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Writing from sources is a common academic task for L2 students in higher education. It is a task that requires the orchestration of numerous skills such as reading source texts, incorporating information from the source texts within the written text, and reading the rhetorical context to interpret the task. Being such a complex activity, it has received relatively little attention. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the complexity of a writing-from-sources task within an L2 environment. Using an ethnographic design, I examined the writing of four Chinese (L1) students with varying levels of English (L2) proficiency completing an argumentative writing-from-sources essay task for a required writing class. The task spanned two and a half weeks and required the participants to cite five sources within a 1500-word essay. Over the course of writing, I interviewed each participant several times about their writing process, observed the participants during class, and collected all notes, drafts, and reading materials. The results revealed the complexity of the writing-from-sources task. Constructing a suitable cognitive representation of the task was one key to success and there were a number of personal and contextual factors that influenced the creation of the participants’ task representations, factors such as individual background experiences, the writing process, and information from and interactions with the teacher and other people within the writing context. These factors varied in the strength of their influence from the beginning to the end of the essay assignment, and I present a tentative theory of task representation to explain the points at which these influencing factors had the greatest impact within the writing process. Low L2 proficiency constrained the writing performance of some of the participants. This resulted in one participant avoiding elements of the writing task requirements in order to earn passing marks and two other participants producing plagiarized texts and receiving failing marks on the assignment. The two participants who plagiarized showed no ill intentions and, consequently, felt receiving zero marks for their writing efforts was unjust. / New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission

Writing from sources is a common academic task for L2 students in higher education. It is a task that requires the orchestration of numerous skills such as reading source texts, incorporating information from the source texts within the written text, and reading the rhetorical context to interpret the task. Being such a complex activity, it has received relatively little attention. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the complexity of a writing-from-sources task within an L2 environment. Using an ethnographic design, I examined the writing of four Chinese (L1) students with varying levels of English (L2) proficiency completing an argumentative writing-from-sources essay task for a required writing class. The task spanned two and a half weeks and required the participants to cite five sources within a 1500-word essay. Over the course of writing, I interviewed each participant several times about their writing process, observed the participants during class, and collected all notes, drafts, and reading materials. The results revealed the complexity of the writing-from-sources task. Constructing a suitable cognitive representation of the task was one key to success and there were a number of personal and contextual factors that influenced the creation of the participants’ task representations, factors such as individual background experiences, the writing process, and information from and interactions with the teacher and other people within the writing context. These factors varied in the strength of their influence from the beginning to the end of the essay assignment, and I present a tentative theory of task representation to explain the points at which these influencing factors had the greatest impact within the writing process. Low L2 proficiency constrained the writing performance of some of the participants. This resulted in one participant avoiding elements of the writing task requirements in order to earn passing marks and two other participants producing plagiarized texts and receiving failing marks on the assignment. The two participants who plagiarized showed no ill intentions and, consequently, felt receiving zero marks for their writing efforts was unjust. / New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission

Writing from sources is a common academic task for L2 students in higher education. It is a task that requires the orchestration of numerous skills such as reading source texts, incorporating information from the source texts within the written text, and reading the rhetorical context to interpret the task. Being such a complex activity, it has received relatively little attention. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the complexity of a writing-from-sources task within an L2 environment. Using an ethnographic design, I examined the writing of four Chinese (L1) students with varying levels of English (L2) proficiency completing an argumentative writing-from-sources essay task for a required writing class. The task spanned two and a half weeks and required the participants to cite five sources within a 1500-word essay. Over the course of writing, I interviewed each participant several times about their writing process, observed the participants during class, and collected all notes, drafts, and reading materials. The results revealed the complexity of the writing-from-sources task. Constructing a suitable cognitive representation of the task was one key to success and there were a number of personal and contextual factors that influenced the creation of the participants’ task representations, factors such as individual background experiences, the writing process, and information from and interactions with the teacher and other people within the writing context. These factors varied in the strength of their influence from the beginning to the end of the essay assignment, and I present a tentative theory of task representation to explain the points at which these influencing factors had the greatest impact within the writing process. Low L2 proficiency constrained the writing performance of some of the participants. This resulted in one participant avoiding elements of the writing task requirements in order to earn passing marks and two other participants producing plagiarized texts and receiving failing marks on the assignment. The two participants who plagiarized showed no ill intentions and, consequently, felt receiving zero marks for their writing efforts was unjust. / New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission

Writing from sources is a common academic task for L2 students in higher education. It is a task that requires the orchestration of numerous skills such as reading source texts, incorporating information from the source texts within the written text, and reading the rhetorical context to interpret the task. Being such a complex activity, it has received relatively little attention. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the complexity of a writing-from-sources task within an L2 environment. Using an ethnographic design, I examined the writing of four Chinese (L1) students with varying levels of English (L2) proficiency completing an argumentative writing-from-sources essay task for a required writing class. The task spanned two and a half weeks and required the participants to cite five sources within a 1500-word essay. Over the course of writing, I interviewed each participant several times about their writing process, observed the participants during class, and collected all notes, drafts, and reading materials. The results revealed the complexity of the writing-from-sources task. Constructing a suitable cognitive representation of the task was one key to success and there were a number of personal and contextual factors that influenced the creation of the participants’ task representations, factors such as individual background experiences, the writing process, and information from and interactions with the teacher and other people within the writing context. These factors varied in the strength of their influence from the beginning to the end of the essay assignment, and I present a tentative theory of task representation to explain the points at which these influencing factors had the greatest impact within the writing process. Low L2 proficiency constrained the writing performance of some of the participants. This resulted in one participant avoiding elements of the writing task requirements in order to earn passing marks and two other participants producing plagiarized texts and receiving failing marks on the assignment. The two participants who plagiarized showed no ill intentions and, consequently, felt receiving zero marks for their writing efforts was unjust. / New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission

While much is written about the need for literacy and particularly functional literacy, the terms are rarely clearly defined from a linguistic perspective. This dissertation develops a concept of literacy consisting of graphological literacy, functional literacy, and the literacy of thoughtfulness. These three aspects are considered with reference to the US adult educational mandates of Americanization and empowerment. Theory is related to practice through the development of educational objectives for English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction with reference to the literacy neetiq (particularly writing skills) of intermediate level ESL adult students, primarily Mexican immigr-ants to Southern California. These ESL students, who may be seen as representative of other immigrants from developing nations to technologically advanced societies, often have limited first language [Ll] and second language UL21 literacy, but develop fairly high L2 oral communicative competence. The research considers the students' Ll literacy levels and uses, which of these can be transferred to L2, and what must be taught in L2. Furthermore how students' higher L2 verbal sIdIls interrelate with and can be exploited in the attainment of L2 literacy at all three levels is discusse4i The extent to which theory has been realized in practice (and practice has been informed by theory) is analyzed with reference to an experimental adult ESL literacy course taught to young adult Mexican immigrants in Santa Barbara, California. The final evaluation reviews the basic premises and the extent to which these have been substantiated, followed by implications of the project and possible areas for future research.

The efficacy of corrective feedback (CF) on writing for second language (L2) development has been much studied in applied linguistics since Truscott’s (1996) polemic against written CF. However, no clear picture of its effectiveness has emerged yet as empirical studies have reported conflicting findings. The majority of these studies are short-term studies focusing on the role of teacher-centered written CF from the cognitive perspective, and therefore the long-term developmental process, oral CF, and the role of the learner and learner affect in the feedback process have been under-explored. In addition, previous research has focused on English learners, and little is known about the impact of CF in writing on learners of non-European languages. In an attempt to address these research gaps, the present study, using sociocultural theory as its theoretical framework, investigated the long-term impact of Vygotskyan dialogic CF, an operationalization of CF as mediation in the learner’s zone of proximal development (Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994), on L2 Japanese writers’ linguistic and affective outcomes. To carry out this investigation, a year-long mixed-methods case study was conducted. Participants were two American undergraduate Japanese as a foreign language learners who were asked to produce personal writing and then participate in a face-to-face writing conference to receive dialogic CF from the researcher. Data included the two learners’ writing samples, interviews, audio-recordings of the writing conferences, and researcher field notes. Learners’ linguistic outcome was analyzed quantitatively using accuracy rates in writing and also qualitatively using genetic method (Vygotsky, 1978) to trace changes in the learner’s responsiveness to dialogic CF. Learners’ affective outcome was qualitatively analyzed using the interview data. The findings with respect to linguistic outcomes obtained from longitudinal data revealed the ‘wave-like’ characteristic of the nature of the L2 developmental process, which questions the common data interpretation equating the lack of short-term accuracy improvement with inefficacy of CF. The findings from the interview analysis showed that positive emotions were frequently engendered and the two learners frequently exercised their agency during dialogic CF writing conferences, which suggests that feedback process in L2 writing is not only a cognitive process but also an affective process.

Given recent calls for university composition policies that are informed by the actual practices and populations of students at a given institution (Tardy, 2011), this study investigated student and instructor perceptions and attitudes toward using online translators (e.g., Google Translate or Babelfish) for composition assignments. The study analyzed interview data from four international students and three English composition instructors to understand how the use of online translators was explained, justified, and contextualized by these two groups. This study revealed that although both students and instructors believed that online translators afforded an opportunity for language learning, the participants still aligned with dominant ideologies of plagiarism and were wary of the use of these services. In conclusion to the study, recommendations were made for instructors to moderate more in-class discussions about the use of technology during the writing process and to define the appropriate and inappropriate uses of such technology more clearly.

This present study investigates the development of second language (L2) Chinese learners’ writing by 1) subjective ratings of essay quality, 2) a battery of objective measures representing the general syntactic complexity as well as specific syntactic features, and 3) the sources of verb phrase complexity used by learners of different institutional levels. This study first compares the subjective ratings of the essays written by learners across four institutional levels and then uses Cumulative Linked Model to examine the contribution of the objective measures of linguistic features to the essay ratings. This study further identifies a number of sources used by learners to construct complex verb phrases, which is an important contributor of the essay rating, and compares the amount of usages by learners at different institutional levels. The purpose of the study is to better understand L2 Chinese learners’ syntactic development in writing from multi-dimensional perspectives, and to identify the most crucial elements that determine the quality of writing. This study recruits 105 L2 Chinese college learners to write a narrative essay and an argumentative essay according to the prompts. Each of the writing sample is rated by two independent raters according to the holistic ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, as well as the analytic rubric which was adapted from the ESL Composition Profile for this study. The derivation of syntactic complexity measures was based on the rank scales of lexicogrammar in Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), involving 12 features at the levels of clause complex, clause, and verb phrase, some of which represent constructions unique to Chinese. A series of statistical tests, including Kruskal-Wallis tests, Dunn’ tests, Spearman’ correlation tests, and CLM are performed to answer that research questions. The findings show that 1) learners’ overall writing quality measured by holistic and analytic ratings do not show significant differences across the first several academic years; 2) higher-level learners are more heterogeneous in writing ability than lower-level learners; 3) phrasal complexity contributes more to the essay quality than clausal complexity; 4) syntactic complexity features that learners develop fastest hardly overlap with those that contribute most to the essay rating; 5) complex verbal phrases come from 10 different sources and the composition of complex verbal phrases remain stable across the groups; and 6) essay types makes significant differences in terms of holistic and analytic ratings, use of syntactic complexity features, as well as their contribution to the essay ratings. From the pedagogical view, this study points out that instruction should focus more on complexity at the phrasal level, especially nominalization and complex verb phrases, that play a more important role to determine the writing quality. Some of the current focus in instruction may not necessarily lead to better quality or higher proficiency in Chinese writing.