Taiwanese students’ negotiations with academic writing: Becoming “playwrights and film directors”

Studies of Anglo-American writing pedagogies in EFL contexts have largely focused on local teachers’ agency and innovativeness, but have neglected students’ active role in localizing these pedagogical imports. Employing a teacher-research method, I examine my students’ negotiations with a sequenced writing approach [Leki, I. (1992)] that I used in two English writing classes at a Taiwanese university. Moving from the notion of writing to display knowledge that they developed in high school to the notion of writing to construct and transform knowledge, my students negotiated with the writing pedagogy in terms of the self, content, community, and form, and on metacognitive, textual, and contextual levels. The students’ multidimensional negotiations mean more than informing me, an EFL teacher, of their particular needs in the writing class, but rather they are an integral part of the process for adapting an imported pedagogy in Taiwanese context. I conclude the study by suggesting that EFL teachers take a critical perspective on their students’ negotiations and trust and mobilize students’ agency when reforming foreign writing pedagogies for local use.