This chapter explores the relationship between writing and knowledge. It shows how writing came to play such an important role in knowledge practices and looks more closely at the idea and definition of academic or scholarly writing. It also considers everyday non-academic knowledge practices. The chapter looks at genre theory and ideas from ‘new rhetoric’ to explore the relationship between writing and knowledge. In some domains the material form of the text is seen as an authority in its own right, and with this in mind, the chapter concludes with an examination of sacred texts.

This argument-based validation research investigates the validity of score interpretations on a computer-based, graphic-prompt writing test, focusing on the generalization inference. The graphic-prompt writing test assesses examinees’ ability to incorporate visual graphic information into their writing,. Both analytic ratings on Graph Description, Content Development, Organization, and Grammar/Vocabulary (n = 2,424) and composite ratings (n = 606) on written test responses from 101 ESL students were analyzed using Generalizability (G) Theory and Multi-Faceted Rasch Measurement (MFRM). Findings indicated three of the four analytic scales and the composites yielded dependable scores. In addition, the results of the G-studies and MFRM analysis revealed the relative effects of the raters on the total score variance was not trivial for both composite and analytic scores and the three raters were not quite equivalent in their rating severity. Nevertheless, the findings support the generalization inference to a large extent. Thus, it can be claimed the graphic-prompt writing task scores were dependable enough to be used for the intended purposes, particularly with the two-rater and three-task test administration design.

The goal of ESL courses offered in American universities is to prepare international students for communication in other courses. This chapter investigates the degree of correspondence in the writing tasks used for assessment in an ESL course and those in other courses. The argument-based validity study focused on extrapolation, the degree of correspondence between performance on the assessment tasks and performance in the context of interest to scores users. Accordingly, this study compared course syllabi, assignment sheets, and students’ written assignments as well as analyzing instructor interview data and student survey responses. The results suggest that the ESL writing and disciplinary course assignments differ with regard to genre, topic, information sources, purpose, rhetorical functions, and length despite their similarity of target audience. In addition, interview data show that students tended to notice more differences than similarities in assignments in the ESL and other courses. The findings do not support the extrapolation inference in the interpretation/use argument for the assessed writing in the ESL courses. Instead, findings point to suggestions for revision to these writing assignments in the ESL academic writing course.

Following the argument-based approach to validity, this chapter focuses on the inference about the positive consequences of an academic ESL placement test (EPT) score use on major stakeholders: ESL instructors and ESL students at a university. The assumptions underlying this inference are that the decisions about ESL course placement are justifiable and comprehensible to test stakeholders, that the decisions are beneficial for ESL learners’ improvement of academic English proficiency, and that the decisions are beneficial for ESL learners’ academic achievement at the university. The assumptions were examined using mixed methods that included interviews, pre- and post-course analyses of students’ performances in ESL classes, and an analysis of the predictive power of the EPT results on students’ academic achievement. The results indicated the positive perceptions of the EPT placement decisions as reported by most of the ESL students and instructors, but variation in the degree of improvement was identified in the ESL courses. ESL students’ performance on the EPT predicted their first-year academic achievement at the university to some degree, highlighting the importance of English proficiency in ESL students’ academic success and the potential impact of the EPT placement decisions on students’ English language learning and overall academic performance.

A web-researching-to-write integrated writing test was developed for the final examination in an ESL academic writing course for international undergraduate students a university in the US. To support the score interpretations, uses of the results for awarding grades, and consequences, research was conducted to investigate the seven inferences that made up the interpretation/use argument: domain definition, evaluation, generalization, explanation, extrapolation, utilization, and consequence implication. To answer research questions motivated by the assumptions in the interpretation/use argument, a convergent mixed methods design was used for data collection and analysis. Data included students’ essay responses, screen recordings, post-test and follow-up test-taker questionnaire responses, post-test and follow-up test-taker interviews, instructor interviews, and documents. Results showed that all of the assumptions underlying the seven inferences in the validity argument were at least partially supported. Further research is suggested to produce additional backing for some inferences. Conclusions are drawn about the usefulness of a validity argument for prompting curriculum change. In addition, this study provides an example of a validity argument constructed for low-stakes classroom-based assessment.

This chapter is about finding the law. Research skills are expected of Australian law graduates; indeed, you need these skills to practise law competently. As Chapter 1 highlighted, the law is so immense that we cannot possibly know it all and, besides that, it changes all the time! By the time you enter into legal practice, the law you learned at university may have changed or may no longer apply.

Engaging with research can be a focus in itself for practitioners, and it is an informative and essential step for engaging in research. The main ways that educators can engage with research include attending professional learning opportunities presented by researchers or experts in a field, attending conferences and reading professional journals or research-based literature. This chapter looks at the importance of engagement with research literature as a critical consumer. In this chapter, we will focus first on strategies for locating and accessing current research literature, reading and summarising literature, and analysing and evaluating research literature – key considerations when reading research as a critical consumer. The chapter also focuses on how to construct a literature review. We consider the use of literature to identify and narrow a broad field of interest to a more refined topic, and return to the discussion about research questions, with a focus on their refinement as a result of reading research literature and writing the literature review. Finally, the chapter introduces the academic writing style and provides guidelines for citations and referencing.

Chapter 3 offers an interdisciplinary overview of research on multi-word units in second language (L2) processing and use. It is motivated by a long-standing puzzle in the field of second language acquisition suggesting that while the idiom principle is the main mechanism of language production in native speakers, non-native speakers cannot benefit from it to a similar degree. The chapter shows that researchers are not unanimous in assessing the degree to which learners operate on the idiom principle and raises a few problems which might be obscuring such operation in commonly used research designs, such as a focus on specific multi-word units rather than co-selection as such, questionable representativeness of reference corpora and inability of statistical measures to capture abstracted associations. The chapter concludes by offering an alternative interpretation based on the concept of approximation adopted from studies of English as a lingua franca.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between editorial work, endonormativity and convergence in the South African context, presenting a corpus-based quantitative case study of how editing reshapes academic writing by users of the STL (White South African English, or WSAfE) and IDG (Black South African English, or BSAfE) strands in South Africa. An inductive, exploratory quantitative method is used to identify linguistic features that distinguish unedited BSAfE and WSAfE academic writing, and edited BSAfE and WSAfE academic writing, using a corpus of edited texts and their unedited counterparts. Two features are analysed in detail: the use of downtoners and possibility modals. The findings provide support for the endonormativity of BSAfE, with WSAfE more ambiguous. The two strands are largely divergent in their usage of the two individual features. With a few exceptions, editors leave BSAfE usage patterns unaltered but sometimes change WSAfE usage to be closer to British English usage. Editing thus either leaves the stylistic distance between the two varieties unaltered or increases it. These findings support an assessment of (sometimes problematised) endonormativity at the level of the individual strands, but no strong evidence for convergence.

This chapter gives examples of applying the creative abilities to common research challenges, using the examples of choosing a dissertation topic, cultivating your relationship with your advisor, and managing time efficiently.

This chapter gives examples of applying the creative abilities to common research challenges, using the examples of writing a paper, developing a team project, and designing a class.