Cheung, Yin Ling

Much of academic writing research is conducted with academics and postgraduate students in the United States, Hong Kong, and Saudi Arabia. There is less published research on how undergraduate students reflect on their writing activities in Singapore. Little is known about what challenges these students face in writing academic papers, in particular, the discussion of results of their first academic paper written in their first year of study. The present study fills this gap by investigating Singaporean undergraduates to uncover their perception of difficulties in writing their first research papers in a compulsory academic writing course offered by a teacher training institute. In-depth interviews were conducted to the four undergraduate students. Results found that, with regard to undergraduates‟ perceptions of writing the discussions section, the main problems were selection of content, organization of content, demonstration of appropriate stance, grammar, and choice of words. Additionally, based on the instructor‟s comments on the students‟ term papers, results revealed that there were mismatches between the writing instructor's professional understanding and students‟ understanding of their own difficulties. The findings of this study have pedagogical implications pertaining to ways to improve the teaching of undergraduate student teachers‟ discussion of results not only in Singapore, but also in similar contexts outside Asia.

Besides enhancing Persian academic reading, in an English only research world, Persian academic stakeholders have to master English and/or Persian academic writing to disseminate findings globally to members of different disciplinary communities through Persian and English language as a lingua franca. This chapter uses the method of qualitative meta-synthesis of 40 empirical studies specifically on academic writing in Persian in refereed journals, book chapters, and conference proceedings published during the period of 2005–2020. An inductive approach to thematic analysis synthesizes (a) the theoretical models for researching Academic Persian in academic writing and (b) the similarities and differences between academic writers from Persian and English for different disciplines. Theoretically and pedagogically, the findings from the comparisons and the systematic content analysis following Sandelowski et al. (Res Nurs Health 20:365–371. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1098-240X(199708)20:4<365

Guided by the sociocognitive theory, this study investigated how teachers used gestures in cooperation with other multimodal resources to improve the learning outcomes of students. Two teachers and their students in Grade 4 writing classes at a local elementary school in Singapore participated in the study. Data were collected over a seven month period using classroom observations. Multimodal interaction analysis and conversation analysis conventions were employed to analyze the lessons. The results show that teachers and students adapted multimodal resources in the writing classrooms, such as teacher’s gestures, body movements, eye gazes, and drawings, to negotiate meaning. The study has yielded insights into practical application of the participation framework in elementary-school writing lessons. The study also confirms that teachers’ symbiotic gestures do serve the pedagogical function of drawing students into a desirable participation framework, thereby enhancing their understanding of target learning points. The interplay between mind (speech) – body (gesture) – world (ecosocial elements such as classroom environment) ecologies and the participation framework is important in that it fosters positive teaching and learning experiences in elementary-school classrooms. A pedagogical implication is that teachers should carefully design their lessons to incorporate gesture and an array of multimodal teaching resources for effective instruction including inducing active participation by the students.

Arguably the first thing that a reader notices of a news item, the headline serves the semantic function of providing pertinent information and the pragmatic function of appealing to target addressees. Moreover, it often embodies the stance of the news writer or the news agency on a particular issue and could program the reader’s perception and interpretation of the ensuing news story in a pre-determined direction. In view of the distinctive significance of headlines in news discourse, in this paper, we analyze how the headlines of The Economist, an elite newsmagazine, frame China in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. The sample of headlines was examined for their structural components, syntactic features, as well as linguistic characteristics, and compared with a selection of the outlet’s headlines on COVID responses of certain other countries. Through identifying the framing patterns adopted in the headlines and unpacking the ideological overtones encoded therein, this systematic analysis has illuminated the role and effects of the tactful employment of language in constructing country image and striking a balance between purported impartiality and ideological dispositions. Its findings and implications are expected to contribute to scholarship on media framing and inform the practice of journalistic writing.

This research investigates how elementary teachers mediate the learning of writing through a socio-cognitive approach. The study reveals how in effective instructions for writing development, teachers can build narrative knowledge in a socio-cognitive approach through these types of instructional scaffolding: explicit outcomes and expectations, modelling, bridging, contextualizing, schema building, re-presenting text and developing metacognition. The study also illustrates through examples, the use of the instructional scaffolding functions by two teachers mediating between students’ current knowledge levels in writing in English and the requisite expert understandings of the narrative genre in actual classroom practice. The adapted instructional scaffolding functions proposed in this article enrich the field of learning and teaching of writing by providing a means for teachers to mediate the learning of writing. The study also highlights the value of qualitative interpretive approaches in contributing to the domain of pedagogical approaches in writing for elementary students.

Through a qualitative meta-synthesis literature review, this chapter examines how non-native language teacher identity across different theoretical conceptions and developmental stages, both novice and experienced, and at elementary, secondary, and university levels, are negotiated through a qualitative meta-synthesis of 35 refereed book chapters and research papers published in international refereed journals between 2004 and 2019. The first half of the chapter examines theories and conceptual foundations that have guided existing research on non-native language teacher identity across different developmental stages to link to issues related to intersections of non-native English language teacher (NNEST) identity and language teaching. The second half of the chapter looks at the application of findings in terms of advocacy issues and pedagogical practices for non-native English teachers and future research to inform English language teachers, teacher-educators, and researchers across elementary, secondary, and university settings.

The purpose of this study is to explore and compare fourth grade students’ perceptions of technology enabled self-directed learning and collaborative learning during their five-week English writing lesson. Three elementary schools in Singapore were invited to participate in the study. In this pseudo-experimental study, students in the intervention group were able to use various technology tools to develop their self-directed learning and collaborative learning skills while working on their writing tasks. At the end of the intervention, their perceptions of self-directed learning and collaborate learning with technology were collected and compared with the control group. There were significant differences in the perceptions between the control and the experimental groups.

In the past decade, research has yielded mixed results regarding the relationship between task complexity and writing quality. Some studies have suggested that an increase in task complexity results in the improvement of syntactic complexity, accuracy and fluency. Other studies have demonstrated partial improvement in fluency, accuracy, syntactic complexity, or lexical complexity. This study examines the impact of task structure on writing quality among English-as-a-second-language (ESL) young learners. The analysis is based on 236 ESL fourth-grade pupils’ narrative compositions. Using the Limited Attention Capacity Model and the Cognitive Hypothesis, the analysis revealed that Primary Four pupils wrote significantly longer and syntactically more complex texts in structured tasks, and they scored higher in lexical variety in unstructured tasks. The accuracy of writing did not vary significantly based on task structure. The study provides new empirical evidence for the argument that task structure affects ESL young learners’ writing performance in terms of syntactic complexity, fluency, and lexical variety. The findings contribute new knowledge to the field of second language writing. In particular, how task structures influence writing quality and how such knowledge can inform writing pedagogy and the evaluation of students’ written work.