Journal of Academic Writing

Booksprints as a Learning Format for Students in Higher Education

Anja Voigt-Färber — 2025-09-30

This article introduces booksprints as an innovative teaching and learning format for academic writing for undergraduate students. Booksprints foster writing with alternative concepts of authorship and enable students to collaboratively go through an almost authentic digital writing and publishing process in a minimum of time, and at the same time facilitate various future skills, such as written communication, coping with change, and digital literacy. Still being in a ‘prototype’ phase, booksprints are only just being tested as a potential educational format that is a bridge between subject matter and writing/teaching methodology. This article, therefore, presents the basic design of booksprints as well as some specific features, such as moderation of the process by the facilitator, explicit role assignments, visualized project management and the use of digital platforms, in order to introduce them as a writing-intensive learning setting for higher education.

Balancing Preference and Practicality

Gayle Pringle Barnes — 2025-09-30

How – and why – do students engage with an increasingly diverse range of learning opportunities in the digitised university? This paper investigates students’ motivations for choosing in-person, online or asynchronous study modes and explores the implications for academic writing provision. I reflect on student and teacher experiences on a non-credit, Masters-level academic writing course at a UK university which was delivered through a ‘hybrid-flexible’ approach (Beatty, 2019). Students could opt to learn through synchronous in-person (on-campus) classes, synchronous online classes or asynchronous activities delivered through a virtual learning environment; all study modes supported the same learning outcomes and students could switch between them as they choose. Course evaluations reveal students have different motivations for choosing in-person, online or asynchronous learning, and suggest that learning preference and practical motivations are not always aligned. I reflect on the opportunities and challenges I encountered as a teacher designing and delivering hybrid-flexible academic writing content. I conclude by exploring how tensions between learning preference and practical motivations might be addressed in the design and delivery of in-person, online and asynchronous learning activities.

Review of Change and Stability in Thesis and Dissertation Writing: The Evolution of an Academic Genre

Febriana Lestari — 2025-09-30

This is a book review of Change and Stability in Thesis and Dissertation Writing: The Evolution of an Academic Genre by Paltridge and Starfield (2024).

Editorial and Production Credits (Vol. 15 No. 1 2025)

Magnus Gustafsson — 2025-09-30

Editorial: Expanding the Horizons of Academic Writing Pedagogy

Hatice Çelebi — 2025-09-30