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Examining how young children learn to write is increasingly important as global society moves further towards a knowledge economy, where the production of texts of various kinds is an increasingly ubiquitous practice in everyday life and work. While there has been recent policy and practice focus on children's writing performance in standardised tests, in this article, the authors focus on what can be learned by listening to children's voices as they are engaged in 'draw and talk' methodologies. While children's drawings have a material reality, they are also representations of children's perceptions of their experiences with learning to write. In this article, the authors explore the processes, practices and relationships involved in learning to write, depicted in children's drawings when they are asked to draw themselves learning to write. The authors identify representations of writing, evident in the children's drawings focusing the relational, the material and the spatial elements of writing.

Writing well and being well as academic writers is rarely spoken about, often hidden, and at times evaded. We believe that developing, maintaining, and growing well-being literacy not only engages the act but also allows awareness, reflection, and metacognitive thinking that enable mindful writing for well-being. Well-being literacy, the capacity to understand and employ wellbeing language for personal, collective, and global well-being, intrigues us. It encompasses nurturing, sustaining, and safeguarding well-being for individuals, groups, and systems to thrive. As scholars delving into well-being literacy, we, a diverse collective from across higher education career trajectories, investigate its role in scholarly writing and our academic realities. Our focus lies in unraveling the paradoxes inherent in higher education, particularly as researchers and writers. In this paper, we examine our own stories as a trioethnography and the impact of our writing practices on our own professional and personal lives. By doing so, we reveal the place of vulnerability, relationships, and meaning in who we are and are becoming as academic scholars. Guiding principles are shared with peers and colleagues in how they might cultivate writing practices while valuing and embodying well-being in the higher education space.

There is a strong body of research showing associations between handwriting automaticity and children's writing performance. However, less is known about keyboarding automaticity and young students' writing performance. We investigated the relationship between handwriting and keyboarding automaticity and writing performance in both modalities in a sample of 49 students, as well as children's attitudes toward writing in each modality. We also examined the frequency and the nature of the teaching strategies implemented to support children's writing development at school, and the writing practices and support that children reported experiencing at home. Our findings showed statistically significant associations between letter writing automaticity in both modalities and the quality and the length of Year 2 children's handwritten and keyboarded texts. Results further suggested statistically significant moderate to strong associations between all handwriting and keyboarding variables assessed. While our findings concur with research stressing the importance of preparing students to become "hybrid" writers by mastering both handwritten and keyboarding modalities, they also stress the need to examine contextual factors, such as teaching and home writing practices, to gain a more comprehensive view of factors impacting children's writers by mastering both handwritten and keyboarding modalities, they also stress the need to examine contextual factors, such as teaching and home writing practices, to gain a more comprehensive view of factors impacting children's writing acquisition and development.

This article aims to use the two authors' life experience, as English teachers, and university academics in the U.K., China and Australia, to improve an understanding how life trajectories can assist exploration of cultural difference and changes. Our experiences can be utilized as a means of understanding how responses to change and cultural differences can be influenced. Using a collaborative auto-ethnography research method offers readers opportunities to engage with the text through encountering the cultural nuances in these transitional journeys. The analysis is undertaken through the theoretical lens of transformational learning, cultural identity, and space. This paper will be of benefit both to academics in multicultural settings and to pre-service teachers in postgraduate programs. First, it will assist in sensitizing readers to become more culturally aware and competent through understanding how change across cultures can be beneficially accomplished and, second, by showing how constructive change can influence all evolving cultural identities within vibrant, multicultural and multilingual contexts such as we experience in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Providing effective, high quality feedback that students engage with remains an important issue in higher education today, particularly in the context of academic language support where feedback helps socialise students to academic writing practices. Technology-enhanced feedback, such as audio and video feedback, is becoming more widely used, and as such, it is important to evaluate whether these methods help students engage with the feedback more successfully than conventional methods. While previous research has explored students' perceptions of audio-visual feedback, this paper seeks to fill a gap in the literature by examining the impact of the audio-visual mode on undergraduate students' engagement with feedback compared to written-only feedback. Evidence from an analysis of feedback comments (n = 1040) and corresponding revisions as well as interviews (n = 3) is used to draw conclusions about the value of providing audio-visual feedback to help students revise their writing more successfully. In line with multimedia learning theory (Mayer 2009), it is argued that the multimodal format, conversational tone, verbal explanations and personalised feel of audiovisual feedback allows for a more successful engagement with the feedback, particularly for students with a lower level of English language proficiency.

This article presents a case study concerning the use of discourse markers (further - 'DMs') in the writing of status updates on Facebook by a group of early balanced English/Italian bilinguals (further - 'participants'), who were born in Australia in the families of Italian immigrants. The corpus of the participants' status updates on Facebook was analysed by means of the WordSmith software for linguistic analysis (Scott 2008) in order to identify the frequency of DMs used by the participants in the English and Italian languages, respectively. The results of the data analysis indicated that the participants employed, predominantly, English DMs (for instance, and, but, though, and yep), while the repertoire of the Italian DMs was limited to diciamo (English equivalents, e.g. let's say, I mean), ecco (English equivalents, e.g. here, well), and ma (English equivalents, e.g., but, yet). These findings are further presented and discussed in the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian Feminist Judgments is a collection of fictional judgments for real Australian cases that have been rewritten by Australian scholars from the perspective of a feminist judge. Each judgment is introduced by a commentary, written by a different scholar, explaining the legal and historical context of the original decision and the choices made by the feminist judge. This review essay locates the collection within more general debates surrounding judgment writing, particularly leading Australian extra-judicial commentary on how and why judgments are written. Against this larger plane, we consider a number of the key issues raised by the collection about judgment writing, including the significance of recounting the facts of a case, the uses of formalist judicial method and the capacity of judgments to effect change. Drawing on a number of examples from the collection, this review essay contends that Australian Feminist Judgments makes a valuable contribution not only to contemporary feminist debates, but also to issues going to the heart of judicial practices and judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which examines book publishing industry data provider Nielsen BookScan (NB) non-fiction sales data in Australia from 2003-2008. It provides background on scholarly interest of using quantitative methodologies and introduced NB as the empirical source of data for the study. It discusses the rare snapshot of book-buying patterns in Australia after the 2011 introduction of NB and before the widespread popularity of electronic (e)book sales and online retail sites.

Focuses on a low-income Australian grade 2/3 classroom where the teacher and children became involved in a local urban renewal project and on how children wrote about the place and power. Key elements in developing critical literacies in elementary school settings; Children and neighborhood; Importance of considering local community practices.

This article presents the reports from the international research correspondents (IRCs) on the topic of reading and writing connections through an informal polling using a questionnaire in seven countries. The participating IRCs include: (1) Ruth Wong of the National Institute of Education in Singapore; (2) Anita Poon of Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong; (3) Jan Turbill of University of Wollongong, Australia; (4) Melina Porto of National University of LaPlata, Argentina; (5) Marta Infante of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Chile; (6) Pietro Boscolo of Universita di Padova, Italy; and (7) Meeli Pandis of Estonia. All IRCs send informed individuals in their region a common 10-item questionnaire. The first question centered on the relationship between reading and writing practices and research, while the next 8 items were rated using a 4-point Likert scale ("never, seldom, sometimes, often"), and the final question was open ended. Here, the authors enumerate the 10 items and present the summaries of the IRCs' results of the 10 questionnaire responses from their constituents together with their own comments. Although many of the correspondents indicated that reading and writing are regarded as linked at least theoretically, the connection of the two in practice can be very different from school to school and from classroom to classroom. They reported that the associated meanings of the concept "writing" influenced the type of instruction and attention this area of literacy received.

Introduction: Researchers are challenged to publish or perish. A range of barriers to writing can result in sub-optimal productivity, particularly for early career researchers. Researchers in rural areas may face additional challenges of distance and limited access to colleagues. Implementing strategies to address some of these obstacles was identified as a priority for a group of early career, rural researchers., Methods: In late 2010, the Wiljo-Piri Writing Group was established, embarking on fortnightly lunch-time meetings for support, networking and the public setting of writing goals; and arranging pairing of 'writing buddies' committed to writing daily, with contact before and/or after each writing session to provide motivation and accountability. Key measures for improvement were publication output (publications per person per year (PPY)) and perceptions of effectiveness of strategies., Results: Publication output varied between individuals and over time; overall PPY rates improved from 0.5 to 1.25. 'Buddy writing' helped facilitate adherence to routine writing sessions and was associated with perceptions of increased creativity, efficiency, confidence and ability to focus., Conclusions: Structured peer support can be a powerful tool to create and maintain regular writing practices and increase publication output. 'Buddy writing' is applicable to any research or academic setting, and helps maintain commitment to daily writing sessions. Furthermore, such interventions can provide peer support for those working in rural settings, helping to address issues such as geographical and professional isolation. Suggested key steps in establishing structured peer support are provided.