Annual oneday seminar

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Annual one-day seminar Research, scholarship
and practice in the area of Academic
Literacies Friday 30 June 2006 University of
Westminster The Centre for Higher Education
Research, the Educational Initiative Centre,
Polylang EAP and the Academic Writing Centre
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An Investigation of Genres of Assessed Writing
in British Higher Education
RES-000-23-0800
Warwick - Reading - Oxford Brookes
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Current Researchers

• Hilary Nesi, Sheena Gardner, Jasper Holmes, Sian
  Alsop, Laura Powell,
• CELTE, Warwick
• Paul Thompson, Alois Heuboeck
• SLALS, Reading
• Paul Wickens, Signe Ebeling, Maria Leedham
• ICELS, Oxford Brookes

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Project Aims

• Develop a Corpus of British Academic Written
  English (BAWE)
• Characterise proficient student writing across
  disciplines and years

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BAWE Corpus Grid
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The probable 28 disciplines
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Planned Corpus Size
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Four Research Strands

• Corpus development
• Discourse community perspectives
• Multidimensional analysis of register
• SFL analysis of genres

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1. Corpus Development

• Collect assignments
• Tag files and prepare for submission to Oxford
  Text Archive
• Develop interfaces for end users

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Access to the Corpus

• ?Full texts available from the Oxford Text
  Archive
• ?On-line search engine to allow for concordancing
  with limited co-text
• ?Shared portal with BASE, MICASE, MICUSP

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2. Discourse Community

• a. Departmental documentation
• b. Tutor interviews
• c. Student interviews
• d. Assignment submission forms

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3. Multidimensional Register Analysis

• Bibers dimensions lexico-grammatical features
• Feature analysis of the academic corpus
• search for clusters of distinctive features by
• ltlevel, ltdisc, ltdiscGroup and lttype

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4. Systemic Functional Genres

• School history genres
• Analytical exposition
• (Background) Thesis Arguments Thesis
  Reinforcement
• Analytical discussion
• (Background) Issue Arguments Position
• Challenge
• (Background) Arguments Anti-Thesis

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Tutor Interviews

• What role does assignment writing play in your
  department?
• What different types of written assignment do you
  set your students?
• What are the main differences between these
  types?
• In what ways does student writing progress?
• What do you value / dislike in student writing?

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Essays

• All assign essays
• Essay has many meanings.

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Essays have a basic structure

• Introduction, body, conclusion
• (Biological Sciences)
• Introduction, logical sequence of argument,
  conclusion (Medicine)
• Argument, counter-argument, conclusion
  (Hospitality Tourism)

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Compared to other assignment types

• The structure of essays is less prescribed
  (Theatre Studies)
• Greater scope .. in terms of what theyre writing
  about (Engineering)
• An essay is generally more rangy, with a freer
  structure (Law)
• Essays have more flexibility than practical
  reports, and may address only a subset of the
  classic RA (Psychology)

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Essays involve critical thinking

• A chance to show .. that you can think deeply
  about a subject (Anthropology)
• Give more scope for originality (Psychology)
• The traditional Law essay would probably take
  the form of a critical discussion

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Engineering assignments

• Essays
• Laboratory reports
• Project reports
• Reflective journals
• Posters (e.g. for transport museum)
• Summaries of analysis recommendations
• Site investigation reports (both factual and
  interpretative)
• Funding proposals
• Business plans

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Published Academic Research

• Over time, student writing should approximate
  ever more closely to the writing that academics
  submit for publication in learned/scientific
  journals (Economics).
• student writing should conform to the style
  youd expect in a research paper - publishable
  in style, but not in content ( Food Sciences)
• Biology students are advised to write in the
  style of current opinion journals.
• Physics expects students to write a scientific
  paper as might be published in a scientific
  journal for an audience of their peers.

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Professional Writing

• Publishing project proposals and letters to
  authors, in the persona of a publisher.
• Case reports (patient description management
  plan) assess competence to progress as a medical
  practitioner.
• Demonstration and analysis of computer coding
  (preparing students for real life)
• problem questions apply the law rather as
  barristers and solicitors have to do.

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Disciplinary differences

• education is a value in itself, and its part of
  a persons development of selfhood it
  depresses me when students view it as a kind of
  grim vocationalism
  
  (Theatre Studies)
• there is little point in writing academic
  essays in some modules, as Publishing is a
  vocational degree and assignments try to
  replicate what goes on.

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For some, the essay is limiting

• The fact that essays are still used as the only
  mode by the majority of English literature
  assessors seems to me very limiting
  (English Studies)
• We are a traditional department and we still use
  mainly essays and were very conscious that we
  would like to, and perhaps need to, do something
  about that
• (Sociology)

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a) Creative writing

• Crime fiction (Sociology)
• dramatic dissertation playscript of the facts or
  trial of a legal case (Law)

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b) Reflective writing

• Students produce original work and then evaluate
  it (Computing, English Studies, Theatre Studies)
• Students write reflectively about their
  experiences during group work (Engineering,
  Hospitality Tourism)
• Students write reflectively about the educational
  value of a practical task (Anthropology)
• Students reflect on past personal experiences
  (Medicine)

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c) Empathy Writing

• writing for school children, friends, museums, or
  newspapers (Physics, Biology, Mathematics and
  Engineering)

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d) New Technologies

• Blogs
• Website evaluations (Medicine, Theatre Studies)
• Web-page design (Publishing)
• Powerpoint presentations (Business and others)

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• Questions?
• Your possible use of the corpus?