The ideal syllabus for an MATESOL course on grammar pedagogy

The idea for this post came to me on the spur of the moment, based on a question a friend asked me on facebook. If you’re teaching an MATESOL course just on grammar pedagogy, what would you put in it? And I thought, wow, that’s an exciting puzzle! The field is just so HUGE! What are the essentials, then? … I thought back to readings I had done during my PhD, particularly those researchers whose work was assigned by our Second Language Acquisition (SLA) professor Nicole Ziegler and our Second Language Writing (L2 Writing) professor Betsy Gilliland… and realized that the best articles about teaching grammar are those which attend to the social contexts of language learning and use, yielding clear implications for pedagogy in a wide range of settings. And so, here is what I suggested to my friend: 10 articles for an MATESOL course just on grammar pedagogy, an introductory lit review + 4 papers about speaking + 5 papers about writing.

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1. Grammar Teaching: An Introductory Article

Ellis, R. (2006). Current issues in the teaching of grammar: An SLA perspective. TESOL Quarterly, 40(1), 83-107. https://doi.org/10.2307/40264512

When I look for an introductory lit review to start off a course on some aspect of second language learning/teaching, I’m always grateful to senior professors who know a lot and synthesize all that knowledge in articles that are comprehensive and accessibly written for a lay audience. This is one of those articles. In the abstract (traditional 1-paragraph summary) at the beginning of the article, Ellis explains that he has structured the paper around 8 questions that “address whether grammar should be taught and if so what grammar, when, and how.” He also writes: “This article concludes with a statement of my own beliefs about grammar teaching, grounded in my own understanding of SLA.” Sharing the breadth of his knowledge while admitting that it is his personal view, he has the reader hooked from the start. The 8 questions are:

• Should we teach grammar, or should we simply create the conditions by which learners learn naturally?
• What grammar should we teach?
• When should we teach grammar? Is it best to teach grammar when learners first start to learn an L2 or to wait until later when learners have already acquired some linguistic competence?
• Should grammar instruction be massed (i.e., the available teaching time be concentrated into a short period) or distributed (i.e., the available teaching time spread over a longer period)?
• Should grammar instruction be intensive (e.g., cover a single grammatical structure in a single lesson), or extensive (e.g., cover many grammatical structures in a single lesson)?
• Is there any value in teaching explicit grammar knowledge?
• Is there a best way to teach grammar for implicit knowledge?
• Should grammar be taught in separate lessons or integrated into communicative activities?

You can read his answers to the questions yourself, so I’ll skip to the end and what he says about his “own beliefs.” First, he reiterates that “teaching grammar works”—i.e., it may not work all the time, but teaching it yields better overall results than not teaching it (pp. 101-102). The question, then, is how. He concludes his lit review of the vast literature on grammar and SLA with 10 of his own beliefs (p. 102-103):

1. The grammar taught should be one that emphasizes not just form but also the meanings and uses of different grammatical structures.
2. Teachers should endeavour to focus on those grammatical structures that are known to be problematic to learners rather than try to teach the whole of grammar.
3. Grammar is best taught to learners who have already acquired some ability to use the language… rather than complete beginners. However, grammar can be taught through corrective feedback as soon as learners begin to use the language productively.
4. A focus-on-form approach is valid as long as it includes an opportunity for learners to practice behaviour in communicative tasks.
5. Consideration should be given to experimenting with a massed rather than distributed approach to teaching grammar. [i.e., He thinks lessons should probably be spaced out rather than crammed… see “massed” versus “distributed” issue above, which is one of the 8 issues.]
6. Use should be made of both input-based and output-based instructional options. 
7. Explicit grammar knowledge can probably assist subsequent learning of implicit grammar knowledge. If you are teaching grammar explicitly, you should give students both inductive and deductive practice—i.e., sometimes they figure out the rule themselves, and sometimes you explain the rule.
8. *** Of special value is that situation in which a student learns the required form incidentally but explicitly—when they are given immediate feedback on what they’re trying to express and why it should be expressed in a certain way, using certain forms. *** [See my discussion of this in a post about code-meshing and my summary of Schleppegrell’s (2007) article further down in this blog post.]
9. Corrective feedback is important, and both explicit and implicit learning are valuable, as are both input-based and output-based exercises. [That’s kind of a rehash of previous points.]
10. Grammar lessons are valuable as both separate grammar lessons (focus-on-forms approach) or integrated into communicative activities (focus-on-form approach).

In other words, there is no real debate between implicit versus explicit lessons, input- versus output-based practice, or separate grammar lessons versus grammar lessons integrated into communicative language teaching. All of these have affordances and limitations; it’s best when we combine them all and use each at the right time. Of special value is the situation in which a student learns the required form just in time and just in need, in the context of what they’re trying to convey (see #8 above). Hence why Ellis’ first commandment (#1 above) is: “The grammar taught should be one that emphasizes not just form but also the meanings and uses of different grammatical structures.”

2. Teaching Grammar for Oral Communication (4 articles)

Oral communication means language development, not literacy development. (Read about the distinction between the two here.) So this set of four articles builds on what Ellis was writing about—everyday oral communication.

First, we have an article about Complexity, Accuracy, Fluency (CAF). The best analogy to differentiate the three is figure skating: Complexity = how hard was the figure skating program (i.e., how complex is the sentence structure/form); Accuracy = how well did the person skate without any mistakes (i.e., did the person get the form right?); Fluency = how fast and smoothly did the person skate/speak. You can see there are tradeoffs: when we increase the complexity or speak faster, we also increase the likelihood of mistakes. When we try to pay attention to accuracy, we slow down speech or try easier forms, etc. We can see these tradeoffs in Leonard and Shea’s (2017) article of study abroad students (see below) on why there might be individual differences. It is not necessary to read the whole dense article—just read the first three pages to get the definitions of CAF, and then the last page if you want a summary of the findings, which I think are common sense: (1) everyone increased their fluency via study abroad, but (2) complexity and accuracy were increased only if the student already had a high enough proficiency to begin with and if they had a good working memory (high intelligence), which freed up cognitive resources to notice new grammar points in the fast pace of daily conversation.

Leonard, K. R., & Shea, C. E. (2017). L2 speaking development during study abroad: Fluency, accuracy, complexity, and underlying cognitive factors. The Modern Language Journal, 101(1), 179-193. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12382

Second, once we have an understanding of CAF, we go to the issue of how each of these is developed in second versus foreign language settings. What aspects of grammar development are more/less attainable in ESL versus EFL language contexts (and within EFL contexts, different language program designs)? This makes Housen et al.’s (2011) article in IRAL (below) one of my favourites for marrying experimental rigour and reader accessibility. Housen and colleagues looked at four classes of ~25 students: German kids growing up in the U.K. (Group A), two classes of German kids in German-speaking countries in “immersion” English programs (Groups B and C), and German kids in German-speaking countries in regular, non-immersion EFL programs (Group D). They measured their relative strengths/weaknesses in CAF and found out that while the ones living in the U.K. did the best overall (well of course, though their German must have suffered), there were mixed and unexpected results with the other groups—including evidence that immersion and English-medium instruction are not the magic bullets they are often said to be, which Guangwei Hu (2008) has likewise found in China. Check it out and see why Group D didn’t do so bad!

Housen, A., Schoonjans, E., Janssens, S., Welcomme, A., Schoonheere, E., & Pierrard, M. (2011). Conceptualizing and measuring the impact of contextual factors in instructed SLA—The role of language prominence. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (IRAL), 49(2), 83-112. https://doi.org/10.1515/iral.2011.005

Next, we come to the work of Merrill Swain. You cannot look at the social contexts of grammar acquisition without an understanding of Swain’s Output Hypothesis, a seminal theory of SLA which she introduces in a conversational style in this paper:

Swain, M. (1993). The Output Hypothesis: Just speaking and writing aren’t enough. Canadian Modern Language Review, 50(1), 158-164. https://doi.org/10.3138/cmlr.50.1.158

One of the things that annoy me is when people pretend they know what the Output Hypothesis is, from the name. “Oh, it means that people have to practice speaking and writing in a second language, otherwise they will only understand but can’t produce their own output.” But take a look at the title above: “Just speaking and writing aren’t enough.” What is the Output Hypothesis, then? It’s the argument that your grammar output won’t be accurate or complex if there is no real social reason to make it so, if you are “getting by” in communication with forms that are inaccurate and simple. You can read the above article yourself for a more detailed discussion… it’s only 7 pages, and filled with Swain’s anecdotal experiences, like a down-to-earth teatime chat.

The fourth paper on oral interaction is about why feedback on errors cannot be random but must be tailored to what the learner has given you at that particular moment. This was a cool experiment by Swain and her colleague Nassaji:

Nassaji, H., & Swain, M. (2000). A Vygotskian perspective on corrective feedback in L2: The effect of random versus negotiated help on the learning of English articles. Language Awareness, 9(1), 34-51. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658410008667135

You’ve probably heard of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) in teaching, the zone that is “neither too easy nor too hard” leading to the best learning outcome. Nassaji and Swain investigated whether ZPD feedback would be more effective than help provided randomly. They examined this using an experiment involving both qualitative data (audio-recorded tutor-tutee dialogues) and quantitative data (grammar accuracy scores on essays after the tutoring sessions). ZPD tutoring was found to result in “consistent growth over time” (p. 48), but non-ZPD tutoring did not have this effect. It underscores the need for feedback that is not random, and that is consistently tailored to what the learner is producing… which is presumably the cause of said consistent improvement over time. This links back to Ellis’ (2006) Principle #8 above: Of special value is that situation in which a student learns the required form incidentally but explicitly—i.e., when they are given immediate feedback on what they’re trying to express and why it should be expressed in a certain way, using certain forms.

Nassaji and Swain also found out an interesting side fact about the random feedback, which I think is funny: even if it was random and not related to anything that was happening in the tutoring conversation, if it was direct and explicit then the tutee learned that grammar point. (That is, learning can still be effective, if not particularly meaningful.)

I put this article under “teaching grammar for oral communication” because the grammar learned would probably apply to both oral and written everyday communication, which is the case for both Swain’s articles in this blog post. No matter whether she gathered oral or written data, what she cared about was the learning of the grammar form. I now come to the five articles that are directly about L2 writing.

3. Teaching Grammar in L2 Writing (5 articles)

As usual, we start with a comprehensive lit review written by an expert or experts for an audience of nonspecialists, published in a prestigious journal.

Evans, N. W., Hartshorn, K. J., McCollum, R. M., & Wolfersberger, M. (2010). Contextualizing corrective feedback in second language writing pedagogy. Language Teaching Research, 14(4), 445-463. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168810375367

Much of the research on grammar accuracy in second language (L2) writing is about university students (English for Academic Purposes, in both ESL and EFL contexts), so that is the population focus of the above literature review. In the Abstract, the authors point to three variables: the learner, the situation, and the instructional methodology. Learner variables include the learner’s motivation, learning style, goals, and first language. Situational variables include the teacher, the physical environment, and socioeconomic conditions. Methodological variables include the instructional design, what is taught, and how it is taught. All these influence what we generally call “L2 writing accuracy.” The authors tie all these variables together by arguing that the strongest approach to Written Corrective Feedback (WCF) is “dynamic written corrective feedback,” of which they give a concrete example from an exploratory pilot study. [Side note: The reason these authors focus on contextual variables is that for quite some time, there was a lot of experimental research on WCF that was entirely laboratory-based/experimental and paid no attention to the social context of teaching and learning, but scholars like Dana Ferris, Icy Lee, Ilona Leki and Neomy Storch worked hard to correct that.]

There’s a throwback to Swain’s Output Hypothesis at the start of Evans et al.’s article:

…some students—even at advanced proficiency levels—seem driven to improve their accuracy while others appear satisfied with their skills because their errors rarely interfere with communication. (p. 449)

In other words, some people care for accuracy a lot, even if their errors do not impede communication, whereas others will only fix the errors if they impede communication. Nevertheless, the authors argue that we can assume the following four points with regard to almost all students who are enrolled in a language class (p. 451):

• Even if they do not belong to the first category of folks, they see a language class as a social situation in which they can improve their grammar accuracy;
• They expect the teacher to help them with this, as part of the teacher’s job;
• They can improve their accuracy with appropriate feedback;
• That feedback should be “manageable, meaningful, timely, and constant” (p. 451).

“Dynamic WCF” has two key principles (p. 452), which are throwbacks to principles we have already seen in this post:

1. Feedback reflects what the individual learner needs most as demonstrated by what the learner produces; and
2. Tasks and feedback should be manageable, meaningful, timely, and constant for both the learner and teacher.

For the first principle, each learner has unique needs. These include first language (L1), grammar analytic aptitude, and the reasons for learning a second language (e.g., for some people, they have to achieve high levels of accuracy and/or complexity; for others, not so much). For the second point, Evans et al. highlight that feedback must be…

• Manageable: Bitchener (2008) suggests that teachers and learners might benefit from focusing on ‘one or only a few error categories’ at a time (p. 108), which goes with a couple of Ellis’ (2006) recommendations at the start of this post. Information overload (especially about one’s grammar mistakes) is not fun at all—be considerate of your learner.
• Meaningful: This means the learning cycle must be completed and learners must ACT based on the feedback. “Students must do much more than merely look over the errors that the teacher has marked and then file or throw the paper away, as they often do. They must understand why the feedback is being given and how they are to use the feedback” (p. 453) [e.g., in a revised assignment or the final assignment]. Meaningfulness also means that the feedback should help students understand why and how something needs to be changed in their writing. For this to happen, students need to invest in the learning process by reasoning through their errors (Ferris, 2006); later, I will address Ferris’ work on that in student conferences.
• Timely: This means that the “right” time gap between receiving feedback and acting based on feedback must be achieved. Too wide a gap and the learner will have forgotten the feedback. However, too narrow a gap and it actually isn’t “learning + revision,” but just “one-off learning” (i.e., it is the same event). Actually, this principle of “shouldn’t be too wide or too narrow a time lapse between first lesson and revision, if knowledge is to be retained long-term” applies to ALL kinds of academic learning.
• Constant: Learners benefit from a steady flow of manageable feedback over an extended period of time, because this develops habits of self-analysis and self-correction, and helps them recognize their most common mistakes.

Evans et al. spend the rest of the article discussing an experimental intervention that I won’t go into, because every program/course has its own specific structure and needs. The two main points are that (1) WCF needs to be contextualized to the learner and situation, meaning it is most effective if it is done in response to, or in dialogue with, what the learner produces in the context of trying to complete a task successfully (there’s Ellis’ Principle #8 again—and also Swain and Nassaji’s main finding); however, (2) there are still universal good practices: manageability, meaningfulness, timeliness, and constancy. Let’s look at articles that elaborate on these universal teaching principles.

First, there is the project led by Prof. Dana Ferris about WCF in conferences with tutors.

Ferris, D. R., Liu, H., Sinha, A., & Senna, M. (2013). Written corrective feedback for individual L2 writers. Journal of Second Language Writing, 22(3), 307-329. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2012.09.009

This study was longitudinal, assiduously tracking 10 students’ development over a semester with a lot of data collected for each student, by a team of researchers. The students wrote four in-class texts, revised them after receiving WCF from the tutors (Sinha and Senna), and participated in retrospective interviews after the first three writing and revision sessions. Data collected included student background questionnaires (N = 10), four student texts (originals plus revisions) per participant (N = 40), and recordings/field notes from periodic interviews with participants (N = 30), as well as recordings/field notes from an end-of-semester interview with the classroom teacher (Liu). Ferris, Liu, Sinha and Senna focused their analyses on students’ descriptions of their own self-monitoring processes as they revised their papers, highlighting individual factors and contextual factors that appeared to influence their writing development.

There were also universal findings, which should not come as a surprise if you’ve been reading the blog post up to this point: students found individual conferences about their specific errors in their compositions useful, but formal knowledge of language rules “played a limited and sometimes even counterproductive role in their self-editing and composing” (Abstract). “Limited,” because there could be a missed link between grammar lessons and later application in one’s writing, and “sometimes even counterproductive,” because students sometimes misapplied a rule previously learned out of context in a grammar lesson. This points to the need for “a more finely tuned approach to corrective feedback” and the need for teachers not just to mark the written products but to talk, talk, talk to students about what is going on. If you want to read more about the individual differences, you can examine the whole paper.

Related to this is Icy Lee’s article about “what gets in the way” of implementing dialogue-based rather than just-on-paper WCF practices. If California professor Dana Ferris is the WCF Queen in the West, Hong Kong L2 Writing scholar Lee is the Queen in the East.

Lee, I. (2011). Feedback revolution: What gets in the way? ELT Journal, 65(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccp028

I once took a graduate course on L2 Writing with Lee’s former apprentice, the established L2 Writing scholar Ling Shi, so I know that Lee spent a significant part of her career studying K-12 ELF classrooms in Hong Kong where teachers spent hours and hours and hours of their lives covering students’ written essays with red pen marks, correcting their grammar errors just to show supervisors they were working and prove they were doing their job, with students doing nothing with this and learning nothing from this (i.e., they were not required to do anything with it in particular, and besides, it was not manageable, meaningful, or timely, although it was constant). Lee studied why it was hard to change these institutional practices. In the short, accessible article referenced above, she examined factors that may facilitate or inhibit change—“while teachers may be cognitively aware of the need for a feedback revolution, there are obstacles that get in the way of innovation” (p. 1).

Lee (2008) had previously found that teachers require single drafts from students (no revisions), mark errors comprehensively (all errors), provide correct answers rather than getting students to think about their errors, only mark on paper without conferencing, use an overwhelming number of error codes, deduct marks for errors (discouraging experimentation and sacrificing grammar complexity), and rarely implement peer conferencing (a practice that is necessary, for reasons I will discuss later).

In this article, Lee narrates how she tried to address the issue in a professional development seminar (attended by 54 principals and teachers) in which the questionnaire and focus group activities also raised participants’ awareness of what needed to be done. For 10 feedback practices that she knew were revolutionary (e.g., marking errors selectively) she calculated the percentage of people who said: (1) “We don’t do this but I would like to adopt it,” (2) “We don’t do this and I would consider adopting it,” and (3) “We don’t do this and I would not consider it.” For most things, teachers DID know what needed to be done, but didn’t have the support from higher school leaders like department heads and principals, or parents… who sometimes demanded the “bad” feedback practices because they wanted a rigorous education for the children, wanted to hold teachers to account, and/or did not see why the practices were counterproductive. Two thirds (67.6%) of teachers wanted to mark errors selectively, 73.3% wanted to use error codes sparingly, 76.7% wanted to get students doing self-correction, and 76.7% wanted to get students doing peer correction. Lee concludes: “a feedback revolution seems possible only when teachers are empowered to play a more autonomous role within the school system” (p. 9).

This brings us to peer conferencing, since we’ve already looked at cultivating learner self-correction/self-awareness:

Storch, N. (2005). Collaborative writing: Product, process, and students’ reflections. Journal of Second Language Writing, 14(3), 153-173. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2005.05.002

Neomy Storch, like Merrill Swain, has done a lot of research on the border between SLA and pedagogy, the result being highly generalizable findings about the kind of social interactions that promote language learning. In this paper, Storch aimed to find what happens when students jointly produce a written text. It’s important to note the age group here—23 adult ESL students. Her findings would still likely be applicable to teenagers who have a certain degree of cognitive and social development; not so with young children.

Most of the 23 students chose to work in pairs, but some chose to work individually. Storch audio-recorded the pair work and collected all the students’ texts. Then she compared the texts produced by pairs with those produced by individuals, and examined the nature of the writing processes in the pair talk. She also interviewed the pairs about their collaborative writing experiences. In terms of students’ subjective experiences, most were positive about the collaborative writing, even though some expressed reservations. Overall, it seemed like a good thing to do, and most students seemed to like it.

But what was more impressive were the products. Storch found that “pairs produced shorter but better texts in terms of task fulfilment, grammatical accuracy, and complexity” (Abstract). That’s right… accuracy AND complexity! Why is this? Well, let’s go back to Swain’s Output Hypothesis: your grammar output won’t be accurate or complex if there is no real social reason to make it so, if you are “getting by” in communication with forms that are inaccurate and simple. Collaborative writing (rather than just writing on your own for the teacher, graded or ungraded) created that necessary social context.

One last element of social context that is worth mentioning is audience. How do writers, individually or collaboratively, consider the target forms necessary to convey their message? First language writing scholar Mary Schleppegrell considers this question in an article that is an accessible introduction to the field of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), titled “At last: The meaning in grammar.”

Schleppegrell, M. J. (2007). At last: The meaning in grammar. Research in the Teaching of English, 42(1), 121-128. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40171750

Grammar is not just about a set of rules; it is about having students consider alternatives and the differing effects they have on the reader. A teacher may see an error like…

Everyone that first year in college alway feel a lot of pressure for register classes.

…and then instinctively jump to correct this sentence (in which the student is saying that first-year college students feel a lot of stress during course registration time). But Schleppegrell argues that the most productive grammar pedagogy is not one that strives for accuracy above all but makes the student aware of “the language systems writers draw on and the alternatives available within those systems, identifying the meanings that the systems construe” (pp. 123-124), for instance:

First year students not only feel pressure from exams, they also feel a lot of pressure (i) when they register; (ii) at registration time; (iii) in registering for classes.

Here, we could teach that we have a two-part sentence; “Not only X but also Y,” and the “Y” can take the form of (i) an actor-verb clause, focusing on the person doing something; (ii) a time phrase, focusing on the period of time; or (iii) an -ing verb, focusing on the action/process of registering.

Of course, Schleppegrell points out that we want to correct things that are unacceptable in formal writing, like when the student writes: “All their schedule is screw up” or “register for classes are a pain,” but this is not enough; we also need to make writers aware of how alternative choices “open up new possibilities for overall text organization” (p. 124). In other words, when we position students as craftspeople who make choices, we give them new identities and open up new ways of thinking, being, learning, and doing rather than putting them in the sole role of student, and incompetent student at that.

Schleppegrell argues that this explicit instruction and guided noticing is especially important for students who rarely encounter “academic English” outside of class time, and so cannot easily pick it up implicitly. She explains:

A focus on grammar that is functional, related to what is being done with language in the various contexts of language use, and offering students a range of options linked to the meanings they construe, can help students expand their linguistic repertoires without losing the language they bring. But to achieve this, researchers and teacher educators need to inform themselves more deeply about the systems of English grammar and the meanings they enable in different contexts of use. (p. 126)

And where can teachers, teacher educators and novice literacy researchers learn about such things? A book that is comprehensive and accessible—written by experts deeply concerned about educational equity—is Rose and Martin’s (2012) Learning to Write/Reading to Learn: Genre, Knowledge, and Pedagogy in the Sydney School. It is about 360 pages, but it is worth more than dozens of disconnected papers; it will teach you much of what you need to know. While a lot of EAP genre pedagogy is for training academics for whom English is an additional language to read and publish academic research, the Sydney School is a practical way of teaching academic reading/writing as an empowering process to K-12 students worldwide whose first language may or may not be English… based on the theories of the famous applied linguist M. A. K. Halliday. This is why L2 writing scholar Ann Johns praised the Sydney School as being THE teaching method for the REGULAR student (Johns, 2008); Halliday himself was involved in the school’s aim to teach foundational literacy skills for everyone. Read Rose and Martin (2012) along with Hilary Janks’ and colleagues’ book on critical literacy (Janks, Dixon, Ferreira, Granville, and Newfield, 2013) and you’re all set.

Summary

So that’s the 10-article set that I suggested to my friend about the “ideal” grammar syllabus. It is by no means comprehensive, but it does offer an examination of the same key takeaways from multiple perspectives (theoretical, methodological, and practical). In sum, what do MATESOL teachers of grammar need to know, or know about?

• The importance of guided noticing of grammar points in context and with particular attention to the meanings the learner is trying to express to their audience (Ellis, Storch, Schleppegrell). Talk to students about these things, in class and in individual student-teacher conferences! And have students talk about these things with each other!
• Social factors that impact grammar learning: at the micro level of pair, group, and tutor/tutee interaction (Swain, Ferris, Storch), as well as wider social contexts such as dominant community languages (Housen et al.) or school policies/practices that emerge from societal conventions and ideologies (Lee).
• Universal pedagogical principles which, like the first two points, are about sociality, such as (i) pushed output (Swain), (ii) ZPD instruction (Nassaji and Swain), and (iii) manageable, meaningful, timely, and constant feedback (Evans et al.). 

References

Bitchener, J. (2008). Evidence in support of written corrective feedback. Journal of Second Language Writing, 17(2), 101–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2007.11.004

Ferris, D.R. (2006). Does error feedback help student writers? New evidence on the short- and long-term effects of written error correction. In K. Hyland & F. Hyland (Eds.), Feedback in second language writing: Contexts and issues (pp. 81–104). Cambridge University Press.

Janks, H., Dixon, K., Ferreira, A., Granville, S., & Newfield, D. (2013). Doing critical literacy: Texts and activities for students and teachers. Routledge.

Johns, A. M. (2008). Genre awareness for the novice academic student: An ongoing quest. Language Teaching, 41(2), 237–252. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444807004892

Lee, I. (2008). Understanding teachers’ written feedback practices in Hong Kong secondary classrooms. Journal of Second Language Writing, 17(2), 69–85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2007.10.001

Rose, D., & Martin, J. R. (2012). Learning to write, reading to learn: Genre, knowledge and pedagogy in the Sydney School. London, U.K.: Equinox.