Writing Theories and Practices
This course, designed and offered by Asst Prof. B. Mitsikopoulou adopts a transdisciplinary orientation to writing theories and practices drawing on linguistic, cognitive, ethnographic, contrastive rhetoric, sociolinguistic and sociosemiotic research. The focus is on the practices of teaching writing, the theories underlying these practices, and the combination of the two as praxis. The first part of the course explores issues related to writing research on first, second and foreign language, history of literacy practices, different theoretical accounts of conceptualizing literacy, the nature and politics of writing. The second part of the course focuses on different theories of writing instruction, such as product, process, genre and literacy approaches. It presents the theoretical basis of each writing instruction approach, it discusses the role of writers, writing materials and teachers, and it analyses writing activities from each of one of the approaches. In addition, it analyses the KPG writing module as a case of a genre-based approach to writing assessment. Drawing insights from writing theory and research, the third part of the course has a practical orientation and explores topics such as teaching writing at different levels, developing writing tasks, responding to student writing, assessing student writing, using new technologies in the teaching of writing.