Co-sponsored by Malmö University and the University of South Florida
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The 2014 Writing Studies Colloquium: Sharing Research and Pedagogies aims to bring forth international experiences of research on writing and teaching of writing in higher education settings. Both researchers and instructors are welcome to share their experiences of different theories and pedagogical practices. The colloquium also intends to explore and develop ways of working together with education technologies. This includes exploring the possibilities of researching writing through Big Data and corpus methodologies. The colloquium aims to find pragmatic solutions to common problems currently encountered in writing instruction. Importantly, the colloquium provides an opportunity to form productive and sustainable networks to facilitate future collaborative international research and pedagogical projects.
Why is the colloquium co-hosted by Malmö University and the University of South Florida?
The 2014 Writing Studies Colloquium is centred on the cooperation of two dynamic writing research environments: The Writing Unit at Malmö University and the Rhetoric and Composition Program at the University of South Florida. This cooperation was established in 2013 to develop matching competencies and interests in writing studies in terms of research and pedagogical practices. Both institutions use the same writing pedagogy (writing as a process), social media and web-based tools, both have experience of rubric development, and both combine writing research and pedagogy. Currently, researchers at Malmö University and University of South Florida are also collaborating on a corpus-based semantic analysis of instructor and peer comments from a cross-institutional, cross-cultural perspective.
What is happening at Malmö University?
The Writing Unit at Malmö University has hosted writing courses in English at both undergraduate and graduate levels since 2006, with approximately 350-400 students taking these courses annually. The research into writing and teaching of writing is done in a mostly EFL context. Among the research projects and development work that the Writing Unit conducts are the following:
- development of rubric and feedback practices;
- development of utilisation of educational technologies;
- evidence-based development of course curricula;
- research on the use of peer-reviews and self-reflections as part of the writing process;
- research on writing instruction metalanguage; and
- research on developing the Malmö University-Chalmers Corpus of Academic Writing (MUCH) in cooperation with the University of Southern Denmark, Språkbanken at Gothenburg University and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (grant from Crafoord Foundation).
What is happening at the University of South Florida?
The University of South Florida is a Research 1 university in Florida, US, with 47,642 students. Established in 1984, the University of South Florida hosts one of the oldest and most distinguished doctoral programs in Rhetoric and Composition in the US. In 2011-12, the university's Writing Program received the Distinguished Writing Program of Excellence Award, a national award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. The university has also developed the educational technology tool, My Reviewers, which Malmö University--along with Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT), University of Pennsylvania, University of Dartmouth, Eastern Michigan University, Eckerd College, the University of Tartu (Estonia), and others--is currently piloting (see http://www.myreviewers.com).
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