What traits do academics value in student writing? Insights from a psychometric approach

The number of students studying for university qualifications through the medium of English and for whom English is not their first language has increased significantly in recent years. This, along with efforts to widen access to those under-represented in higher education, has brought into focus the question of what academics see as constituting a ‘good’ piece of student writing. In this small-scale pilot study, Thurstone’s method of paired comparisons was used to establish a scale for ranking six essays in terms of how favourably each was viewed by academic lecturers when compared with every other essay in the set. Kelly’s repertory grid technique was subsequently applied to interviews conducted with the same lecturers to establish which traits they associated with the upper and lower end of the scale. Findings suggest that this methodology represents a promising approach to establishing what academic tutors regard as the key elements of good writing and thus provides an indication of what English teachers might fruitfully focus on in their teaching of the skill.     

Why become a teacher? Student teachers’ perceptions of the teaching profession and motives for career choice

The aim of the study is to discursively identify student teachers’ perceptions of the teaching profession early in their education and their motives for this career choice. Students wrote a letter sharing thoughts on why they want to become a teacher, how they regard the teaching profession and if someone inspired them in their career choice. The empirical data consists of 259 student texts from three Swedish teacher education programmes. The study employed a qualitative method denoting different categorizations compared to previous studies, emphasising the idea of multiple motives for career choice and the link to student teachers’ evolving pedagogical identity. Major differences can be distinguished among the programmes, emphasising different main motives and shifting incipient pedagogic identities. The results indicate the value of organising teacher education programmes drawing on multiple motives, which is expected to contribute positively to completion of teacher education and teacher retention in future profession.     

Can higher-proficiency L2 learners benefit from working with lower-proficiency partners in peer feedback?

Informed by Vygotsky’s conceptualization of the Zone of Proximal Development, this case study investigated the benefits of peer feedback on second language (L2) writing for students with high L2 proficiency and the factors that may influence their learning in peer feedback in the Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language context. Specifically, the study examined whether, what, and how higher-proficiency (HP) English learners can learn when they collaborate with their lower-proficiency counterparts. Analyses of multiple sources of data – video-recordings of peer feedback sessions, interviews, stimulated recalls, and drafts of student texts – revealed that while group peer feedback in the writing classroom can provide learning opportunities for HP students, their learning can be influenced by several factors, including their beliefs about peer feedback, motives and goals for peer feedback, and medium of group discussion. Implications are drawn from these findings for peer feedback practice and research in L2 writing.     

隐喻思维方式初探：从莱可夫网上公开信谈起

现代隐喻理论认为，隐喻不仅跟语言有关，而且也跟思维和判断推理有关。恰当的隐喻有助于人们作出正确的决策，而决策失误也往往与不恰当的隐喻有关，Lakoff发表在网上的公开信、Schǒn关于“贫民窟是疾病”或“贫民窟是自然社区”和“漆刷是水泵”的概念隐喻，清楚地说明了隐喻是如何被用来支配影响人们的判断推理和人民基于此判断推理之上的行为，以及隐喻如何被用来产生新视角，分析解释问题，为创造发明开辟新思路，本对此问题进行一些分析和探讨。     

Writing centre tutoring sessions: addressing students’ concerns

The guiding principle behind university writing centres is to focus on the process of writing rather than the finished product, prioritising higher order concerns related to organisation and argumentation of texts rather than lower order concerns of grammar and punctuation. Using survey-based data, this paper examines students’ concerns regarding written texts in English and analyses whether there is a correlation between students’ and peer-tutors’ perceptions of help received/provided in the writing centre at Nanyang Technological University. The aggregate findings show that there is a significant correlation between their perceptions but a further sub-analysis that pairs individual student and peer-tutor responses reveals that there are discrepancies between their perceptions of the type of help received and provided. These findings not only reveal the type of feedback students prefer, whether global or local, but also whether there is a good fit between student needs and tutoring approach based on students’ nationality and English proficiency.