Applied Linguistics Winter Colloquium

Guest speaker talk

Although writing is a critical skill in personal, educational, and professional domains, its role in language education in the United States is unclear and several recent studies have identified presentational writing as the most difficult linguistic modality to teach and the one that students struggle with the most. Why is this the case and what are the perspectives of language educators today on teaching writing? This presentation will begin by sharing data from a qualitative study of collegiate French instructors’ beliefs and practices related to teaching writing. In the second half of the presentation, I will argue in favor of an integrated pedagogy for writing instruction, i.e., a Design approach, based on second language writing research and multiliteracies pedagogy, and I will describe principles of this approach. The presentation will conclude with implementation considerations and directions for future research.