact on ESL students' pre-writing strategy use but fail to detect significant effects on the students' writing quantity and writing quality; however, a trend of improvement regarding the writing quality variables was detected among the strategy-trained students. Furthermore, the qualitative analysis revealed some similarities and differences of less experienced and experienced writers' writing processes and strategies. Overall, the findings suggest the complex interplay among the factors influencing student writing development including writing strategy use, writing processes, writing tasks, task conditions, their past writing experience, and their language proficiency.