This study investigated the written composition skills of Spanish-speaking university students with and without dyslexia, focusing on the role of spelling fluency and accuracy in text quality. Thirty-nine participants (20 with dyslexia) completed a spelling-to-dictation task and an opinion writing task. Real-time writing measures, such as burst length and pause duration, were recorded using a smartpen to explore their relationship with writing performance. The results showed that adults with dyslexia produced texts of significantly lower quality and made more spelling errors than their peers. However, there were no significant differences in burst length or pause duration between the groups. In the dyslexic group, spelling fluency was strongly associated with text quality, whereas spelling accuracy was not. Mediation analysis indicated that burst length statistically partially mediated the relationship between spelling fluency and text quality. These findings suggest that spelling fluency may play an important role in the writing process of adults with dyslexia, potentially influencing cognitive load and overall text performance.
This study examines positioning patterns and their impact on genre performance in Chinese L2 students’ source-based argumentative writing. Drawing on positioning theory and analytical frameworks for source-based argumentation, analysis of 26 undergraduate English majors’ essays, stimulated recall interviews, and reflective journals revealed three overarching positioning patterns (single, negotiated, and simultaneous) and dynamic positioning shifts across essay segments. These patterns significantly influenced rhetorical move production: single and negotiated positioning led to constrained genre performance, while simultaneous positioning facilitated expected or partially identifiable moves depending on alignment. Dynamic positioning shifts further accounted for segment-level variability in rhetorical effectiveness within individual essays. The findings extend positioning theory beyond conversational dynamics to written discourse, demonstrating how positioning operates through momentary decisions and multiple engagement layers. This study reconceptualizes L2 genre performance as emerging from writers’ dynamic negotiation of positioning demands rather than stable capabilities. These insights suggest pedagogical shifts toward positioning-conscious revision strategies and temporal positioning scaffolds, contributing to both positioning theory and L2 writing research by elucidating how various factors materialize in student writing through positioning’s mediating role.
This study investigates how academics in precarious transition develop and adapt academic networks to support writing for publication amid institutional instability and geographic mobility. Drawing on longitudinal data from three displaced scholars, including interviews, feedback interactions, and repeated Academic Network Plots, we analyze changes in network size, structure, and function. Across cases, network development is explained by three integrated moves: (1) targeted initiation with selective pruning: purposeful outreach aligned with publishing aims while de-prioritizing less productive ties; (2) value brokering with role repositioning through reciprocal collaborations; and (3) durability orientation via structuring follow-ups and outputs (co-authorships, revision cycles, grants) to stabilize ties despite mobility. These moves function as counterstrategies to the epistemic marginalization described in centre-periphery research, showing how scholars under precarious conditions reshape their trajectories despite structural hierarchies. We extend research on academic networking by showing how precarity shapes both access to networks and scholars' positions within them. We offer a transition-sensitive framework that integrates structural and functional change with temporality, brokerage, and mobility. Implications are outlined for mentoring design, institutional support, and equitable participation in global knowledge production.
Using a multiple case-study approach, this study investigated the dynamics of peer interactions that took place through Microsoft Copilot among six pairs ( n = 12) of ESL learners, focusing on their interaction patterns, use of semiotic and multimodal resources, and functions of languaging. Our analyses illustrated that four pairs displayed collaborative orientation, one pair demonstrated an expert-novice pattern, and one pair exhibited a dominant-passive pattern. It was also found that while the collaborative group students focused more on text search and revision, the expert-novice group and the dominant-passive group allocated more time to image generation. Furthermore, in terms of languaging functions, our results revealed that all six pairs of students spent most of their time negotiating writing content. Our study has implications for technology-enhanced multimodal writing pedagogy in a generative artificial intelligence machine-in-the-loop setting.
