Presentations by Mostafa Nazari on Writing Social Science Research Papers

Mostafa Nazari is currently a PhD candidate at Kharazmi University in Tehran, Iran. He completed his Bachelor of Arts in TEFL in Mohaghegh, Ardebili University, Ardebil Iran in 2014. He then received his Masters of Arts, in 2016, from Kharazmi University, Tehran with his thesis titled “The correspondence between Iranian EFL teachers’ dispositions toward task-based language teaching and their TBLT-related instructional practices”. Currently he’s working towards his PH. D. in Applied Linguistics in Kharazmi University. His dissertation title is “Conceptualizing the role of emotions in young English learner teachers’ identity construction: A case study from Iran”. And his research interests are teacher, education and professional development, teacher identity, teacher emotion, teacher cognition, technology and teacher education, action research and language assessment.

Mostafa had delivered three workshops designed to provide a forum for researchers to become more familiar with the structure and content of research articles, specifically, articles of between 6000 to 8000 words that report on the findings of original studies and make empirical contributions to the field of knowledge.

Recorded are three 2-hour sessions, the first delivered on June 16th, 2023 on introductions and literature reviews, the second, on June 17th, 2023, on methodology and outcomes and on June 18th, 2023, Mostafa presents on the discussion and concluding sections of these articles as well as on writing abstracts. The third session is split for some unknown technical reason and are listed as 3 a and 3 b.

The workshops are targeting researchers working on articles for publication as well as university instructors who wish to educate their students and preparing them for submissions to journals in their fields. The workshops are designed to help students hone their professional skills by learning how to structure their research articles on the way to meeting publication standards. Also, freelance researchers might benefit from these workshops, developing their competencies in academic writing.

Find the recordings below:

Mostafa Nazari _Writing Social Science Research Papers: https://media.heanet.ie/page/464fd3c6ed9842ffa550ec61a9d40ac8

Mostafa Nazari _Writing Social Science Research Papers 2: https://media.heanet.ie/page/f7fd9c86d1d345ceb89feee452971017

Mostafa Nazari _Writing Social Science Research Paper 3a: https://media.heanet.ie/page/a4d647ec41b24018b6b8727d2fa15a95

Mostafa Nazari _Writing Social Science Research Paper 3b: https://media.heanet.ie/page/cd24cf0f240048cebd1df6f71c4d8d88

Enjoy!

EWCA presents an Academic Writing Workshop

Organised by EWCA Activities Co-Secretary, Associate Professor, Dr. Elif Tokdemir Demirel, Kirikkale, Turkey; facilitated by guest scholar:

Mostafa Nazari, PhD in Applied Linguistics, Kharazmi University, Tehran, Iran

Please join us if you are free!

The European Writing Centers Association (EWCA) is organizing the European Writing Centers Week (EWCW) for the first time.


European Writing Centers Week is an excellent opportunity for the writing center professionals to connect virtually and celebrate writing centers’ important roles in academic contexts.

The program will be posted soon.

Stay tuned!

On behalf of the EWCA Board, board@writingcenters.eu

Follow the QR Code for links to each event. Participation is FREE!

EWCA Conference 2022 – A Post-Conference Round Up

July 6th to July 8th, 2022

Hosted online by the writing center of the University of Graz (Austria), the theme of the European Writing Centers Association 2022 Conference was ‘Writing Centers as Spaces of Empowerment’, as pointed out by conference host Doris Pany (Graz) in the conference Call for Papers, “Higher education is widely perceived as a promise of empowerment”. Certainly, the romance of writing center work is that we foster competency, and thereby participation, in not only academic discourse but in the wider conversations unique to the democratic process that have consequences for how we govern ourselves, are governed by others and the extent to which we have access to those that govern. We strive to help those who come to us to become better writers, and in an academic context, that means more informed, critical thinkers, in short, good scientists: honest, trust-worthy, fair/balanced and respectful, leading by example, responsibly sustaining standards necessary to the maintenance of the integrity of one’s self as a citizen and a scholar and to the maintenance of the integrity of those institutions of which we regard ourselves as members.

The consensus was that the conference was a great success, probably exceeding everyone’s expectations given that events conspired in the eleventh hour to force what had been a long-anticipated live conference to become what may have understandably been perceived by many as another dreaded online conference. Endless thanks go to Doris’s Conference Organizing Committee: Lisa Wurzinger, Franziska Gürtl and Lukas Georg Hartleb, as well as those less visible but none-the-less diligent Sigrid Schneck and Katharina Deman. The conference ran so flawlessly, it was easy to forget that it was totally online. It was a wonderful experience. The idea of utilizing an online networking app at the end of the day was just icing on what was already a rich, satisfyingly flavourful cake.

The flawlessness of the delivery only made the quality of the content more apparent. For three days, 3 keynote presentations, 38 presentations, 5 workshops, 6 roundtables, 3 networking sessions and a number of Pecha Kuchas and posters addressed the empowerment of students, tutors, subject specialists, writing center directors, writing centers themselves and even the empowerment realized by retired writing center directors. All these sessions were attended and carried by 165 international participants including 48 students. The many approaches and strategies for the achievement of empowerment presented in these various forms of engagement are testament to the accuracy of Brad Hughes’ categorical breakdown, in his keynote presentation, of the writing center expertise and commitment on which writing centers are built. Approaches and strategies for empowerment included academic literacies approaches, other linguistic approaches, genre analysis, social strategies such as writers’ groups and retreats, collaborative writing, contrastive language strategies, translingual approaches, “small-teaching” and “working alliance” approaches and the use of actor-network theory and “writing as liberation”. Equally impressive and edifying were the number of marginalized groups treated: international students, other language learners, at-risk students, first-year/transitioning students, multilingual students and neuro-diverse students. Empowerment through the engagement with the emotional labor of writing, an often-neglected area, was addressed as was tutor-led writing centers, Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Peer Assisted Learning programs as agents for empowerment of both subject specialists and students. Finally, the issue of sustaining pedagogical integrity, particularly in the face of the corporatization of higher education, and Brad Hughes’ talk on “connectivism” spoke to the empowerment of writing centers themselves. Beside this variety of perspectives on empowerment, the conference also engaged with the very future of the EWCA itself. In the general assembly the EWCA members discussed their goals for the upcoming years and elected a new Executive Board for the period 2022-2024.

It is our hope that as we move away from our experience of the EWCA 2022 Conference toward the next biennial conference in 2024, those who heard Brad’s presentation will reflect on his ethical stance on writing centers, that they should be pedagogical workshops, continually experimenting, challenging unexamined assumptions, adapting to new contexts for writing and for teaching writing, engaging in plenty of “epistemic trespassing”.

Thank you all, members and non-members alike, for your patience, participation, comraderie and encouragment. 

Best wishes from the EWCA 2020 Organizing Committee at schreibzentrum.uni-graz.at 

Doris Pany, Leiterin des Schreibzentrums

Lucas Hartleb, Mitarbeiter des Schreibzentrums

Franziska Gürtl, Mitarbeiter des Schreibzentrums

Lisa Wurzinger, Teamassistenz, treffpunkt sprachen – Zentrum für Sprache, Plurilingualismus und Fachdidaktik

UNIVERSITÄT GRAZ, Österreich

Save these dates and come hungry:

The EWCA Summer Institute 2023 is the EWCA’s second ever summer institute. Deemed a massive success by all who attended the first EWCA SI in Viadrina, the second SI in the American University of Armenia in Yerevan promises to be just as good if not even better.

The SI traditionally is a time for folks to get away from day-to-day responsibilities and to gather as a cohort, and while the extent to which you get away from mundane matters is up to you, this year’s cohort will enjoy the opportunity to virtually connect with writing center professionals across the globe. Just like in years past, participants can count on the experience to include a generous mix of:

  • Workshops
  • Independent project time
  • One-on-one and small group mentoring
  • Connecting with cohort members
  • Special interest groups
  • Other engaging activities

The EWCA SI is for anyone who is:

  • Interested in or already providing writing support in learning centres, language centres, academic support centers, or writing centers 
  • Starting up a new writing centre or interested in doing so
  • New to directing or working as professional staff a writing center
  • Looking for new direction for their writing center
  • Planning or expanding a writing center career
  • Interested in learning and sharing with writing center and writing support colleagues
  • Ready for more sustained discussions about writing support and/or writing centers than conferences offer

Please, keep the dates free. Come to Yerevan in May, 2023. There’ll be lots of interesting talk and activities. Come hungry and bring your dancing shoes (just in case). 🙂

Hisar School Writing Center, Istanbul, Turkey

By consultant, Ekin Aluf

Hi! Our writing center is located in Hisar School, Istanbul, Turkey. We have a big room in the middle of our school with a cozy vibe to it. Our center is run by high school students trained by our center directors. We aim to benefit middle schoolers and other high school students who wish to work with their peers on their various assignments. We have three different elective courses for three different levels of writing consultants. It separates the first, second, and third years, allowing each consultant to have a more fitting experience for their level. 

When students come to our writing center we hope to better not just their writing or assignment, but also the writer and to leave permanent improvements they can apply to their writing of choice. When we receive a submission from a student, we prepare for their session beforehand, finding specific positives and parts that the student can work on. During the session, we keep the student motivated by using “and”s instead of “but”s, while also leaving the decision-making to the writer, creating an equal environment between consultants and clients. 

When we give feedback, we also take some feedback regarding the tutor session. Here are some of the student-written feedback about our sessions. The feedbacks are important to our improvement as well, telling us specifically how we helped them and how we can better ourselves making the sessions more beneficial.  

“I fortunately got very good feedback about my essay and I definitely needed a second eye to read it.”

“Everything was good. Now I know what to fix and I also got some ideas on what to write about.”

Working at the writing center benefits the tutor, as well as the writer. The environment created in the center helps the tutor work on their writing, improves their critical thinking skills and enables them to look at their writing in a more objective way. In my personal experience, I felt like it helped me with my IELTS exam as a foreign English speaker. It helped me better my skills like thinking on the spot and empathy. 

Our aim as the writing center, especially by having high school students as tutors, is to create collaboration among students and inspire them to explore their writing and bring out their whole potential.

WRITING CENTER
Yazma Becerileri Merkezi  HİSAR OKULLARI
Göktürk Merkez Mahallesi İstanbul Caddesi
No: 3 34077 Göktürk – İstanbul
Tel: (+90 212) 364 00 00 Ext 333
www.hisarschool.k12.tr

News from the Centre for Academic Writing (CAW): Coventry University, England

Centre for Academic Writing (CAW) Reception Area

The Centre for Academic Writing (CAW) at Coventry University, England re-opened on campus in August 2021 after operating as a fully-online writing centre between March 2020-July 2021 during the COVID pandemic. Although CAW has offered students synchronous and asynchronous writing tutorials via the Coventry Online Writing Lab (COWL) since 2010, the pandemic pushed staff to come up with new online booking processes and delivery methods in order to offer writing tutorials, a drop-in writing café, writing development workshops, undergraduate and postgraduate writing development modules, and staff consultations online. Two years on from the start of the UK’s first national ‘lockdown’, students and staff are back in CAW, tutorials are taking place either side of clear plastic screens as well as online, CAW’s Single Question Drop-ins are happening at a table in the University Library, and writing development workshops and modules are being delivered online. It’s great to be ‘back in the centre’ as well as retaining our online presence!