Writing Support For International Graduate Students

Using qualitative data collected from more than twenty universities across the US, Writing Support for International Graduate Students describes and theorizes agency- and advocacy-driven practices, programs, and policies that are most effective in helping international students learn graduate-level writing and communication skills. It uses compelling narratives and cases to illustrate a variety of program models and support practices that fostered the students’ process of academic transition and success. Employing an ecological framework, the book seeks to advance academic conversation about how writing scholars/instructors and program administrators, as well as other academic service professionals working with this student body, can formulate policies, develop programs, and implement practices that best help these students grow as writers and scholars in their disciplines.

Re/Writing the Center illuminates how core writing center pedagogies and institutional arrangements are complicated by the need to create intentional, targeted support for advanced graduate writers. Most writing center tutors are undergraduates, whose lack of familiarity with the genres, preparatory knowledge, and research processes integral to graduate-level writing can leave them underprepared to assist graduate students. Complicating the issue is that many of the graduate students who take advantage of writing center support are international students. The essays in this volume show how to navigate the divide between traditional writing center theory and practices, developed to support undergraduate writers, and the growing demand for writing centers to meet the needs of advanced graduate writers. Contributors address core assumptions of writing center pedagogy, such as the concept of peers and peer tutoring, the emphasis on one-to-one tutorials, the positioning of tutors as generalists rather than specialists, and even the notion of the writing center as the primary location or center of the tutoring process. Re/Writing the Center offers an imaginative perspective on the benefits writing centers can offer to graduate students and on the new possibilities for inquiry and practice graduate students can inspire in the writing center. Contributors: Laura Brady, Michelle Cox, Thomas Deans, Paula Gillespie​, Mary Glavan, Marilyn Gray​, James Holsinger​, Elena Kallestinova, Tika Lamsal​, Patrick S. Lawrence, Elizabeth Lenaghan, Michael A. Pemberton​, Sherry Wynn Perdue​, Doug Phillips, Juliann Reineke​, Adam Robinson​, Steve Simpson, Nathalie Singh-Corcoran​, Ashly Bender Smith, Sarah Summers​, Molly Tetreault​, Joan Turner, Bronwyn T. Williams, Joanna Wolfe

The purpose of this book is to help international students navigate the academic issues they will encounter while attending graduate school in the United States. This book provides guidelines for conquering the obstacles that international graduate students often face, such as developing independent ideas based on required readings, participating in classroom discussions effectively, organizing academic papers, and effectively managing academic work and social relationships. This book is an invaluable tool for international graduate students and their instructors and mentors.

This book explores roles that L2 writing specialists, IEP directors and instructors, writing center administrators, and others within writing studies might play in potential cross-campus dialogues on graduate student writing support. It includes a diverse chorus of voices on graduate writing support--both seasoned, well-known researchers in second language writing and composition studies and fresh new voices and perspectives.

Canada has become one of the most popular destinations for international students at the higher education level. A number of complex factors and trends, both in Canada and globally, have contributed to the emergence of Canada as a destination for international higher education. However, more research is still needed to better understand the experiences of international students in Canada considering the rapid growth in numbers as well as the social, political, and linguistic singularity of Canada as a destination. Multidisciplinary Perspectives on International Student Experience in Canadian Higher Education is an essential scholarly publication that explores international students' experiences in Canadian colleges and universities. It seeks to explore the various factors, aspects, challenges, and successes that characterize the international student experience in Canadian higher education from the perspective of international students and the academic communities to which they belong. Featuring a wide range of topics such as information literacy, professional development, and experiential learning, this book is ideal for academicians, instructors, researchers, policymakers, curriculum designers, and students.

In Graduate Writing Across the Disciplines, the editors and their colleagues argue that graduate education must include a wide range of writing support designed to identify writers' needs, teach writers through direct instruction, and support writers through programs such as writing centers, writing camps, and writing groups. The chapters in this collection demonstrate that attending to the needs of graduate writers requires multiple approaches and thoughtful attention to the distinctive contexts and resources of individual universities while remaining mindful of research on and across similar programs at other universities.

Legal Reasoning, Research, and Writing for International Graduate Students, Fifth Edition, helps international students understand and approach legal reasoning and writing the way law students and attorneys do in the United States. With concise and clear text, Professor Nedzel introduces the unique and important features of the American legal system and American law schools. Using clear instruction, examples, visual aids, and practice exercises, she teaches practical lawyering skills with sensitivity to the challenges of ESL students. New to the Fifth Edition: Streamlined presentation makes the material even more accessible. Chapters are short, direct, and to the point. Five chapters on reasoning and writing, including exam skills, office memos, and rewriting. Full chapters on contract drafting and scholarly writing. New flowcharts provide a concise, visual overview for each chapter. Citation coverage updated to new 21st edition of The Bluebook. Simplified examples and exercises. Three thoroughly revised chapters on legal research, including non-fee legal research and technological changes in the practice of U.S. law. Professors and student will benefit from: Comparative perspective informs readers about the unique features of American law as compared to civil law, Islamic law, and Asian traditions. Explanations of practical skills assume no former knowledge of the American legal system. U.S. law school necessary skills explained immediately: case briefing, creating a course outline, time management, reading citations, and writing answers to hypothetical exam questions. Short, lucid chapters that reiterate major points to aid comprehension. Clear introductions to writing hypothetical-based exams, legal memoranda, contract drafting and scholarly writing. An integrated approach to proper citation format, with explanation and instruction provided in context. Discussion of plagiarism and U.S. law school honor codes. Practical skill-building exercises in each chapter. Research exercises are primarily Internet-based Charts and summaries that are useful learning aids and reference tools

As more students enter Canadian universities from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, supporting the development and transition of their academic writing skills through assignment and feedback design has become very important. Many of these students and their instructors identify academic writing as one of the students' biggest problems in a Western university or college (Robertson, Line, Jones & Thomas, 2000; Yang, 1994; Zhu & Flaitz, 2005). Yet there is little support available for the instructors who work with these students (Dedrick & Watson, 2002). This study focuses on my interactions with three instructors in graduate programs that have a high proportion of international students who use English as an additional language (EAL). By weaving together action research and case study research, three themes became apparent: the instructors saw no clear distinction between the needs of EAL students and those who have English as a first language; the instructors were unclear about how to teach writing in their discipline; and, the instructors felt frustrated and overburdened by their workload. I also learned how I, as a researcher and an educational developer, can better interact with instructors to ensure support at the level of assignment and feedback design. The first lesson is when interacting with others it is necessary to identify the lens that represents one's institutional and cultural lens. Because I did not adequately identify and interrogate my lens, I gave in to my colonial impulse to direct the study and the participants. The second lesson is the space in which we two instructors, the person from a given discipline and the person who is an educational developer, come together as a kind of?contact zone? (Pratt, 1998). I had hoped that the instructors and I would come together as a kind of Venn diagram, with our knowledge overlapping in a neutral and fruitful way, but I learned that the space where we come together is fraught and vulnerable for both the participants and the researcher. The third lesson is that relationships, which traditionally are not highly valued in our workplace in higher education, are extremely important in order to foster dialogue, continue conversations, and allow for the necessary revisiting and development of our work together. The main recommendation stemming from this study is workplace training for administrative staff who are in educational development positions. This study is important because there is little previous research in this area. As more Learning and Teaching Centres emerge at Canadian institutions, we must learn how to work effectively with instructors to affect curricular and assignment change. We must also question whether the kind of support a member of a Learning and Teaching Centre can provide is enough to affect this change, or whether other models, such as the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and faculty mentoring, are essential in the development of the understanding of how to better support the development of the academic writing skills of international EAL students.