Discipline-Specific Writing

Theory into practice

John Flowerdew, Tracey Costley, John Flowerdew, Tracey Costley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315518992
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Teoria e pratica della didattica

Discipline-Specific Writing provides an introduction and guide to the teaching of this topic for students and trainee teachers. This book highlights the importance of discipline-specific writing as a critical area of competence for students, and covers both the theory and practice of teaching this crucial topic. With chapters from practitioners and researchers working across a wide range of contexts around the world, Discipline-Specific Writing:

• Explores teaching strategies in a variety of specific areas including science and technology, social science and business;
• Discusses curriculum development, course design and assessment, providing a framework for the reader;
• Analyses the teaching of language features including grammar and vocabulary for academic writing;
• Demonstrates the use of genre analysis, annotated bibliographies and corpora as tools for teaching;
• Provides practical suggestions for use in the classroom, questions for discussion and additional activities with each chapter.

Discipline-Specific Writing is key reading for students taking courses in English for Specific Purposes, Applied Linguistics, TESOL, TEFL and CELTA.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Tracey Costley and John Flowerdew

Background to this edited collection

This edited collection draws from the Summer Institute for Creative and Discovery-Based Approaches to Teaching University English for Specific Disciplines that was held by the department of English, at City University of Hong Kong in 2014. This was the second Summer Institute organised by the department in order to provide a creative space for thinking about approaches to the teaching of discipline-specific university writing, the previous one focussing more broadly on creativity and discovery in the university writing class (Chik, Costley and Pennington, 2015). Many of the chapters in this collection were developed out of interactive workshops at this Summer Institute, bringing practitioners and researchers together from across a wide range of Higher Education (HE) contexts. Through this edited collection we hope to make these ideas and approaches available to audiences beyond the Summer Institute (see also Flowerdew (2016a) for a selection of articles also deriving from this Summer Institute).

In addition to contributions from the Summer Institute, we have commissioned additional chapters from colleagues in the field in order to provide comprehensive coverage of the different elements that combine to make a discipline-specific writing course. More than this, we have organised the collection to mirror the essential stages involved in preparing and delivering courses for discipline-specific writing. The intention of the book is to give teachers both new to and experienced in the teaching of discipline-specific writing, course designers, programme coordinators, as well as other interested colleagues, a framework to consider, and ideas to draw upon, to aid and inform discipline-specific writing course development. The edited collection seeks to raise questions and explore the kinds of issues and challenges one might face in developing discipline-specific writing courses. Each chapter is offered by experts in the field, who draw from their own theoretical frameworks, practice and pedagogy to illustrate the different ways in which they meet the needs of their own students and contexts. Through these contributions, we hope to provide ideas for theory, classroom practice, and further research.

Using this book

With more students now than ever before undertaking undergraduate and postgraduate level study and higher education institutions (HEIs) offering an unparalleled range of courses in and through the medium of English, the need for students to take up the language and literacy practices of their disciplines is more pressing than it has ever been. These needs, as has been the case for the last 40 to 50 years or so, are met by teachers and courses that adopt a variety of different approaches and methods. Some of us find ourselves in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) contexts where we might be teaching postgraduate students studying to be pilots. We might find ourselves teaching ESP to undergraduate classes of dentists, engineers, and/or students who fall broadly under the banner of Humanities. We may find ourselves teaching on our own or in teams with other university staff and/or industry professionals. We may be responsible for planning and developing such courses, teaching them, training others to teach them, and assessing them, as well as adopting many other possible roles. In some contexts, our teaching might be part of a writing across the curriculum (WAC) initiative, a writing in the disciplines (WID) course, or a bespoke module and/or stand-alone course designed for a specific department. We might adopt a genre approach, one that is based on the use of corpora, and/or one that draws upon an academic literacies model.

This book tries to take account of this wide range of contexts and practices and provides strategies and ideas for pedagogy from a discipline-specific perspective. A key question is how to meet the needs of the students in terms of providing them with the content, language and literacy practices required by their studies, whether this is at the level of overall course design, individual classes, student assessment, or program evaluation. Each chapter in this edited collection begins with a discussion of the theory and literature that informs the approach(es) and materials, before moving on to practical applications and suggestions for classrooms. Each chapter ends with questions for discussion as well as additional activities for class.

Although the chapters in this collection focus on the uses of English, the ideas and approaches discussed are, we suggest, germane to the teaching of disciplinary writing in any university context regardless of whether English is the medium of instruction or production, or not. In this sense our interests and intentions are, similar to Bazerman and Prior (2004), that we start from an interest in ‘what writing does, and how it does it’.

Discipline-specificity and disciplinarity

What do we mean when we refer to discipline-specificity, or to use the more usual term, disciplinarity? The term refers to systems of knowledge, their creation and organisation, and the intellectual and teaching and learning practices that are associated with them (Christie and Maton, 2011). Different disciplines build their knowledge in different ways and individuals working in particular disciplines share their ideals, beliefs, values, goals, practices, conventions, and ways of creating and distributing knowledge. In Lave and Wenger’s (1991) terms, individuals in different disciplines belong to communities of practice, groups of people whose members share a common interest in a particular domain, with the goal of gaining knowledge related to their field. Through the process of sharing information and experiences with the group, individuals learn from each other, and have an opportunity to develop personally and professionally. Such disciplinary communities of practice have their fully-fledged members, the professoriate, and their apprentices, students at different stages of development. Following Lave and Wenger’s theory of situated learning, apprentices become fully-fledged members of the discipline through a process of legitimate peripheral participation. Disciplinary knowledge also provides the basis for the creation and dissemination of new knowledge. Without a firm base on which to build, new knowledge is not possible. Disciplinarity furthermore provides for the creation of identity, both the shared identity of the members of the disciplinary community and part of one’s personal identity, how one views the world (Christie and Maton, 2011).

It is fashionable in some quarters to embrace interdisciplinarity, to emphasise how disciplines need to work together, not in isolation (Frodeman, Klein and Mitcham 2010). There is a need to go beyond disciplines because excessive specialisation can be dangerous, it is argued, according to this view, from both an epistemological and a political point of view. Some might argue, in fact, that all disciplines are made up of sub-disciplines, and so are already interdisciplinary (e.g. Gimenez, 2014). However, without a secure identity, a discipline cannot be a part of an inter-disciplinary activity. As Christie and Maton (2011: 7) stress,

[d]isciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are . . . not opposed but rather two sides of the same coin, two dimensions of knowledge formations that together enrich intellectual and educational practices. The autonomous, inward-looking face provides possibilities for cumulative knowledge-building, the generation of shared grounds for judgements and collective identities. The heteronomous, outward-looking face broadens intellectual coalitions and enables ideas recontextualized from other perspectives to refresh the ways of viewing and thinking about problems circulating within the discipline.

So apprentice scholars need a firm grounding in their individual disciplines if they are to take part in interdisciplinary activities.

Discipline-specific writing

The above section on disciplinarity provides a firm theoretical basis for a discipline-specific approach to the teaching and learning of academic writing. Writing is an important feature of a discipline’s identity. The processes and forms that writing takes in a discipline tell us a lot about that discipline. The way one writes in Mathematics varies greatly from the way one writes in History; and the way one writes in Information Science differs greatly from how one writes in Architecture. Learning to write in the discipline is an important part of one’s disciplinary apprenticeship. To be a fully-fledged member of the discipline one needs to be familiar with and able to perform the written genres associated with the discipline. Hanauer and Curry (2014: 3) comment (with regard to the STEM¹ disciplines) that ‘language and literacy are specific to disciplines’ and that ‘the investigation, analysis, and discussion of different literacy products, multimodal objects, or oral interactions is contextualised within a framework of disciplinary action that underpins and explicates these communicative components’. Similarly, Gimenez (this volume) cites Bazerman and Prior (2004: 2) as arguing that ‘to understand writing, we need to explore the practices that people engage in to produce texts as well as the ways that writing practices gain their meanings and functions as dynamic elements of specific cultural settings’.

Chapters in this volume by Parkinson and Gimenez provide excellent examples to show how this process operates in two contrasting disciplinary fields: Science/Engineering and Business, respectively. Parkinson shows how Science and Engineering students learn to write by writing the laboratory report, and how, by learning to write this genre, they at the same time ‘learn the empirical values of laboratory work that are expressed in its writing’. Gimenez, on the other hand, shows how ‘business [in common with other social science disciplines] requires a set of clearly defined persuasion, argumentation and reasoning skills: summarising, critiquing, critical analysis, evaluating supporting material from multiple sources and so on’.

Discipline and genre

We have already mentioned that to be a fully-fledged member of a disciplinary community one needs to be familiar with and able to perform the written genres associated with that discipline. For this reason, many of the chapters in this book adopt a genre-based approach to the teaching of discipline-specific writing, with Chapter 6 by Hyon focussing exclusively on this topic, so we will not go into great detail here. We might cite Hyland, however, on the advantages of a genre-based approach, as presented near the beginning of his Genre and Second Language Writing (2004: 10–11), as follows:

• Explicit. Makes clear what is to be learned to facilitate the acquisition of writing skills.
• Systematic. Provides a coherent framework for focusing on both language and contexts.
• Needs-based. Ensures that course objectives and content are derived from target needs.
• Supportive. Gives teachers a central role in scaffolding students’ learning and creativity.
• Empowering. Provides access to the patterns and possibilities of variation in valued texts.
• Critical. Gives students the resources to understand and challenge valued discourses.
• Consciousness raising. Increases teachers’ awareness of texts and helps them confidently advise students on writing.

Such advantages are further explicated in the various chapters of this volume, especially that of Hyon.

Discipline-specificity and English for Specific Purposes

Readers will find that individual authors in this volume sometimes describe their practices as belonging to the tradition of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). ESP is traditionally broken down into two sub-fields: English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Occupational Purposes (EOP). Discipline-specific approaches strictly speaking only fit into the EAP domain, not the domain of EOP, because occupations are not disciplines. However, there is often overlap, because some professions – for example Law, Accountancy, and Engineering, to mention just three – may be grounded in specific disciplines (Flowerdew and Peacock, 2001:11). A lot of work which goes on in the academy in these more professionally-oriented disciplines may therefore be considered as preparation for professional practice. Be that as it may, not all EAP is discipline-specific, far from it. EAP may be broken down into English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) and English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP), sometimes also referred to as wide-angle EAP and narrow-angle EAP (Basturkmen, this volume; Flowerdew and Peacock, 2001; Flowerdew, 2016b). The former usually caters for heterogeneous classes made up of students from different disciplines, while the latter selects its students from specific disciplines or disciplinary areas. However, we would argue that just because students are drawn from different disciplines, this does not mean that there may be no focus on discipline-specificity, that is to say, both EGAP and ESAP may be discipline-specific, or have elements of discipline-specificity built into their design. This may be brought about in more heterogeneous EGAP classes through individualised learning, with different students in the same class working on texts and practices which may be specific to their particular discipline, a practice which can be emphasised further through out-of-class activities. So, with regard to the present volume, although the focus of all of the chapters is on discipline-specificity, their context may not always be ESAP, but may be EGAP, or may lie somewhere along a cline between the two poles. We emphasise, therefore, that, as editors of this volume, we are not taking a ‘hard-core’, dogmatic ESAP position. The focus is on discipline-specificity, but this may be in the context of ESAP or EGAP. While, as we have argued, there are strong theoretical grounds for discipline-specificity (disciplines are distinctive in terms of their language and practices, etc.), there may be arguments in favour of a wider-angle approach, in relation to student numbers, instructor skills, and training, and ther...