While the majority of previous studies on EAP (English for academic purposes) writing have been devoted to professional or academic writing at a more advanced level (i.e., PhD students and scholars) in ESL contexts, little attention has been paid to the academic writing of master-level novice writers in EFL contexts. From a sociocultural perspective, the present case study examined the writing strategies of a master-level novice writer – Alice in Macau context. Non-structured, semi-structured and text-based interviews were used as the primary source of data, with document analysis used for triangulation. The study identified two major categories (i.e., artifacts and community) and five subcategories of mediational means (i.e., journal articles and theses, languages, online writing materials, peers and experts) as significant in the novice writer’s academic writing activities. It also unveiled double-edged features of mediational means and recognized their interplay with the writer’s goals and relatedness to her situated context.
While a plethora of studies have been conducted on corrective feedback in L2 writing, praise as feedback has received less attention in L2 writing despite its well-acknowledged motivating functions in education and psychology (For economy of expression, the word “praise” will be used consistently throughout this paper to denote “praise as feedback”). To fill this gap, this review article aims to provide a bird's eye view of praise in L2 writing. This paper reports praise givers’ perceptions and practices, praise receivers’ perceptions and the effect of praise from reviewed studies. Specifically, this paper highlights the issue of ill-defined praise in L2 writing, the mismatch between teachers’ positive perceptions and their practices, inconsistent findings regarding the effectiveness of praise as well as motivating functions of praise. Based on these findings, this article argues that more attention should be given to unleashing the potential of praise through teachers’ giving balanced and quality praise and more investigations of praise with longitudinal research design and multiple data sources so as to advance our understandings of feedback in student L2 writing development.
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