Journal of Second Language Writing最新文献

English for Academic Purposes (EAP) instructors may struggle to capitalize on students’ multilingual practices in teaching and demystifying academic writing, considering the expectation to use standard English. My teaching report is situated in Qazaqstan, where I worked as an EAP instructor with first-year undergraduate students for whom Qazaq and Russian are the dominant languages, English is a foreign language, and translanguaging is a commonplace practice. The paper shares how I built on my shared linguistic and cultural background with my students to implement translanguaging pedagogy for teaching EAP writing in a hybrid course at an English-medium university. A major takeaway from my teaching experience is to establish a translanguaging space, in which students with different translanguaging beliefs can explore pedagogical translanguaging. The pedagogical translanguaging instructions used in writing one academic essay were focused on developing an outline, citations, and rough drafts. Throughout the essay completion in person and online, students and I discussed translanguaging writing examples, drew on our metalinguistic awareness, and critical discussions of linguistic choices. Overall, this paper illuminates on how an EAP instructor with a similar linguistic background to their students can disrupt monolingual norms, and use translanguaging pedagogy for linguistically just academic writing instruction

Since the 1960s, legal writing pedagogy in the United States has been heavily influenced by the plain English movement, which largely discourages the use of legal jargon and overly complex syntactic structures in legal documents. While these efforts to democratize legal English are laudable, it is unclear whether plain English practices can accommodate the needs of multilingual, foreign legal writers who have not yet acculturated to the U.S. legal discourse. Using mixed-effects modeling, this study tracks the development of syntactic and lexical complexity in 246 hypothetical legal essays written by 31 international Master of Laws students enrolled in a year-long legal language course. Results show that after one year of instruction, students demonstrated a significant increase in the use of nominalizations and sophisticated vocabulary. However, their sentences became notably shorter, and there was a marked decrease in the use of noun phrases with pre-modifying adjective within semesters. We discuss the intersection between plain English and academic writing practices and their impact on second language (L2) writers’ developmental trajectories. We also highlight important caveats to consider when implementing plain English pedagogy in legal language classrooms.

This study explores aspects of noticing and metalinguistic awareness in L2 writing via a translation-based writing task that involved L2 output followed by translation to the L1 and then reverse translation back to the L2. We designed an innovative writing task that included translation, informal contrastive analysis, and learners’ evolving interlanguage. We administered the task to 37, L1 Arabic speakers who were preparing to become teachers of Hebrew as a Second Language in Israel. We present what participants reported as salient during three stages of the task: (1) after producing written output in Hebrew (L2) and then translating the text into Arabic (L1); (2) after reverse translating the text from Arabic back to Hebrew (L1 to L2); and (3) after completing the writing task and orally debriefing as a group. Content and thematic analysis of participants’ collected reflections revealed four areas of linguistic saliency: (1) vocabulary and semantics; (2) syntax and structure; (3) content; and (4) pragmatics. Findings suggest translation-based writing tasks raise metacognitive awareness around these four components of L2 writing. Implications for L2 classroom writing pedagogy will be discussed.