L2 Students’ Academic Literacy Development Guided by Teacher Written Feedback: A Writing-to-Learn Perspective

Non-native graduate students need to master specialized disciplinary knowledge and genre conventions to perform academic writing tasks. The learning practice is always a process of legitimate peripheral participation where students are inducted into their chosen discipline through collaboration and interaction with people in their social and academic network. Adopting a writing-to-learn perspective, the study sought to examine how teacher written feedback guided L2 graduate students to engage in legitimate, peripheral, and participatory activities with the purpose of understanding teacher expectations, learning disciplinary conventions and developing academic literacy in the discipline of applied linguistics. The exploration demonstrated that teacher written feedback provided opportunities for students to engage in dialogic interaction with various parties through interpreting and/or clarifying teacher written feedback. These legitimate peripheral participation activities not only enabled L2 students to gain necessary disciplinary knowledge for successful papers, but also situated them in relation to more experienced members and by extension to the field.