Teaching Academic Writing

A Toolkit for Higher Education

Caroline Coffin, Mary Jane Curry, Sharon Goodman, Ann Hewings, Theresa Lillis, Joan Swann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415261364
• eBook ISBN: 9781134507320
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Student academic writing is at the heart of teaching and learning in higher education. Students are assessed largely by what they write, and need to learn both general academic conventions as well as disciplinary writing requirements in order to be successful in higher education.
Teaching Academic Writing is a 'toolkit' designed to help higher education lecturers and tutors teach writing to their students. Containing a range of diverse teaching strategies, the book offers both practical activities to help students develop their writing abilities and guidelines to help lecturers and tutors think in more depth about the assessment tasks they set and the feedback they give to students. The authors explore a wide variety of text types, from essays and reflective diaries to research projects and laboratory reports. The book draws on recent research in the fields of academic literacy, second language learning, and linguistics. It is grounded in recent developments such as the increasing diversity of the student body, the use of the Internet, electronic tuition, and issues related to distance learning in an era of increasing globalisation.
Written by experienced teachers of writing, language, and linguistics, Teaching Academic Writing will be of interest to anyone involved in teaching academic writing in higher education.

Chapter 1
Issues in academic writing in higher education

AIMS OF THE BOOK

Teaching Academic Writing is an introductory book on the teaching of academic writing in higher education. It is aimed at higher education lecturers and writing tutors who wish to help undergraduates improve their academic writing in both discipline-specific and writing/study skills contexts. The book raises issues about the teaching of academic writing and offers many practical suggestions about how academic writing can be taught. Some suggestions are meant for lecturers to implement as part of their subject teaching; other ideas will work better in collaboration with writing or language specialists who work alongside subject specialists to help students with their writing. The book will also be useful for people who work in contexts where writing support is offered as a separate provision, for example within study skills and EAP courses (English for academic purposes). Whilst the book is aimed principally at lecturers and tutors working with undergraduate students, it raises many issues which are relevant to those who teach postgraduate students, particularly those students who are returning to higher education after a break from academic study.¹ The aims of the book are:

• to identify and demystify the conventions and practices associated with academic writing so that both subject specialists and writing support staff can better advise and help students to construct their written work
• to discuss ways that lecturers can address the needs of a variety of students, including those with little experience in academic writing and those whose primary language is not English
• to enable lecturers in a range of contexts to adopt and adapt various teaching strategies to the teaching of academic writing for different purposes
• to combine a practical orientation to teaching writing with a grounding in current theories of writing instruction.

STUDENT WRITING IN A CHANGING HIGHER EDUCATION CONTEXT

Student writing is at the centre of teaching and learning in higher education, fulfilling a range of purposes according to the various contexts in which it occurs. These purposes include:

• assessment, which is often a major purpose for student writing (see National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, 1997). Students may be required to produce essays, written examinations, or laboratory reports whose main purpose is to demonstrate their mastery of disciplinary course content. In assessing such writing, lecturers focus on both the content and the form of the writing, that is the language used, the text structure, the construction of argument, grammar and punctuation.
• learning, which can help students grapple with disciplinary knowledge as well as develop more general abilities to reason and critique (Hilgers et al., 1999). Separately from or simultaneously with writing for assessment, students may also be asked to write texts that trace their reflections on the learning process itself, as with journals where they record thoughts, questions, problems, and ideas about readings, lectures, and applied practice.
• entering particular disciplinary communities, whose communication norms are the primary means by which academics transmit and evaluate ideas (Prior, 1998). As they progress through the university, students are often expected to produce texts that increasingly approximate the norms and conventions of their chosen disciplines, with this expectation peaking at the level of postgraduate study.

Students and lecturers alike recognise the necessity for good communication skills both within the university and in the larger world. Whilst some research signals that an ever-increasing range of writing demands are being made of students (Ganobcsik-Williams, 2001), evidence also indicates that the most traditional of practices – that of essay writing – continues to hold sway across many disciplines (see National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, 1997). Whether the essay should continue to be the main type of writing that students produce and whether students know how to successfully engage in this and other writing practices are questions being voiced more and more frequently.² In this book, whilst our main focus is on essay writing, we also deal with other kinds of writing such as laboratory reports, project reports, case studies, and reflective journals.

Student academic writing continues to be at the centre of teaching and learning in higher education, but is often an invisible dimension of the curriculum; that is, the rules or conventions governing what counts as academic writing are often assumed to be part of the ‘common sense’ knowledge students have, and are thus not explicitly taught within disciplinary courses. If students lack familiarity with these conventions, the assumption is often held that they will ‘pick it up’ as part of learning their subject knowledge. Although this position might have been understandable within the context of a small and predominantly homogenous higher education system, it is no longer justified within current contexts where significant changes are affecting all aspects of teaching and learning, including student academic writing. These changes include:

Increasing student numbers. The growth of student participation in higher education signals a shift away from a small, highly elitist provision of higher education toward policies and practices aimed at widening access to more of the population. In the UK at the end of the 1930s only some 2 per cent of the population took part in higher education, compared with some 10 per cent in the 1960s and some 30 per cent by the late 1990s. The UK government plans to increase this proportion to up to 50 per cent of the 18- to 30-year-old population by the year 2005 (HEFCE, 2001). Policies of widening participation have been a driving force behind a heightened interest in teaching and learning, including student writing, in many parts of the world. The growing UK interest in teaching writing thus mirrors trends in South Africa, Australia, and the United States.

Increasing diversity of the student population. The student population is not only larger and still growing but significantly more diverse than previous generations of students. Increasing numbers of ‘non-traditional’ students, that is, students from social groups historically excluded from higher education, are now present. These include students from working-class backgrounds, those who are older than 18 when they start university, and students from a wide range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds (HEFCE, 2001). There are also large numbers of international students who have been mainly educated in countries other than the UK. Educational background, ethnicity, cultural expectations and gender all influence how students read academic texts and respond in writing (Lillis, 2001). Students new to higher education may not feel at ease with academic writing conventions or with staking claims for knowledge about which their lecturers have greater expertise, necessitating more explicit instruction about writing.

Complex patterns of participation in higher education. There are complex patterns of participation including greater numbers of part-time students in higher education, in contrast to the traditional, full-time model. In the UK, part-time participation has been steadily on the increase and has been taken up particularly by women (see Blackburn and Jarman, 1993; HEFCE, 2001; Ramsden, 2001).

Curriculum changes. There have been significant curriculum changes, not least in shifts towards modularisation and interdisciplinarity. Modularisation, whereby teaching and learning are structured around short courses rather than over a whole academic year, has grown substantially in the past ten years. By 1994 it was estimated that more than half of UK universities had moved to semester provision, which was linked in many cases to modularisation of the curriculum and delivery (Schuller, 1995). Interdisciplinarity, whereby a growing number of courses offer modules in a wide range of subject areas, happens within particular interdisciplinary degrees such as communication studies and women’s studies, but also in routes through more traditionally demarcated subject areas. There has also been growth in vocationally and professionally oriented higher education courses that cross academic boundaries, for example, nursing and social work studies.

Diverse modes of curriculum delivery. The introduction of a range of modes of curriculum ‘delivery’ has been profoundly shaped by developments in information technology. The most notable shift has been away from conventional face-to-face teaching and learning modes and toward the use of computer conferencing systems and web-based materials, both as part of campus-based provision and increasingly in distance courses. The impact of such changes on traditional practices of teaching, learning and assessment is only just beginning to be explored (see e.g. Richardson, 2000).

Contexts for teaching and learning. The increase in student numbers has not been matched by an equivalent increase in funding. Many institutions have larger class sizes, fewer opportunities for small group teaching (such as seminars and tutorials) and – of specific relevance to student writing – little time for lecturers to comment on students’ written work. Whilst the nature of the material conditions for teaching and learning varies immensely across institutions, a notable difference frequently emerges between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ universities.³ The ‘new’ universities often have larger classes compared with ‘old’ universities such as the prestigious institutions of Oxford and Cambridge, where a highly personalised teaching and learning context prevails in the form of the tutorial system. Nonetheless, many innovations in pedagogy are taking place at new universities in response to these changing contexts and at national levels in many parts of the world there is unprecedented interest in teaching and learning in higher education. In the UK the recent establishment of the Institute for Learning and Teaching (ILT) placed teaching in higher education firmly on the political agenda, thus mirroring current and historical developments in similar contexts elsewhere. (For a current parallel, see the white paper on higher education in South Africa at http://196.14.128.104/Deptinfo/highereduc/hewp1.html; for historically similar developments in the United States, see Crowley, 1999; Horner and Lu, 1999.)

This book’s focus on the teaching of academic writing is therefore part of a current interest in teaching and learning in higher education more generally. Questions, and possible answers, about how best to support students’ academic writing are relevant to all those committed to enhancing successful teaching and learning in higher education.

INSTITUTIONAL PROVISION OF WRITING INSTRUCTION

A range of approaches to teaching writing has developed in different geographical contexts and for different historical and socio-political reasons. In Australia, pedagogical models designed to foster students’ awareness of academic conventions and practices have emerged from the study of disciplinary genres and the field of systemic functional linguistics (see e.g. Martin and Veel, 1998). In the United States, for decades courses in ‘freshman composition’ have taught the presumed generic skills of academic writing to first-year students as well as nonnative speakers of English (Leki, 2001; Zamel and Spack, 1998). Recently interest has grown in teaching writing in the disciplines or across the curriculum, in recognition of the discipline-specific nature of much of academic writing and the usefulness of writing to the learning process. In South Africa, where fundamental changes in higher education are taking place, teachers and researchers are critically reconceptualising the purpose and nature of student writing in the academy (see e.g. Angelil-Carter, 1998; Thesen, 2001).

Institutional structures around the world tend to include any of four main locations for the teaching of writing: dedicated writing courses, disciplinary subject courses, English for academic purposes/English for speakers of other languages departments, and study skills or writing centres. In addition to these face-to-face venues, on-line writing instruction has recently added another dimension – or at least the possibility for it – to all of these domains.

Dedicated writing courses

First-year writing, or ‘freshman composition’, is usually a required course at the beginning of university study in the United States. Depending on university policy, first-year students may take remedial/basic writing courses, freshman composition, or more advanced writing courses. As the provision of writing instruction has increased, higher level courses in academic writing have been developed. In some cases these courses link disciplinary lecturers with writing specialists to focus on disciplinary forms of writing, as in ‘learning communities’ (Grubb, 1999). The development of the academic field of composition studies in the United States in the past 35 years came about partly as a response to increased numbers of non-traditional students entering the academy. Veterans of the Second World War, greater numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, women, and disabled students all changed the face of the student population in higher education. The needs of these students to acquire academic literacy functioned to expose some of the hidden assumptions and practices of the academy. The growth of composition studies also came from increased attention to theories of teaching and learning writing. For many of the same reasons, UK universities have also recently begun to provide courses dedicated to teaching academic writing.

Disciplinary subject courses

With the increasing recognition of the centrality of writing to learning and assessment in higher education, the movement to include writing across the curriculum (WAC) and writing in the disciplines (WID) has grown (see e.g. Bazerman and Russell, 1994; Fulwiler, 1986). The WAC movement is premised not only on the notion that writing is a tool for learning but also that because academic writing happens in specific disciplinary contexts, instruction in such writing should also be located in these courses. One benefit of incorporating writing in the disciplines is that students can see how different forms of writing occur in different contexts. WAC/WID pedagogy also emphasises the sequencing of writing tasks throughout a course so that students build gradually into particular forms of writing.

Study support centres and writing centres

Within many higher education institutions, writing instruction has often been located in departments or centres that offer support in study skills. Because such centres are frequently situated outside academic departments, study skills specialists have offered the ‘service’ of helping students with their written work. In many cases these services are provided to students referred to study skills centres because their lecturers deem their work to be deficient. Like EAP lecturers (see below), study skills specialists may have little subject-area knowledge; they may also not have much communication with the lecturers who set writing assignments, provide feedback, and assess students’ written work.

Writing centres have often evolved from study skills centres. In some cases, writing centres have assumed a higher-status role as their functions have broadened to encompass offering mini-courses on specific aspects of academic and other types of writing. The most recent development in writing centres has been the addition of on-line writing support (see below).

English for academic purposes

A large number of non-traditional students in higher education are international students and other non-native speakers of English. To cater for their needs, academics in the fields of ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) and EAP have often combined writing instruction with language teaching and learning. The experiences, backgrounds, and needs of non-native English speakers vary considerably. Immigrant or ‘home’ students may have different English language learning and writing experiences than those of international students studying in the UK and other English-speaking countries. ESOL/EAP lecturers who teach second language writing often have been trained in applied linguistics or language teaching; thus their expertise may be in different subject areas than those of their students. Many, however, work together with subject lecturers or make themselves familiar with the writing needs of their students (Graal and Clark, 2000; Johns and Dudley-Evans, 1981). As a result non-native speakers of English often obtain much of their knowledge about academic literacy in Western universities from their EAP courses. The knowledge of different academic text types and discipl...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• ACTIVITIES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1: ISSUES IN ACADEMIC WRITING IN HIGHER EDUCATION
• CHAPTER 2: APPROACHES TO TEACHING WRITING
• CHAPTER 3: WRITING FOR DIFFERENT DISCIPLINES
• CHAPTER 4: PLANNING THE ASSESSMENT OF STUDENT WRITING
• CHAPTER 5: GIVING FEEDBACK ON STUDENT WRITING
• CHAPTER 6: ACADEMIC WRITING IN AN ELECTRONIC ENVIRONMENT
• ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• REFERENCES