Bio:

Emerita Professor Terry Myers Zawacki directed the nationally recognized George Mason University Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program and the University Writing Center and co-led university-wide, cross-curricular writing assessment. She is a co-editor of the book series International Exchanges on the Study of Writing and sits on the editorial boards of a number of WAC-related journals and book series. Her publications include Engaged Writers and Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life and the edited collections WAC and Second Language Writers: Research towards Linguistically and Culturally Inclusive Programs and Practices; Writing Across the Curriculum: A Critical Sourcebook; and Re/Writing the Center: Approaches to Supporting Graduate Students in the Writing Center. She has also published chapters and articles on a range of teaching-with-writing topics, including faculty attitudes and expectations for second-language writers, writing assessment in the discipline, challenges faced by dissertation writers and supervisors, peer tutoring initiatives, and implications of internationalization for the writing classroom.

Speech Title:

Connecting Our Paths (接軌): Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), English Across the Curriculum (EAC)

Abstract:

My presentation introduces the principles of U.S. Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and a key tenet that guides program development—that WAC is always local, shaped by and adapted to institutional missions and cultures. I describe how the English Across the Curriculum (EAC) movement has taken up and adapted WAC principles to fit the linguistically complex Hong Kong context, focusing on both writing and communication. While both WAC and EAC programmatic approaches may vary considerably across institutions, both are fundamentally concerned with writing as a means of learning (writing to learn) and learning to write (LTW) in meaningful contexts, typically the student’s field or discipline, and, for EAC, writing to learn language. To illustrate how WAC has been adapted for a local context, in this case Hong Kong, I describe the EAC initiative at CUHK and its component parts. With this foundation, I turn next to the challenges faced by both WAC and EAC, drawing on research with faculty presented in Introducing WAC into China: Feasibility and Adaptation, and then to a focus on students and the complexity of learning to write in a discipline with English as an additional language. I close with practices that help students develop as writers in their fields.