Taxonomizers of the field of composition and rhetoric often speak in valorizing terms of "social epistemic rhetoric," referring to a group of scholarresearchers who argue for the social nature of knowledge in general and of writing and reading in particular. While some in composition and rhetoric indeed are taking a rhetorical turn to social construction, a careful look at the dominant writing ...

Lexical sophistication is an important component of writing proficiency. New lexical indices related to range, n-gram frequency, psycholinguistic word information, academic language, polysemy, and hypernymy have yielded new insights into the construct of lexical sophistication and its relationship with second language (L2) acquisition and writing. For example, recent studies have suggested that...

Although the concept of metacognition has received considerable attention for its impact on learning across disciplinary areas, it has not been sufficiently discussed in the context of L2 academic reading and writing. In this paper, we bring together two theoretical frameworks, genre analysis and metacognition theory, and discuss the concept of metacognitive genre awareness. Drawing on the anal...

The present special issue (SI) is a collection of position papers and empirical studies intended to advance disciplinary conversations on the learning teaching second or foreign language (L2) writing in instructed acquisition (ISLA) contexts. It does so by analyzing critically past research, providing new insights obtained controlled classroom-based conducted various educational settings with d...

This paper looks at the principles and practices of teaching writing in the Writing Centre at the University of Cape Town (UCT). It outlines some of the context of higher education in South Africa and how writing centres need to contribute to both access and redress of past inequities. In order to critically engage with writing, the UCT Writing Centre takes an “academic literacies” approach, wh...

Personal reflections from my own teaching experience based upon subject centred learning, writing skills development, understanding research methods and spiritual inquiry are offered to encourage similar engagement or reflection by other higher education teachers. I explain how my teaching in the environmental sciences has been transformed for each of these themes in a series of narratives or s...