Teaching Requests to L2 Learners of Spanish

Abstract

With academic writing viewed as an important aspect of language instruction, there is an increasing interest on how writing education could be improved to better accommodate the needs of multilingual learners. To evaluate the empirical evidence from published research studies, we conducted a systematic synthesis of the published research that has examined innovations in English-as-a-foreign language writing instruction in China, in contexts including tertiary, secondary, and elementary schools. General claims emerged across our analyses of 56 empirical studies published in the SSCI journals in English from 2005-2015. Each claim is supported by empirical evidence: (1) corpus-based approaches are useful in analyzing students’ writing; (2) students’ affective and cognitive factors may influence the outcome of writing instruction; (3) training may help teachers improve confidence in teaching writing; (4) differences may appear between assessment-oriented teacher feedback and non-assessment-oriented teacher feedback; (5) assessment for learning influences student learning of writing; (6) instruction may help writers acquire skills and knowledge of writing for publication; (7) technology-enabled instruction can help students in their writing process; and (8) novel and authentic writing tasks can promote students’ critical thinking ability.