Multilingual Writing in Digital World

This chapter examines teachers' practices and strategies while using digital tools for writing. The chapter argues that when teachers use digital writing, they need to change their teaching strategies in order to ease their students' writing tasks. It also highlights the purposes of integrating digital tools for the writing classes and the challenges they face while adapting digital writing. The data are collected from teachers who work at schools, colleges, and universities, through a survey generated by Google forms. The findings show that integrating suitable digital tools requires mastering the use of technologies by supporting teachers' digital literacy skills before integrating them into classes to overcome any emerging challenges. This is to reinforce students to improve their writing levels. The chapter suggests more extended studies to examine students' attitudes and experiences with using digital tools and the impact of coronavirus pandemic on education.

A COMPARISON OF NICHE ESTABLISHMENTS IN ENGLISH RESEARCH ARTICLE INTRODUCTIONS PUBLISHED IN INTERNATIONAL AND THAI JOURNALS

The present study looked closely at the niche establishments in the introduction sections of English research articles written by Thai authors and published in local Thai journals and compared them to those found in introduction sections written by non-Thai authors published in international and high indexed journals. Each of the two corpora contains forty introductory sections. The analysis was based on the frameworks of Swales (2004) and Lim (2012). It was found that the use of niche establishments in the international corpus was higher than that in the Thai corpus. In the Thai corpus, “Stressing insufficient research” was the highest strategy, but “Revealing methodological limitations” was completely absent. It is expected that the results will provide practical guidance for novice writers to write their research introduction sections with informative and convincing niche establishments and, to some extent, the results should also benefit English writing classes, especially in Thailand.

Writing Classes with Writeabout.com: Learning Mode, Feedback, and Collaboration

This review seeks to provide an alternative online platform for running an online writing class inside and outside the classroom. It focuses on Writeabout.com, which enables the integration of different modes of instruction, types of feedback, and collaborative activities that are necessary for providing an effective writing class. Its features allow teachers to create virtual classes and add students by using codes or importing from Google Classroom. The other features enable teachers to monitor the progress of each student’s writing and give both oral and written feedback synchronously and asynchronously. Writeabout.com provides some stimulating ideas to inspire students to start writing. This review also elaborates on the pedagogical applications of Writeabout.com inside and outside the classroom in a self-access context and for developing learner autonomy in writing.

Innovative Pedagogy to Overcome Student Struggles with Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a problem that affects English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learner all over the world. Rather than simply labelling students who plagiarize as “offenders,” finding solutions to guide them away from it is of primary importance. Ten instructors teaching a 30-week EFL academic writing course at a large urban university in Japan were interviewed about their methodologies to do so. Two academic writing classes (N=40) were asked to write reflections on what they were learning and how it was being taught to them. The student reflections and instructor interview transcripts were coded and analysed, instructor strategies to deal with plagiarism proactively in this context identified, and student responses to these strategies explored. The strategies were largely found to be a combination of existing methods with one notable exception, which is introduced in detail here. It is based on Rubin’s Four Tendencies personality framework, which is a method that relies on instructors recognizing learners as responding to expectations in one of four ways and harnessing this to help them achieve. This personalized instruction can be seen as one of the modern approaches to facilitate learning and engagement outlined by Owens and Kadakia (2016). Student responses to it were positive, and the instructor using it felt that it both reduced stress and improved relationships with students. As such, the method has been added to the departmental pedagogy for the next intake of students.

An Investigation on the Learners' Perceptions and Experiences in Engaging with Online Writing Lessons Conducted via Google Classroom

This study aims to examine the learners’ perception and experiences in engaging in writing lesson conducted via Google Classroom among the secondary school learners in Malaysia and China. This study is important for both the teachers and stakeholders to identify the suitable types of writing activities that can be used in a Google classroom platform to motivate the learners to be interested in writing and the ways to solve the problems faced by the learners when it involves writing lesson via e learning. This study focuses on five learners; three learners from Malaysia and two learners from China. This study employed a qualitative approach. The instruments were interview questions and guided logbook journals. The sessions were conducted via Google Meet and the recorded interviews were then transcribed. Hence, researchers used qualitative method to analyse the codes and categories to pen down the findings. As a result, both China and Malaysia learners expressed their affirmative agreement towards their participation in writing classes conducted using Google classroom. Moreover, based on the log book entries, it was discovered that the features embedded in Google classroom platform plays an important role in the teaching and learning process, mainly in submissions and feedbacks. Finally, the learners agree that Google classroom has improved their writing ability to a certain extend. Although the learner faced some hiccups in utilizing this method of e-learning but all participants were affirmative that Google Classroom has instilled confidence and stimulated their motivation to write better essays.

'GRAMMARLY' AS A TEACHERS' ALTERNATIVE IN EVALUATING NON -EFL STUDENTS WRITINGS

In evaluating students’ EFL writing, lecturers nowadays can implement corrective evaluation by using an online automatic software. Grammarly is automated online software that is comonly used in EFL writing classes. It is an internet proofreading service that evaluates the correctness grammarl, spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary as well as detects plagiarism. This paper reports research aimed at exploring the use of Grammarly software for evaluating non-EFL students’ writings. This research employed descriptive-qualitative method with students of ITB AAS Indonesia as the data sources. The results of analysis show that in correcting students' language errors, lecturers can evaluate and analyze in details without a lot of correcting efforts or improvements. Grammarly can be considered as a useful tool for lecturers who need to correct non-EFL students’ writings. Grammarly will automatically check or detect the work being typed from various related aspects. Various writing errors made by the students were found in Grammarly’s reports, both in the aspect of correctness and clarity. Correctness is concerned with the mechanical norms in writing, whereas clarity deals with concise and direct language use. The spelling errors found in students’ writings are text inconsistencies, misspelled words, and improper formatting whereas for grammatical there are subject-verb disagreement, passive voice misuse, as well as unclear, wordy, and incomplete sentences. Meanwhile, the errors in punctuation are shown by inappropriate use of punctuation marks in compound/complex sentence, comma misuse within clauses, and improper formatting. It can be concluded that Grammarly can be an alternative for lecturers’ in evaluating non-EFL students' writings.

Searching for the yet unknown: Writing and dancing as incantatory practices

As two ballet dancers and university educators, we began this collaborative research with a shared belief in ballet and writing as liberatory practices and a desire to confront pedagogies that rely on intimidation. Both we and our students have experienced ballet and writing classes that rely on audit-and-surveillance, and we sought to foster individuality, value differences, and cultivate agency through multimodal approaches in our ballet technique, history, and dance studies courses. During the spring semester of 2021, the history and dance studies courses were online and asynchronous; the ballet classes met in a ‘hybrid’ model: classes were held in person, with students given the option to take class via Zoom either synchronously or asynchronously. Through interviews and analysis, we found praxes that ignite curiosity and motivation by drawing from definitions of writing and dancing as incantatory practices. Notably, this is the first research that takes a capacious view of ‘ballet pedagogy’ to include history, writing, technique, and dance studies courses. Ultimately, we hope these findings support exploratory and multimodal teaching, reinforce connections among language, empowerment, and pedagogy, encourage students and educators to collaboratively challenge current practices, and motivate administrators to rethink university structures that replicate the audit-and-surveillance practices of certain ballet and writing pedagogies.