This article explores the integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into the academic writing process. Guided by the principles of the academic literacies model, the authors embedded process writing alongside the use of ChatGPT-generated texts within an academic writing course. As part of the course's second module, students reflected on their reactions to using GenAI. This article shares the benefits and drawbacks of incorporating GenAI into the writing process from the students' perspectives, with a particular focus on how the students saw GenAI influencing their thought processes. We conclude with a discussion of the practical implications of our findings for other academic writing educators. This is the first half of a two-part article; we discuss additional themes resulting from this study's analysis in the companion paper, as well as an emerging framework inspired by the module's design.
This article explores the impacts of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) on undergraduate students' writer identities and skills, with a view to considering how the technology can be integrated into writing instruction. We embedded process writing alongside the use of GenAI in an undergraduate academic writing course and gathered written reflections from the students. We explore how the student participants understood GenAI in relation to their developing writer identity and their understandings of academic integrity. A focus group was conducted with the teaching team which explored their reactions to teaching with GenAI and their views on the potential strengths and drawbacks of the software. Drawing on the student and teacher data, we conclude by sharing recommendations for using GenAI within academic literacies instruction and discussing an emerging framework for critical AI literacy. This is the second half of a two-part article; we encourage readers to also read the companion paper, which shares students' reactions to using GenAI and process writing in the course as well as reflections on the cognitive side of writing.
With the number of international students completing their higher degree by research (HDR) studies in Australian universities steadily rising, how best to support their academic literacy needs remains unclear. Although research exists on undergraduate and postgraduate international students and their needs when studying in their host countries, there appears to be limited literature that focuses on the needs of international students completing HDR or doctoral studies. As the first phase of a qualitative research project aimed at addressing this gap, this paper presents findings from a comprehensive scoping review on the academic literacy needs of international HDR students at Australian universities. In this holistic approach, academic literacies have been defined to not only include the acquisition of academic skills but also ways of knowing and being in a host institution. As for methodology, the review utilised Arksey and O'Malley's framework and the PRISMA extension framework for scoping reviews with findings analysed and interpreted thematically through conceptual models of academic literacy. In-depth analysis of 11 articles revealed two overarching themes of 'Acculturation' and 'Identity', which included the sub-themes of 'academic acculturation' and 'social acculturation; and 'agency need for a culturally informed approach to understanding and meeting the academic literacy needs of international HDR students. Such an approach will involve applying a non-deficit framework that acknowledges and celebrates international students' diverse ways of knowing and being. ' and 'competing identities', respectively. This review highlights the
Academic language and learning services are a critical aspect of most university retention strategies, yet there are gaps within the current literature about the ways in which diverse student cohorts engage with these programs. This article analyses a three-year data set of the engagement by 11,111 students with four different types of services at an Australian university: individual learning adviser appointments, academic skills workshops, Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS), and an online writing support service (Studiosity). The data presented demonstrates that in any given year, students tend to pick one type of service and only engage with that service: 74% of students in this study only engaged with one type of service in any given year, and fewer than 1% accessed all four. This choice appears to be influenced by demographic variables, including age and domestic or international status. These findings highlight the importance of providing a range of different academic language and learning services to accommodate diverse student preferences.
This preliminary study examines the use of interactional metadiscourse markers (IMMs) in the discussion sections of education research articles (ERAs) authored by native English speakers (NSEs) publishing in Q1 SSCI-indexed journals and Turkish authors with English as an additional language (EAL) publishing in locally indexed or non-indexed journals. The corpus comprised 30 single-authored ERAs, with 15 from each author group. Analyses of IMMs, conducted both manually and with computer-assisted tools, were guided by ences in the frequency and distribution of IMMs: NSE authors employed more IMMs across all categories, particularly hedges, boosters, self-mentions, and engagement markers, often demonstrating greater variety and rhetorical flexibility. In contrast, Turkish EAL authors displayed a preference for impersonal self-mentions and attitude markers, especially evaluative adjectives, and showed less frequent use of explicit reader engagement features. These findmore dialogic and strategically hedged arguments. These differences suggest varying rhetorical preferences that may be shaped by prior academic literacy emphasizes the need for pedagogical interventions to support broader awarescholars aspiring to publish in high-impact international journals.
International students significantly contribute to the economies of some countries, particularly those that are English-speaking. For this reason, initiatives to enhance the academic performance of international students in several host countries have been focused on. Their enhanced performance can contribute to the university's global ranking and overall reputation, revenue generation, and student enrolment growth. The present study examines the efficacy of an (ELB), in preparing students for mainstream studies at Curtin University in Australia, focusing on two key areas: student exam performance and student perception of the program's effectiveness. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the performance of 684 Chinese students across four sets of grades: ELB results (in the home institution), Semester 1 results, Semester 2 results and Course Weighed Averages (CWAs) at Curtin University. The program's efficacy was investigated through focus group interviews. The results indicated that the ELB students performed extremely well as a cohort in both their onshore semesters of study after completing the ELB course. Three types of perceived efficacies - academic, affective and socio-cultural - were identified in the interview transcripts. The study reveals that offshore ELB programs can help international students to perform strongly in host university courses.
As Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI) is transforming learning and teaching in higher education, the Library has taken a leading role in supporting students' AI literacies at Curtin University. Early workshops revealed a mismatch between content and student needs, prompting a user experience survey that uncovered confusion, fear and uncertainty. We found that teaching Gen-AI requires flexibility, critical thinking, and a shift from traditional approaches-which starts by listening to our learners. As Gen-AI technologies and institutional policies change, our approach to learning and teaching AI literacies must be adaptable, student-centred, and open to uncertainty and discovery.
Academic Language and Learning (ALL) educators work across a variety of Australian higher education institutions, playing a critical role in developing students' academic language. The importance of these roles has been amplified in light of sector-wide efforts to improve academic language and learning, leading to student success. Yet, despite the clear contribution ALL educators make to the student experience, their professional status remains ambiguous, and their career progression pathways are often unclear. The work they do is situated in centralised learning support units, but in some cases, ALL educators are embedded within faculties or work in close collaboration with academic teaching staff. This inconsistency in terms of where ALL educators are situated reflects a broader lack of shared understanding regarding the role's scope and identity. The present study investigates how ALL educators are positioned within the Australian higher education landscape and how the profession is defined, recognised, and supported across institutions, with attention to how expertise is valued, and career progression unfolds in practice. The analysis draws on data derived from 31 Australian Universities' websites, job descriptions and LinkedIn profiles to examine the qualifications, skills, and career trajectories of professionals in ALL educator roles across the sector. The paper finishes with a proposed Professional Standards Framework for ALL educators to support consistent role definition, professional development, and career advancement.
In 2022, a challenge to a core Academic Skills Advisor (ASA) role, the individual consultation (1-1), emerged in the form of Chat GPT, a generative AI (gen AI) platform that can perform a similar role to that of the ASA in the provision of feedback and advice on students' written academic work in 1-1 contexts. Some views hold that gen AI platforms can perform this role as well as an ASA, representing an equally capable and economically more feasible option. This paper examines this proposition by first considering the advantages gen AI brings to the 1-1 writing advising context before exploring the comparative advantages of the human advisor through the lens of a humanistic Personal-Pedagogical-Institutional framework. The paper concludes that human advisors offer many clear advantages over gen AI platforms in the 1-1 context working collaboratively with students' academic writing, not the least of which is a crucial affective element. ASAs enact this by being actively co-present with students in the 1-1 role through dialogic, mutually recognitive advising which, in turn, has a referred, wider application.
Fostering a sense of belonging and increasing academic preparedness, Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) are shown to reduce attrition, highlighting the importance of connecting equity students with this support. However, while regular PASS attendance is correlated with improved academic success, engagement is low. Reasons include unawareness of support and stigma associated with academic help-seeking. To address the issue of awareness, peer-led promotion was introduced at James Cook University (JCU), Cairns. Findings show that as a result, attendance increased by a factor of six on that campus, while there was no significant change in attendance in the same period on the Townsville campus where the promotion was not conducted. While timely promotion raises awareness and improves access to support services, addressing stigma is more challenging. Embedding PASS within curricula, rather than as additional support, is suggested to normalise academic help-seeking behaviour.
This paper introduces an Academic Numeracies Framework ('Framework'), designed to support the systematic embedding of academic numeracy across tertiary institutions. The Framework responds to challenges in aligning student numeracy with curricula and to the often-fragmented numeracy development practices in universities. Distinctive features include its focus on tertiary education, its purpose as ateaching and learning tool rather than an assessment instrument, and its multidisciplinary applicability. These features make it an ideal tool to facilitate numeracy embedding across universities. A key application is the mapping of target, assumed and actual student numeracy, informing curriculum design and development, and learning-support initiatives. The paper outlines the Framework's conceptual foundations, describes its structure and key features, and explains how feedback from first-year and pathway academics, learning development staff and academic managers (educators) informed its refinement. An illustrative application for the nursing discipline is presented. The insights gained position the Framework as a timely and practical tool to guide educators seeking a structured approach to integrate numeracy development into courses, programs and initiatives.
Individual consultations or 1-1s, face-to-face appointments between an Academic Language and Learning (ALL) advisor and a student have long been part of the higher education advising context in Australia. Nevertheless, individual appointments represent a contested space, particularly in regard to the emergence of generative AI platforms that seek to perform a similar role to that of the human advisor, but also due to questions concerning 1-1 feasibility and scalability. Despite a great deal of interest in 1-1s as a core part of the advisor role, a gap was identified in terms of current information regarding their delivery among ALL teams in Australia. Therefore, this research, undertaken in the early months of 2025 with 41 ALL teams, sought to shed light on how 1-1s are delivered across the country. Examining a range of delivery aspects including role and team naming, staffing, team location, numbers of 1-1s delivered in 2024, trends, ratios, advantages of and challenges to human facilitated advising, the paper concludes that, even in the face of clear and ongoing questions concerning its existence, the individual consultation is still very much a present and valued part of ALL work.
As generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools become increasingly accessible, disciplinary academics in higher education are faced with challenges in how they approach the teaching and assessment of academic writing and adapt their practices to integrate GenAI. Drawing on an exploratory research project, this paper examines the perspectives and practices of academics across a range of disciplines at an Australian metropolitan university. Through surveys of 58 academics across all faculties, we seek to understand diverse responses to the pedagogical and ethical considerations concerning student use of GenAI to produce academic writing. Our findings reveal how GenAI is reshaping approaches to academic writing, its influence on teaching and assessment practices, and the resultant challenges and opportunities for disciplinary learning. Participants were invited to reflect on GenAI use in academic writing, with a focus on its impact on assessment design and teaching practices. These responses are influenced by the specific contexts of each discipline, prompting reflection on the evolving role of Academic Language and Learning (ALL) practitioners in supporting ethical and effective integration of GenAI into higher education academic writing practices.
This practice-based project explored how international students at a pathway college could interact with Generative AI (GenAI) to develop academic vocabulary in a personalised and engaging way. The initiative aimed to develop vocabulary while promoting critical engagement with GenAI, preparing the students to use it ethically and effectively in both academic and professional contexts. Students used structured prompts which were designed to encourage deeper interaction beyond dictionary-style use and maintained individual vocabulary records to enable further development. Observations suggest that guided interaction with GenAI can support both language development and
The word part strategy can hypothetically be effective in acquiring academic vocabulary, which is chiefly constructed using morphologically complex structures. However, not much is known about this association as little information exists on the word part strategy in the academic context among L2 English learners. Consequently, this study focused on the use of vocabulary learning strategies and its relationship with receptive morphological knowledge in learning L2 academic English vocabulary. 694 Finnish university students' intentional strategy use and performance in tasks measuring receptive morphological knowledge were examined with quantitative methods. The findings showed that intentional strategy use was associated with the students' receptive morphological knowledge. The findings also suggested that students who used strategies requiring analytical skills had higher levels of morphological awareness and skills needed in the word part strategy. Before Finnish students can use the word part strategy independently, the results suggested that the required amount of explicit pedagogical focus on the strategy depends on how they are currently engaging with words. These findings can be exploited for developing L2 English teaching at the university level and providing useful information to further research on advanced English learners' vocabulary learning and strategy use.
Across a range of educational contexts, including academic language and learning (ALL) practice in the higher education sector, there is growing interest in harnessing student voices to improve classroom experiences. In this paper, we discuss our action research (AR) focusing on students' reflective activities in a 5-day academic language intensive programme designed to encourage students to share their learning experiences with their tutor, and to empower tutors to design and deliver a bespoke programme informed by student voices. The paper will also highlight the impact that adopting an AR approach can have on educational and research practices. Our AR suggests the inclusion of the reflective activities enabled teachers to adapt their teaching practices, foster teacher-student and student-student rapport, and create more empathetic classrooms better tailored to their students' specific learning needs. This paper may be of significance for any educators interested in implementing similar activities to encourage student voices in their classrooms to enhance teaching practices and students' learning experience, particularly ALL practitioners in comparable contexts or for programmes delivered in intensive and/or block mode. It would also be of interest to educators considering adopting an AR approach to investigate a specific issue in their educational context.
This study investigates the effectiveness of rubric-based dynamic assessment combined with multimodal feedback in enhancing the quality of doctoral dissertations and fostering long-term academic development. Using a mixed-methods approach, the research examines the impact of structured, multimodal feedback-delivered through written comments, audio, and video-on doctoral candidates' dissertation quality, feedback literacy, and critical writing skills. Quantitative results reveal statistically significant improvements across all dissertation components (Academic Writing Quality, Literature Review, Methodology, and Data Analysis) from initial to final submissions, as indicated by a repeated measures ANOVA (p < 0.001). Qualitative findings highlight the importance of feedback clarity, relevance, and emotional support, with students and supervisors emphasizing the value of video feedback in providing actionable guidance and maintaining motivation. The integration of rubrics facilitated targeted revisions and enhanced feedback literacy, enabling students to independently interpret and apply feedback. The study contributes to the theoretical understanding of dynamic assessment, rooted in Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, by demonstrating how iterative, multimodal feedback scaffolds students' learning and fosters self-regulated academic growth. Practical implications include recommendations for integrating multimodal feedback in doctoral supervision to promote both cognitive and emotional support. The findings underscore the potential of this feedback model to inform higher education policy and improve doctoral education globally.
Even though identity formation is seen as essential in learning academic writing, it has not received much attention at the Bachelor thesis level in higher education research. This narrative case study focuses on the identity formation of two young students of philosophy during their bachelor's thesis writing processes by applying narrative analysis and the model of the hero's journey to interview data. The study demonstrates students' adaptation and resistance to institutional norms and social practices and identifies many possible identities, including an institutional one and two different heroes: the grower and the fighter. The findings suggest that students recognise that the institutional narrative of bachelor's thesis writing has a clear impact on their identity transformations. This study challenges the idea of purely rational and technical understandings of academic writing and describes it as a diverse transformational journey which can be utilised in revealing underlying questions about academic practices and assumptions in order to help students understand academic writing and their actions more deeply. The study offers cultural archetypes as a pedagogical way to explore students' learning experiences and identity change in becoming an academic writer. Additionally, useful guiding questions are provided for pedagogical use.
Academic language and learning (ALL) support at Australian universities plays a crucial role in the academic success, acculturation and wellbeing of many student cohorts, including international students. This paper examines the implementation and effectiveness of a course-embedded, discipline-specific ALL support initiative, SCANA (Student Communication and Needs Analysis), at the University of Sydney. The paper evaluates the iterative development of SCANA support within a single postgraduate education program over four semesters, and focuses on how and why the design and delivery of ALL instruction changed over this time, towards an increased focus on digital literacy and a more inclusive learning environment. It complements this evaluation with student performance data and student feedback data demonstrating improvements in academic outcomes and student satisfaction. Ultimately, this paper highlights the importance of discipline-specific, course-embedded ALL support in addressing the challenges faced by international students at Australian universities and offers a practitioner's view of the iterative development of one particular ALL support initiative. This research contributes to the growing body of literature on best practices in ALL support, particularly the inclusion of digital and AI resources and a focus on digital literacy.
The Clemente Australia program (Clemente) aims to disrupt cycles of inequity and social injustice by providing access to university education for individuals facing complex life challenges. Central to this program is facilitating the students' academic journey by offering academic literacy resources to navigate their educational journeys. In this paper, we examine the interplay between a series of brief academic literacy workshops, introduced as an initiative, and subsequent individual academic literacy consultations within the Clemente program. Drawing on an autobiographical approach, we, the academic literacy advisor and the program site coordinator, share our narratives, discuss our lived experiences, what we learned, what we observed and the possibilities and challenges we encountered. From the critical perspectives on emotion and academic literacy theories, we then reflect on the extent to which offering brief workshops (BWSs) to Clemente students impacts their approach towards and engagement in individual consultations (ICs). Our findings suggest that offering these BWSs not only facilitates the process of ICs, and student involvement, but also the development of "critical hope" (Zembylas, 2013), leading to a more inclusive and accessible academic context with possibilities for "crit- ical engagement" (Janks, 2012, p. 159).
