The purpose of the present pedagogical experience was to address the English language writing needs of university-level students pursuing a degree in bilingual education with an emphasis in the teaching of English. Using mentor texts and coding academic writing structures, an instructional design was developed to directly address the shortcomings presented through a triangulated needs analysis. Through promoting awareness of international standards of writing as well as fostering an understanding of the inherent structures of academic texts, a methodology intended to increase academic writing proficiency was explored. The study suggests that mentor texts and the coding of academic writing structures can have a positive impact on the production of students' academic writing.

Bilingual learners often integrate semiotic resources and communicative modes across the languages they speak. Unfortunately, current approaches to researching such a phenomenon assign pragmatic functions to individual discourse moves at best or to isolated utterances at worst. Thus, using a social semiotic multimodal interaction analysis, this study examined actions in interac­tions of a group of six transnational students participating in a second-grade literacy circle at a school in western New York, USA. The purpose of this was to account for the complex reciprocities among their multimodal ways of communicating, their learning climate, and ultimately their learning as mediated and evidenced in their integrated multimodal communicative action. Data included four audio recordings of four literacy circle reading activities that took place during a four-day period. Findings sug­gest that, first, learning results from communication. Second, learning can only be evidenced through communication in interaction. Finally, communication is always multimodal and emergent while, at the same time, culturally governed. This presents direct implications for instruction and learning regarding the social conditions afforded to students to access their full repertoire of semiotic resourc­es and modes to participate and act on their own behalf and in pursuit of their learning.