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From text to corpus – A genre-based approach to academic literacy instruction
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System 41 (2013) 307e321
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From text to corpus e A genre-based approach to academic literacy instruction Chris Tribble, Ursula Wingate* King’s College London, Education & Professional Studies, Franklin-Wilkins Building, Waterloo Road, London SE1 9NH, United Kingdom Received 3 May 2012; accepted 15 March 2013 Available online 18 April 2013
Abstract Widening participation in Higher Education and a dramatic increase in the recruitment of overseas students has led to an urgent need for academic institutions to recognise the literacy demands they make of their students, and to respond to these students’ learning needs. In this paper we report on the first phase of a discipline-specific academic writing project at King’s College London. The instructional approach takes as its starting point the assessed academic genres which students have to write. Working within the tradition of genre based approaches to academic writing instruction, we have used the KCL Apprentice Writing Corpus to provide a databank of exemplars. These texts, along with grading and feedback information from academic departments, and input from disciplinary specialists, have provided the basis for discipline-specific writing courses which focus on strategically important assessed disciplinary genres (Critical Assignments in Applied Linguistics, and Laboratory Reports in Pharmacy). In this paper we discuss issues in corpus compilation, the selection of exemplars, and the rationale which has informed the development of the teaching resources. We also provide examples from the workshops offered as part of the courses. The paper concludes with a brief account of the evaluation of the courses, and a discussion of how corpus informed materials are being developed to extend the project in its second phase. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Academic literacies; Academic writing; Corpus; Disciplinary discourse; Genre; EAP; Writing instruction
1. Introduction In the last few decades, internationalisation and widening participation in Western higher education systems have led to increasing diversity in the social, ethnic and linguistic composition of student populations. As a result, the extent to which students are prepared for the literacy requirements of the university varies considerably, and researchers such as Lea and Street (1998) and Ivanic and Lea (2006) have found that the support offered by universities in the UK tends to be inadequate as it often caters exclusively for a narrow set of target groups, neglecting the fact that students from all backgrounds are novices in the discourses and conventions of their chosen academic disciplines. In such a context, there is a need for truly inclusive approaches to teaching academic writing. We have argued elsewhere (Wingate and Tribble, 2012) for the need to develop ‘mainstream’ instructional approaches to teaching academic literacy; approaches that are embedded into disciplinary curricula and accessible to all * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ44 (0)20 7836 3536. E-mail address: [email protected] (U. Wingate). 0346-251X/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2013.03.001
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students. In the same paper, we have also argued that such approaches should combine the best aspects of existing theories and pedagogies, and should target all students rather than specific learner groups. In this present paper we propose a model for writing instruction which draws on genre informed approaches to the analysis and explicit teaching of discipline-specific writing (e.g. Swales, 1990; Martin, 1993, 2000). This genre model takes into account theories that are oriented towards social practices such as Academic Literacies (e.g. Lillis and Scott, 2007) and Critical EAP (e.g. Benesch, 2001, by including opportunities for students to consider literacy practices, institutional power relations, and social roles in their analyses of disciplinary genres. However, the model stands in contrast to Academic Literacies as it: a) calls for explicit attention to textual exemplars from genres which are strategically important for students, and a) makes use of Vygotskian notions of scaffolding in which there is a need for collaboration between writing and subject experts and apprentice writers themselves, and in which a cycle of deconstruction, joint construction and independent construction is followed (Rothery, 1996). The relative novelty of the approach we are proposing lies in its initial focus on a detailed analysis of small sets of texts from disciplinarily specific assessed student genres as the basis for the development of instructional materials, and the later use of discipline-specific corpora of student writing for the development of supplementary materials. In this way we hope to avoid the de-contextualisation which Martin points to in relation to corpus studies ‘that submerge unfolding texture in processes of counting and averaging that look for trends across texts rather than contingencies within them’ (Martin, 2004 cited in Coffin and Donohue, 2012: 69). This explains the title for our paper e From text to corpus. As part of an institutionally funded project, we have collaborated with subject specialists in the disciplines of Applied Linguistics and Pharmacy at King’s College London, and in this paper, we offer examples of developing, implementing and evaluating the approach in these disciplines. 2. Background 2.1. Current approaches to teaching academic writing Using the text-focused to writer-focused continuum proposed by Coffin and Donohue (2012), current approaches to teaching academic literacy can be broadly categorised into those which have texts as the starting point for analysis and instructional materials, i.e. English for Specific/Academic Purposes (ESP/EAP) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and those which give a primary emphasis to writers and have a socio-contextual focus, namely New Rhetoric, Academic Literacies and Critical EAP. The contrasts and overlaps between these traditions have been discussed elsewhere (Hyon, 1996; Bawarshi and Reiff, 2010; Coffin and Donohue, 2012). Within the scope of this paper, we would claim that, as yet, none of these approaches has made sufficient impact in terms of offering a mainstream pedagogy targeted at students from all backgrounds. The reason for this lack of impact may be that each tradition has been developed in response to the needs of specific student populations, and is to some extent still limited to these contexts. Thus current ESP/EAP, arising from the teaching of English as a Foreign Language, has had a focus on L2 students, while SFL, originally developed for empowering students in the Australian school and adult education sectors, has only recently found some application to higher education (e.g. Woodward-Kron, 2007; Mahboob et al., 2012), and has not, as yet, made much impact outside Australia. The traditions that focus on social practices surrounding writing practices do not offer strong pedagogical models, either because they hold that explicit teaching is not effective, as in the case of New Rhetoric (e.g. Dias, 1994; Freedman and Medway, 1994), or, as in the case of Academic Literacies, the emphasis has been on research rather than pedagogy (Lillis and Scott, 2007). These writer oriented traditions are also constrained by their particular contexts (the Northern American college composition classes are the context for New Rhetoric, whilst the focus of Academic Literacies has been largely on ‘non-traditional’ students in UK universities) and have not been concerned with offering an inclusive literacy pedagogy. The absence of a ‘mainstream’ pedagogy that would include all students enrolled in a study programme is obvious in the typical provision of academic literacy support in UK universities which broadly consists of two approaches. The first is targeted exclusively at non-native speakers of English, i.e. overseas and EU students. For this group, EAP courses are available, usually in English Language Centres. For the second group, the so called ‘home students’ (because they gained their entry qualifications in the UK and are therefore perceived as native speakers, even if they
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come from an ethnic minority background) there is usually only remedial provision in the form of study skills courses (Wingate, 2006). Both approaches offer courses to students from all disciplines, and therefore cannot provide much insight into discipline-specific epistemologies and discourses. Targeting mainly students who are perceived as having difficulty with academic English, this provision represents a ‘deficit model’ of writing instruction. This model stems from the previous elite system in which fewer students needed support (Ivanic and Lea, 2006). This model is unsuitable for contemporary universities where the majority of students, coming from diverse backgrounds, have not specifically prepared for the literacy demands of their discipline; however, the provision has not changed in many institutions. Its inadequacy has led to a situation in which many students struggle with academic literacy, and are subject to a deficit discourse of falling standards which is prominent in mass media (e.g. Mitchell and Evinson, 2006). Although the need to move away from the deficit model has been frequently stressed, there are controversies over the nature of alternative approaches, particularly over the use of texts in teaching academic writing. 2.2. Why use texts in academic writing instruction? Within genre (EAP, SFL) approaches to writing instruction, texts are seen as instantiations of genres that belong to specific academic discourse communities (e.g. Swales, 1990; Hyland, 2002). From this perspective the notion of general EAP instruction is problematic, as it can do little to help students to understand and control the genres that are required for participation in specific disciplinary settings. Thus, both EAP and SFL researchers have been concerned with the analysis of linguistic and contextual characteristics of text genres, and see the need to develop effective pedagogies for explicitly teaching genres to L2 students (e.g. Hyland, 2002; Mahboob et al., 2012). However, these approaches have been accused by the UK-based Academic Literacies movement of being ‘textbiased’, ‘prescriptive’ and ‘normative’ (e.g. Lillis and Scott, 2007). Academic Literacies, as well as Critical EAP proponents, have demanded more attention to practices surrounding student writing, as well as opportunities for students to critique and challenge institutional practices and power relations. However, along with EAP and SFL scholars and practitioners, we are convinced that literacy instruction must take texts as the starting point, as reading and writing texts in unfamiliar genres is the most pressing problem students face in a university system where the written text is the main assessment tool (Wingate and Tribble, 2012). Our ‘mainstream’ approach, therefore, focuses on the development of academic writing in the first instance, and attempts to respond to the needs of all novices in discipline-specific academic writing, regardless of whether they are native or non-native speakers of English. Furthermore, it aims to help students extend their writing capacities through the exploration of the student genres that are required at their level of study e whether initial or advanced. The majority of earlier genre-based accounts of academic writing have focused on published texts such as research articles (Swales, 1990; Hyland, 2000), and have demonstrated how writing practices vary across disciplines. However, these ‘expert’ texts are not representative of the assessed genres that undergraduate and graduate students have to write, and therefore it has been difficult to use the findings from this research directly for the development of pedagogic materials. An exception to this practice is that of Swales and Feak (1994a, b, 2002) who have drawn on a wider range of text sources in order to support writing development. By using exemplar texts from assessed genres of academic writing such as ‘data commentary’, ‘summary’ and ‘research paper’, and including tutor comments on more or less successful instances, their work can be seen as a precursor of the approach which we present in this paper. However, as their project has the aim meeting the needs of students across a very wide range of disciplines, there are significant differences between their approach and our discipline-specific strategy. More recent work drawing on corpora of student writing, both through the direct use of student texts as learning resources (Charles, 2003, 2007; Lee and Swales, 2006), and wide-ranging accounts of disciplinary language variation (Biber, 2006; Nesi and Gardner, 2012), has started to map out ways in which apprentice writers can work towards controlling the genres that they need to produce at university. Our intention is to build on this work. 2.3. Pedagogical aspects An important feature of our model is the collaboration between writing and subject specialists. A ‘systemized partnership between language professionals and subject professionals’ (Li and Flowerdew, 2007, p. 100) has been advocated by previous researchers (e.g. Dudley-Evans, 2001), and has been used in some instructional contexts. In the project we report here, this collaboration is essential. In the first place, it is needed to get access to students’ texts and
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to establish an account of successful and less successful practice. More importantly, however, it encourages the integration of literacy instruction into the pedagogic praxis of the discipline itself, with subject specialists giving writing specialists the information and insights required for the development of instructional resources, and also participating in the writing workshops. In these workshops, they not only clarify discipline-specific questions, but more importantly, their presence signals to students that literacy is an essential part of the discipline. In the discipline-specific writing workshops that are part of our project, we used the learning and teaching cycle that was developed in SFL approaches to writing instruction (Rothery, 1996). The details are explained in Section 4.3, and some examples from the workshops are given in Section 4.4. 2.4. Previous applications of corpora in writing instruction As mentioned earlier, EAP has been one of the areas where corpora have been widely drawn on for pedagogic purposes (Ro¨mer, 2011). However, to date, the majority of these applications have focused on either what a corpus can tell us about disciplinary writing, or how students can interrogate a corpus to enhance their awareness of aspects of academic writing that are relevant to their writing needs. Thus, these studies have offered accounts of for instance contrasts between the citational practices of apprentice writers and those of published writers (Thompson and Tribble, 2001); remedial grammar instruction using published and apprentice texts (Lee and Swales, 2006); the enhancement of apprentice writers’ control of rhetorical functions through the study of mini-corpora of published texts (Charles, 2007) and the differentiation between expert published and apprentice writing through the analysis of lexical bundles (Hyland, 2008). While recent major studies have added significantly to our understanding of the genres that learners need to control (Biber, 2006; Nesi and Gardner, 2012), corpus developers and writing instructors have unsurprisingly tended to see the direction of travel from research to application as moving from corpus to text, rather than in the opposite direction. Our intention in developing an Apprentice Writing Corpus (AWC) at King’s College is different, as, in the first instance, we wish to use the corpus as an exemplar (and counter-examplar) data-base, drawing on the corpus qua corpus in a second stage of programme development. At the time of writing we have completed Phase 1 of this project, with Phase 2 ongoing. In the following sections we will briefly discuss the compilation of the AWC and the data that we are currently drawing on for materials development. We will then present the rationale which has informed materials development, and the stages which have been involved in producing the currently available sets of teaching/learning resources. After discussing the initial evaluation of Phase 1, we will provide some examples of the corpus based supplementary materials which are still under development. 3. Corpus resources 3.1. Which text genres? Corpus based research into variation across disciplinary texts has clearly demonstrated the problems that are inherent in any assumption of the existence of a general academic register (Hyland, 2000; Biber, 2006), a general academic vocabulary (Hyland & Tse, 2007), or a single academic style appropriate to all disciplines (Nesi and Gardner, 2012). With this in mind, we adopted an approach which focuses on strategically important genres in those disciplines we were able to include in the KCL project (initially Applied Linguistics and Pharmacy, with Management and History slated for subsequent development). Although we would have liked to make use of existing corpus resources, we found that an absence of relevant texts, or restrictions on their use, made none of the major corpora which contain significant amounts of academic writing particularly useful. The limitations of each are summarised in Table 1. We decided, therefore, to work with faculty members to identify genre categories which present specific challenges to students, and which have high value in each of the programmes included in our project. In the first instance, we focused on student writing in the two disciplines of Applied Linguistics, and Pharmacy. Drawing on the ‘genre family’ categories outlined in Nesi and Gardner (2012), the MA Applied Linguistics texts (course assignments and dissertations) can be seen as fitting in to the Essay and Research Report families, the MSc in Pharmacy texts (laboratory reports) are members of Methodology Recount. Based on our own earlier experience in supporting dissertation writing on MA programmes, we also decided to include both high scoring and low scoring text instances in the corpus. This decision was based on feedback from these programmes where students had commented on the usefulness of seeing what goes wrong, as well as working with examples of good practice.
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Table 1 EAP corpora of academic writing. BNC (British National Corpus) MICUSP (Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers) BAWE (British Academic Written English)
100 Million words of written and spoken text, but only 5 chemistry texts/13 linguistics texts, all from book or journal sources 830 ‘A’ grade papers from a range of disciplines across four academic divisions (Humanities and Arts, Social Sciences, Biological and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences), but no pharmacy or linguistics texts No pharmacy, but 89 chemistry papers (high scoring/across BA/Masters)/115 linguistics scripts (high scoring/across BA/Masters) e but BAWE data restricted; cannot be used for teaching materials
3.2. Building the corpus In order to develop the AWC we needed to have approval from the College Research Ethics Committee and also to have the agreement of students to include their texts in the corpus. We then used an internet survey system circulated to all students on the Applied Linguistics and Pharmacy programmes inviting them to participate in the project by contributing their texts. Agreement was indicated by students agreeing to complete a brief survey. This included a request for their student number, family name and first name (essential for tracking texts prior to entering in the data base). Access to student texts was simplified by the fact that programmes at King’s College now require electronic submission (usually through the plagiarism checker Turnitin), although the process of weeding out which texts could be used and which texts were not available has proved to be time consuming. Once we had identified those texts for which we had permission, additional information, along with the grade that the texts had been awarded could then be added to in the form of a Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) compliant header.1 The texts were then anonymised. As we have permission from students to collect all the texts that they submit for assessment during their studies, we have the potential to carry out both synchronic studies of populations and diachronic studies of individual writers. To date, AWC contains the following data: MSc Pharmacy: 264 texts/746,038 words (laboratory reports) MA ELT and Applied Linguistics: 199 texts/849,239 words (course assignments and dissertations). 4. Developing the writing course e examples from Applied Linguistics and Pharmacy Our project consists of two distinct phases; the first is concerned with text analysis and the development of materials that help students to understand and control the discursive conventions of the genres they have to write. For this phase, a smaller set of exemplar texts is sufficient. The second phase aims to develop extension materials for students who need support with linguistic aspects of writing; these materials, as will be shown later, require corpus analysis. In this section we discuss the approach that we have taken to the first phase. We would propose that even if an extensive corpus of assessed student texts is not available, the strategy outlined here provides a sufficient basis for the development of useful resources to enhance disciplinary writing. However, as we will demonstrate towards the end of this paper, the value of disciplinespecific corpora cannot be underestimated when it comes to the development of linguistic skills at the level of wording. 4.1. Identifying exemplars As we had grades for each of the assignments in our corpus, it was possible to identify high and low scoring text examples. In the case of Applied Linguistics, a shortlist of high scoring and low scoring scripts was drawn up and, through discussion with the disciplinary specialists, a working set of exemplar texts was established. The one major problem that we had in developing the Pharmacy materials was that there was a shortage of low scoring scripts as less successful students were unwilling to contribute their texts. This meant that we had to rely on a very small sample of low scoring scripts in the development of Pharmacy materials. 1
http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml
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4.2. Genre analysis In order to prepare teaching materials, we decided to restrict our analysis to the exemplar texts identified by the subject specialists. These texts provided sufficient data to raise an overall awareness of discourse requirements of the discipline, which was the main aim in Phase 1. The analysis focused on moves across the texts, following the EAP tradition of moves analysis (e.g. Swales, 1981; Hopkins and Dudley-Evans, 1988). The process was facilitated by making full use of whatever section heading information existed in the original word-processed document along the lines outlined in Gardner and Holmes (2010). An example of the move analyses of three Pharmacy laboratory reports, ranging from high scoring (grade 71), medium scoring (grade 60) and low scoring (grade 52) is given in Table 2. This example, used in the teaching materials for Pharmacy, demonstrates that the low scoring assignment (shown in the two columns to the right) does not present the ‘moves’ expected in the laboratory report, resulting in a lack of focus and a structure. Once moves were analysed it was possible to identify obligatory and optional elements, and, through discussion with disciplinary specialists, to develop a commentary which unpacked the “goodness” of the high scoring examples and the problematic aspects of those which scored poorly. This analysis has proved to be sufficient for the first round of materials development. A specific linguistic analysis combining systemic functional and corpus approaches is carried out in the second, corpus-focused, stage of materials development. 4.3. Materials development Materials development so far has involved: a) identifying those moves which are considered by disciplinary specialists to be strategically important and challenging for students b) selecting examples of these moves from the text data base Table 2 Move analysis of Pharmacy students’ ‘Optimisation reports’.
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c) developing a commentary on successful and less successful realisations of these moves within the genre d) formulating these as learning materials e) formulating introductory materials which contextualise the resources and explain the pedagogic approach. 4.4. Materials The materials were provided to students as printed resource manuals. For Applied Linguistics, the resource manuals contain text examples with commentaries for the following sections/chapters: Introduction, Discussing Literature, Presenting and Discussing Findings, Conclusion. For Pharmacy, the manuals include text examples with commentaries on the following sections of the scientific report: Introduction, Definitions and Descriptions, Describing the Experiment, Presenting Results, Discussion. Within the scope of this article, it is difficult to give a full sense of the materials. The brief extract in Table 3 (from a section on Introductions in Applied Linguistics) is offered as illustration of some of the essential features of the materials. As can be seen, the first examples provide comments on positive aspects of the discourse and moves required in Introductions. Following their reflection on the ‘desirable features’, students are then asked to analyse and provide their own comments on another text example. In this process, students make use of the labels and comments which have been applied in the earlier analysis. Next, they review Introductions in low scoring assignments such as the example shown in Table 4. The evaluation showed that being offered exemplars from low scoring assignments was highly appreciated by students. While it is useful to learn from good practice, sometimes it is even more useful to get a sense of what does not work. Table 3 Example from applied linguistics materials: introduction with commentary.
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Table 4 Introduction in low scoring assignment.
4.5. Pedagogic approach and implementation Our approach to writing pedagogy has been closely aligned to the SFL tradition and makes use of the teaching/ learning cycle proposed by Rothery (1996). The approach leads from scaffolded to independent learning. Scaffolded learning takes place in writing workshops and involves the deconstruction and joint instruction phases of the teaching/learning cycle. The writing workshops cover one or two parts of the target genre, for instance ‘Introductions’ or ‘Presenting and Discussing Research Findings’. Usually, two or three workshops are offered in a programme to all students, leaving them the choice to select the areas where they feel they need instruction. The workshops have the following format: (1) Deconstruction phase: this phase requires the critical analysis of exemplar texts from the perspective of what ‘job they have to do’, and which linguistic resources are needed to do the job (Tribble, 2010: 161). The participants work in small groups to analyse high and low scoring exemplars and their commentaries. They then reflect on learning points derived from this analysis and write up and share these observations. (2) Joint construction phase: participants were invited before the workshop to bring with them the electronic version of an extract of their current writing in the relevant part (i.e. Introduction). The group members work together to comment on and revise these extracts, informed by what they have learned in the deconstruction phase. Collaboration between writing and the subject tutors is essential in the deconstruction phase to provide the scaffolding students need to make sense of both the discursive and subject-related aspects of academic writing. Both tutors are present in the workshops to assist students, and our experience so far has shown that questions and discussion points arising from students’ work with the materials require specific advice concerning both writing issues as well as subject matter issues. The last phase of the teaching/learning cycle takes place outside the classroom: (3) Independent construction phase: after the workshops, participants go back to their own texts and make changes according to what they have learned in the workshops. So far, we have conducted seven workshops with a total of 112 participants in Applied Linguistics (59 participants) and Pharmacy (53 participants). The workshops were offered to all students in two postgraduate programmes
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Table 5 Disciplinary contrasts demonstrated through frequency of lexical bundles. Applied linguistics Orientation Research Topic Location Description Citation Quantification Procedure Text Framing Structuring Resultative Transition Participant Engagement Stance
per M 38 16 13 12 5 4 14 2 1 1 8 8
Pharmacy Orientation Research Quantification Topic Description Procedure Citation Location Text Resultative Framing Transition Participant Engagement Stance
per M 41 21 12 6 4 0 6 5 1
2 2
(Pharmacy and Applied Linguistics). For Pharmacy, a one-off three-hour workshop was conducted with three groups of students; in Applied Linguistics, two two-hour workshops were conducted with the cohorts of two consecutive years (2010/2011). Between 42 and 60 per cent of the programmes’ overall cohort participated, and no student group (for instance non-native speakers of English) was overrepresented. 5. Evaluation The evaluation of the instructional approach was carried out by (1) a questionnaire administered to participants immediately after each workshop, (2) the analysis of audio-recordings of the group discussions during the deconstruction and joint construction phases, and (3) the analysis of amendments students made to their own texts in the joint construction phase. These evaluation methods were useful to assess the immediate effect of the instructional approach, in terms of their perceptions as well as improved understanding of the target genres. For a more comprehensive evaluation, it would have been desirable to ask students to write pre- and post-assignments. However, as the workshops took place outside the timetabled curriculum, students had to find extra time to participate and could not be asked to take on additional writing tasks. 5.1. Questionnaire results The questionnaire required students to rate how useful they perceived different aspects of the material to be. 99 of 112 participants (49 from Pharmacy and 50 from Applied Linguistics) returned the questionnaire. Almost all Table 6 Framing and quantification bundles from the AWC. Applied linguistics
Pharmacy
Framing that there is a when it comes to as well as the in terms of the in the same way in addition to the on the basis of due to the fact in the sense that
Quantification the angle of repose uniformity of weight angle of repose and uniformity of capsule content the uniformity of capsule mean angle of repose bp limits for uniformity weight and content of
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316 Table 7 Concordance from AWC applied linguistics.
respondents regarded the materials as very useful/useful for writing their next assignments. The main features of the materials, i.e. that they are based on student texts and offer a commentary, were rated equally highly (see the relevant questions and student responses in Appendix 1). The students were also asked to evaluate the individual sections of the materials, and to comment on the quality of the workshops. The responses showed that students appreciated the group work as well as the presence of the writing and subject tutors. Critical comments were concerned with the amount of text to read and the resulting time pressure. This critique occurred mainly in relation to workshops where more than one part of assignments/reports was covered. It will need to be addressed by either extending the length of the workshops or restricting the content. 5.2. Audio-recordings of group discussions One group in each of the seven workshops was audio-recorded in order to assess how the students responded to the materials and what they learned from them. As the workshops took between one and a half and two hours, we obtained 720 min of recordings which were transcribed. The analysis revealed several ‘learning episodes’ in each recording. We use the term ‘learning episode’ for those instances when the utterances revealed that the students, through the text analysis, had understood something that they had not known before. Here, we provide a couple of extracts from the group discussions as examples. Example 1. Pharmacy students analysing the structure of scientific reports.In this example, five students were comparing the structure of six reports (three of them are shown in Table 2). S1: And there is a difference between these and this. The moment you look at this one, the 71, you can see that there is a lot of organisation and skills the student has and this one is far too lengthy, the 52, he should have pulled things together. S2: Yeah just a list a list of experiments.The group members agreed that the low scoring report had a ’totally fragmented’ (S3) structure. They came to the conclusion that
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S2: what you need in the report is Introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, conclusion, don’t launch into hundreds of experiments.The learning episode in this example occurred through the comparison between the structures of high and low scoring reports which helped the students identify the sections needed in a report, and notice that ‘lists’ should be avoided. Example 2. Applied Linguistic students analysing introductions.These extracts are from the discussion of four students about the Introduction of a low scoring assignment (see Table 4). The first is concerned with Comment 1 which raised awareness of a problem in the student’s own writing: S1: ‘Goes directly to outlining what is going to be done in the assignment, without providing any intellectual or social context.’ That’s exactly my problem. I must talk about some background first.The second extract relates to Comment 4 in the same exemplar; it demonstrates how students’ understanding develops through the comments as well as through their discussion: S2: I am not sure about point 4 ‘.gives no forward map to guide the reader in relation to the rest of the assignment’. But I think it’s provided already in the beginning when it said: ’I am going to investigate the different goals of English users.’ S1: But I think the important point is it should be at the end of the Introduction? The problem here is not that there is no map but that the map is spread all over the Introduction.In the following joint construction phase, S1’s text was changed according to what the group had learned from the materials on Introductions. This is shown in the next section. 5.3. Analysis of amendments in student texts As explained in Section 4.5, the students worked jointly on extracts of their own work in the joint construction phase to make improvements if necessary. As the group worked on electronic versions, any amendments were recorded by the function ‘Track Changes’, and could subsequently be analysed in relation to the preceding discussion. Appendix 2 shows the changes made to the Introduction of S1, following the discussion reported in extracts in the previous section (Example 2). In S1’s original text, the outline of the paper (‘In the following paper I am going to discuss how. First of all I am going to define.. Next I am going to describe.’) was presented at the beginning, preceded only by a very short introductory paragraph. This outline was deleted by the group; instead a longer paragraph was inserted which explains, with reference to relevant literature, the concept that forms the topic of the assignment. A more detailed outline is then provided at the end of the revised Introduction. This revision was a direct result of the students’ newly acquired understanding of the moves required in Introductions. 5.4. Evaluation e summary The evaluation carried out so far was concerned with the immediate impact of the instructional approach and included only the deconstruction and joint construction phases of the teaching/learning cycle. It showed the participants’ appreciation of the instructional method, as well as numerous instances of how students’ understanding of features and moves in academic texts was developed. However, as mentioned earlier, an evaluation of the long-term impact of the instructional approach still needs to be carried out, which assesses whether students applied what they learned from the materials to subsequent pieces of writing. For this evaluation, we plan to carry out a series of interviews with workshop participants after they have written further assignments and received feedback on them. 6. From text to corpus Thus far we have focused on materials which will help students to understand the overall structure of texts within key disciplinary genres and on how major moves within these texts are realised. The next stage focuses on
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the exploitation of disciplinary corpora for the development of linguistic knowledge and skills at the level of wording. In this second phase we are drawing on the same discipline-specific corpora which we have used for the textoriented teaching materials. However, as we shift our focus from text to corpus, we are making a fuller use of the corpus resource in order to enhance students’ understanding of the use of lexis and grammar in the genres they have to write. In this process we are drawing on the ‘Kibbitzers’ model (Johns, 1997), research into citational practices (Thompson and Tribble, 2001), evaluation in text (Hunston and Thompson, 2000), and lexical bundles (Biber, 2006; Ward, 2007; Hyland, 2008). Within the scope of this article, we can only give two examples of the use of the AWC for writing instruction. The first example is the analysis of lexical bundles. Hyland (2008) has shown how an analysis of lexical bundles can be used to distinguish between expert and apprentice writing as well as texts produced within disciplinary settings. Hyland categorises lexical bundles by research -, text, or participant-orientation; this framework, along with an explanation of these categories, is presented in Appendix 3. Lexical bundles are used in our project in two ways; first to raise students’ awareness of the strong contrasts between the rhetorical requirements of different disciplines, and second to show how this variation is realised at the level of wording. As an example, using Hyland’s categories for the analysis of the most frequent lexical 4-word bundles in the AWC provides a striking difference in the orientation and emphasis of writing between Applied Linguistics and Pharmacy. For instance, as can be seen in Table 5, writers in Applied Linguistics are more strongly concerned with the framing of argument (text orientation) and managing the engagement of the reader (participant orientation). By contrast, the texts in the Pharmacy corpus show a much greater concern with quantification (research orientation). By exposing students to practices in other disciplinary areas, we find that they gain a fuller understanding of how meanings are instantiated within their own fields, and why these contrasts matter in the development and transmission of disciplinary knowledge. By reviewing the most frequently used bundles which realise core functions within the disciplinary area, students are enabled to critique their own texts and are provided with a resource bank which they can draw on in future writing. Table 6 shows the most frequent bundles of framing in Applied Linguistics, and of quantification in Pharmacy. The second example of the use of the AWC follows the ‘Kibbitzers’ model developed by Johns (1997). In the light of evidence from feedback to students on their own writing, they can be given access to edited concordances or collocate tables from the relevant discipline- and genre-specific corpus and use these to review how they might better word a particular function. Thus, if a student is having problems with the contrast between the ways in which e.g. claim, believe, hold, and consider are used in Applied Linguistics, it is an easy task to prepare a concordance of examples which can then provide the starting point for a discussion of how these words are used in their disciplinary contexts (see Table 7). 7. Conclusion: current resources, future plans Although it requires time and resources to develop this kind of writing courses within disciplines, the proposed approach offers a realistic and sustainable way of providing focused, discipline-specific writing instruction to students across all levels in higher education. Unlike other models, it distributes responsibility in a reasonable and feasible way between writing and subject experts, and, through the involvement of subject experts, it ensures the authenticity and subject-specificity of the instruction. The involvement of the writing expert ensures that not too much demand is placed on the subject experts, particularly when it comes to linguistic issues. We would argue, therefore, that Phase 1 of our approach, based on a set of exemplar texts collected by the subject tutor and developed into learning resources by writing experts, could be fairly easily implemented across a wide range of disciplines and institutions, once a more comprehensive evaluation has established that the instructional approach does indeed lead to improvements in students’ writing. Phase 2, corpus informed materials for linguistic extension work may be less easy to develop, as it requires the compilation of corpora and some knowledge in corpus analysis, but, we would hold, is still very valuable. The development of both types of materials will constitute a worthwhile long term investment for university programmes, as they can be used for many cohorts of students, and will, therefore, have a good level of sustainability.
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Appendix 1. Extract of evaluation questionnaire
Appendix 2. Changes made to Introduction in Joint Construction Phase
Appendix 3. Hyland’s classification of lexical bundles Research-oriented: help writers to structure their activities and experiences of the real world. Types: Location e indicating time and place (e.g. at the beginning of, at the same time) Procedure (e.g. the use of, the role of) Quantification (e.g. the magnitude of the, a wide range of) Description (e.g. the structure of the, the size of the); Topic e related to the field of research (e.g. the currency board system).
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Text-oriented: concerned with the organisation of the text and the meaning of its elements as a message or argument. Types: Transition signals e establishing additive or contrastive links between elements (e.g. on the other hand, in addition to) Resultative signals e mark inferential or causative relations between elements (e.g. as a result of, it was found that) Structuring signals e text-reflexive markers which organise discourse and direct reader elsewhere in text (e.g. in the present study, in the next section) Framing signals e situating arguments by specifying limiting conditions (e.g. in the case of, with respect to) Participant-oriented: focused on the writer or reader of the text. Types: Stance features e convey writer’s attitudes and evaluations (e.g. are likely to be, may be due to) Engagement features e address readers directly (it should be noted that, as can be seen) References Bawarshi, A.S., Reiff, M.J., 2010. Genre: an Introduction To History, Theory, Research, And Pedagogy. Parlor Press and the WAC Clearinghouse, West Lafayette, Indiana. Benesch, S., 2001. Critical English for Academic Purposes. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ. Biber, D., 2006. University Language: a Corpus-based Study of Spoken and Written Registers. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia. Charles, M., 2003. ‘This mystery...’: a corpus-based study of the use of nouns to construct stance in theses from two contrasting disciplines. J. English Acad. Purposes 2, 313e316. Charles, M., 2007. Reconciling top-down and bottom-up approaches to graduate writing: using a corpus to teach rhetorical functions. J. English Acad. Purposes 6, 289e302. Coffin, C., Donohue, J., 2012. Academic Literacies and systemic functional linguistics: How do they relate? J. English Acad. Purposes 11, 64e75. Dias, P., 1994. Initiating students into genres of discipline-based reading and writing. In: Freedman, A., Medway, P. (Eds.), Genre and the New Rhetoric. Taylor & Francis, London, pp. 191e210. Dudley-Evans, T., 2001. English for specific purposes. In: Carter, R., Nunan, D. (Eds.), The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 131e136. Freedman, A., Medway, P. (Eds.), 1994. Genre and the New Rhetoric. Taylor & Francis, London. Gardner, S., Holmes, J., 2010. From section headings to assignment macrostructures in undergraduate student writing. In: Swain, E. (Ed.), Thresholds and Potentialities of Systemic Functional Linguistics: Multilingual, Multimodal and Other Specialised Discourses. EUT Edizioni Universita` di Trieste, Trieste, pp. 268e283 (. http://etabeta.univ.trieste.it/dspace/bitstream/10077/3652/1/Gardner%20Holmes%20Thresholds. pdf (accessed 11.04.12.). Hopkins, A., Dudley-Evans, T., 1988. A genre-based investigation of the discussion sections in articles and dissertations. English Specif. Purposes 7 (2), 113e121. Hunston, S., Thompson, G., 2000. Evaluation in Text. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hyland, K., 2002. Specificity revisited: how far should we go now? English Specif. Purposes 21, 385e395. Hyland, K., 2000. Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing. Longman, Harlow. Hyland, K., 2008. Academic clusters: text patterning in published and postgraduate writing. Int. J. Appl. Linguistics 18 (1), 41e62. Hyland, K., Tse, P., 2007. Is there an “Academic Vocabulary”? TESOL Q. 41 (2), 235e253. Hyon, S., 1996. Genre in three traditions: Implications for ESL. TESOL Q. 30 (4), 693e722. Ivanic, R., Lea, M., 2006. New contexts, new challenges: the teaching of writing in UK higher education. In: Ganobcsik-Williams, L. (Ed.), Teaching Academic Writing in UK Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 6e15. Johns, T., 1997. Kibbitzing one-to-Ones. In: Web Version of Notes for Presentation at BALEAP Meeting on Academic Writing, University of Reading, 29th November 1997. materials presented at. http://www.lexically.net/TimJohns/index.html. http://micusp.elicorpora.info/micuspkibbitzers (accessed 25.11.12.). Lea, M., Street, B., 1998. Student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach. Stud. Higher Educ. 23 (2), 157e172. Lee, D., Swales, J., 2006. A corpus-based EAP course for NNS doctoral students: moving from available specialized corpora to self-compiled corpora. English Specif. Purposes 25 (1), 56e75. Li, Y., Flowerdew, J., 2007. Shaping Chinese novice scientists’ manuscripts for publication. J. Second Lang. Writing 16, 100e117. Lillis, T.M., Scott, M., 2007. Defining Academic Literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy. J. Appl. Linguistics 4 (1), 5e32.
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Mahboob, A., Dreyfus, S., Humphrey, S., Martin, J.R., 2012. Appliable linguistics and english language teaching: the scaffolding literacy in adult and tertiary environments (SLATE) project. In: Mahboob, A., Knight, N. (Eds.), Appliable Linguistics. Continuum, London, pp. 25e43. Martin, J.R., 1993. A contextual theory of language. In: Cope, B., Kalantzis, M. (Eds.), The Powers of Literacy. A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing. The Falmer Press, London. Martin, J.R., 2000. Design and practice: enacting functional linguistics. Annu. Rev. Appl. Linguistics 20, 116e126. Mitchell, S., Evison, A., 2006. Exploiting the potential of writing for educational change at queen mary, University of London. In: GanobcsikWilliams, L. (Ed.), Teaching Academic Writing in UK Higher Education Basingstoke. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 68e84. Nesi, H., Gardner, S., 2012. Genres across the Disciplines: Student Writing in Higher Education. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Ro¨mer, U., 2011. Corpus research applications in second language teaching. Annu. Rev. Appl. Linguistics 31, 205e225. Rothery, J., 1996. Making changes: developing an educational linguistics. In: Hasan, R., Williams, G. (Eds.), Literacy in Society. Longman, London, pp. 86e123. Swales, J.M., Feak, C.B., 1994a. Academic Writing for Graduate Students. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Swales, J.M., Feak, C.B., 1994b. Academic Writing for Graduate Students, 2nd Edition. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Swales, J.M., Feak, C.B., 2002. Academic Writing for Graduate Students 3rd Edition. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Swales, J.M., 1981. Aspects of Articles Introductions (Aston ESP Research Reports No. 1). University of Aston, Birmingham. Swales, J.M., 1990. Genre Analysis. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Thompson, P., Tribble, C., 2001. Looking at citations: using corpora in english for academic purposes. Lang. Learn. Technol. 5 (3), 91e105. Tribble, C., 2010. A genre-based approach to developing materials for writing. In: Harwood, N. (Ed.), English Language Teaching Materials. Cambridge University, Cambridge, pp. 157e178. Ward, J., 2007. Collocation and technicality in EAP engineering. J. English Acad. Purposes 6, 18e35. Wingate, U., 2006. Doing away with study skills. Teach. Higher Educ. 11 (4), 457e465. Wingate, U., Tribble, C., 2012. The best of both worlds? Towards an English for academic Purposes/Academic Literacies writing pedagogy. Stud. High. Educ.. Woodward-Kron, R., 2007. Negotiating meanings and scaffolding learning: writing support for non-English speaking background postgraduate students. Higher Educ. Res. Dev. 26 (3), 253e268.
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From text to corpus e A genre-based approach to academic literacy instruction Chris Tribble, Ursula Wingate* King’s College London, Education & Professional Studies, Franklin-Wilkins Building, Waterloo Road, London SE1 9NH, United Kingdom Received 3 May 2012; accepted 15 March 2013 Available online 18 April 2013
Abstract Widening participation in Higher Education and a dramatic increase in the recruitment of overseas students has led to an urgent need for academic institutions to recognise the literacy demands they make of their students, and to respond to these students’ learning needs. In this paper we report on the first phase of a discipline-specific academic writing project at King’s College London. The instructional approach takes as its starting point the assessed academic genres which students have to write. Working within the tradition of genre based approaches to academic writing instruction, we have used the KCL Apprentice Writing Corpus to provide a databank of exemplars. These texts, along with grading and feedback information from academic departments, and input from disciplinary specialists, have provided the basis for discipline-specific writing courses which focus on strategically important assessed disciplinary genres (Critical Assignments in Applied Linguistics, and Laboratory Reports in Pharmacy). In this paper we discuss issues in corpus compilation, the selection of exemplars, and the rationale which has informed the development of the teaching resources. We also provide examples from the workshops offered as part of the courses. The paper concludes with a brief account of the evaluation of the courses, and a discussion of how corpus informed materials are being developed to extend the project in its second phase. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Academic literacies; Academic writing; Corpus; Disciplinary discourse; Genre; EAP; Writing instruction
1. Introduction In the last few decades, internationalisation and widening participation in Western higher education systems have led to increasing diversity in the social, ethnic and linguistic composition of student populations. As a result, the extent to which students are prepared for the literacy requirements of the university varies considerably, and researchers such as Lea and Street (1998) and Ivanic and Lea (2006) have found that the support offered by universities in the UK tends to be inadequate as it often caters exclusively for a narrow set of target groups, neglecting the fact that students from all backgrounds are novices in the discourses and conventions of their chosen academic disciplines. In such a context, there is a need for truly inclusive approaches to teaching academic writing. We have argued elsewhere (Wingate and Tribble, 2012) for the need to develop ‘mainstream’ instructional approaches to teaching academic literacy; approaches that are embedded into disciplinary curricula and accessible to all * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ44 (0)20 7836 3536. E-mail address: [email protected] (U. Wingate). 0346-251X/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2013.03.001
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students. In the same paper, we have also argued that such approaches should combine the best aspects of existing theories and pedagogies, and should target all students rather than specific learner groups. In this present paper we propose a model for writing instruction which draws on genre informed approaches to the analysis and explicit teaching of discipline-specific writing (e.g. Swales, 1990; Martin, 1993, 2000). This genre model takes into account theories that are oriented towards social practices such as Academic Literacies (e.g. Lillis and Scott, 2007) and Critical EAP (e.g. Benesch, 2001, by including opportunities for students to consider literacy practices, institutional power relations, and social roles in their analyses of disciplinary genres. However, the model stands in contrast to Academic Literacies as it: a) calls for explicit attention to textual exemplars from genres which are strategically important for students, and a) makes use of Vygotskian notions of scaffolding in which there is a need for collaboration between writing and subject experts and apprentice writers themselves, and in which a cycle of deconstruction, joint construction and independent construction is followed (Rothery, 1996). The relative novelty of the approach we are proposing lies in its initial focus on a detailed analysis of small sets of texts from disciplinarily specific assessed student genres as the basis for the development of instructional materials, and the later use of discipline-specific corpora of student writing for the development of supplementary materials. In this way we hope to avoid the de-contextualisation which Martin points to in relation to corpus studies ‘that submerge unfolding texture in processes of counting and averaging that look for trends across texts rather than contingencies within them’ (Martin, 2004 cited in Coffin and Donohue, 2012: 69). This explains the title for our paper e From text to corpus. As part of an institutionally funded project, we have collaborated with subject specialists in the disciplines of Applied Linguistics and Pharmacy at King’s College London, and in this paper, we offer examples of developing, implementing and evaluating the approach in these disciplines. 2. Background 2.1. Current approaches to teaching academic writing Using the text-focused to writer-focused continuum proposed by Coffin and Donohue (2012), current approaches to teaching academic literacy can be broadly categorised into those which have texts as the starting point for analysis and instructional materials, i.e. English for Specific/Academic Purposes (ESP/EAP) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and those which give a primary emphasis to writers and have a socio-contextual focus, namely New Rhetoric, Academic Literacies and Critical EAP. The contrasts and overlaps between these traditions have been discussed elsewhere (Hyon, 1996; Bawarshi and Reiff, 2010; Coffin and Donohue, 2012). Within the scope of this paper, we would claim that, as yet, none of these approaches has made sufficient impact in terms of offering a mainstream pedagogy targeted at students from all backgrounds. The reason for this lack of impact may be that each tradition has been developed in response to the needs of specific student populations, and is to some extent still limited to these contexts. Thus current ESP/EAP, arising from the teaching of English as a Foreign Language, has had a focus on L2 students, while SFL, originally developed for empowering students in the Australian school and adult education sectors, has only recently found some application to higher education (e.g. Woodward-Kron, 2007; Mahboob et al., 2012), and has not, as yet, made much impact outside Australia. The traditions that focus on social practices surrounding writing practices do not offer strong pedagogical models, either because they hold that explicit teaching is not effective, as in the case of New Rhetoric (e.g. Dias, 1994; Freedman and Medway, 1994), or, as in the case of Academic Literacies, the emphasis has been on research rather than pedagogy (Lillis and Scott, 2007). These writer oriented traditions are also constrained by their particular contexts (the Northern American college composition classes are the context for New Rhetoric, whilst the focus of Academic Literacies has been largely on ‘non-traditional’ students in UK universities) and have not been concerned with offering an inclusive literacy pedagogy. The absence of a ‘mainstream’ pedagogy that would include all students enrolled in a study programme is obvious in the typical provision of academic literacy support in UK universities which broadly consists of two approaches. The first is targeted exclusively at non-native speakers of English, i.e. overseas and EU students. For this group, EAP courses are available, usually in English Language Centres. For the second group, the so called ‘home students’ (because they gained their entry qualifications in the UK and are therefore perceived as native speakers, even if they
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come from an ethnic minority background) there is usually only remedial provision in the form of study skills courses (Wingate, 2006). Both approaches offer courses to students from all disciplines, and therefore cannot provide much insight into discipline-specific epistemologies and discourses. Targeting mainly students who are perceived as having difficulty with academic English, this provision represents a ‘deficit model’ of writing instruction. This model stems from the previous elite system in which fewer students needed support (Ivanic and Lea, 2006). This model is unsuitable for contemporary universities where the majority of students, coming from diverse backgrounds, have not specifically prepared for the literacy demands of their discipline; however, the provision has not changed in many institutions. Its inadequacy has led to a situation in which many students struggle with academic literacy, and are subject to a deficit discourse of falling standards which is prominent in mass media (e.g. Mitchell and Evinson, 2006). Although the need to move away from the deficit model has been frequently stressed, there are controversies over the nature of alternative approaches, particularly over the use of texts in teaching academic writing. 2.2. Why use texts in academic writing instruction? Within genre (EAP, SFL) approaches to writing instruction, texts are seen as instantiations of genres that belong to specific academic discourse communities (e.g. Swales, 1990; Hyland, 2002). From this perspective the notion of general EAP instruction is problematic, as it can do little to help students to understand and control the genres that are required for participation in specific disciplinary settings. Thus, both EAP and SFL researchers have been concerned with the analysis of linguistic and contextual characteristics of text genres, and see the need to develop effective pedagogies for explicitly teaching genres to L2 students (e.g. Hyland, 2002; Mahboob et al., 2012). However, these approaches have been accused by the UK-based Academic Literacies movement of being ‘textbiased’, ‘prescriptive’ and ‘normative’ (e.g. Lillis and Scott, 2007). Academic Literacies, as well as Critical EAP proponents, have demanded more attention to practices surrounding student writing, as well as opportunities for students to critique and challenge institutional practices and power relations. However, along with EAP and SFL scholars and practitioners, we are convinced that literacy instruction must take texts as the starting point, as reading and writing texts in unfamiliar genres is the most pressing problem students face in a university system where the written text is the main assessment tool (Wingate and Tribble, 2012). Our ‘mainstream’ approach, therefore, focuses on the development of academic writing in the first instance, and attempts to respond to the needs of all novices in discipline-specific academic writing, regardless of whether they are native or non-native speakers of English. Furthermore, it aims to help students extend their writing capacities through the exploration of the student genres that are required at their level of study e whether initial or advanced. The majority of earlier genre-based accounts of academic writing have focused on published texts such as research articles (Swales, 1990; Hyland, 2000), and have demonstrated how writing practices vary across disciplines. However, these ‘expert’ texts are not representative of the assessed genres that undergraduate and graduate students have to write, and therefore it has been difficult to use the findings from this research directly for the development of pedagogic materials. An exception to this practice is that of Swales and Feak (1994a, b, 2002) who have drawn on a wider range of text sources in order to support writing development. By using exemplar texts from assessed genres of academic writing such as ‘data commentary’, ‘summary’ and ‘research paper’, and including tutor comments on more or less successful instances, their work can be seen as a precursor of the approach which we present in this paper. However, as their project has the aim meeting the needs of students across a very wide range of disciplines, there are significant differences between their approach and our discipline-specific strategy. More recent work drawing on corpora of student writing, both through the direct use of student texts as learning resources (Charles, 2003, 2007; Lee and Swales, 2006), and wide-ranging accounts of disciplinary language variation (Biber, 2006; Nesi and Gardner, 2012), has started to map out ways in which apprentice writers can work towards controlling the genres that they need to produce at university. Our intention is to build on this work. 2.3. Pedagogical aspects An important feature of our model is the collaboration between writing and subject specialists. A ‘systemized partnership between language professionals and subject professionals’ (Li and Flowerdew, 2007, p. 100) has been advocated by previous researchers (e.g. Dudley-Evans, 2001), and has been used in some instructional contexts. In the project we report here, this collaboration is essential. In the first place, it is needed to get access to students’ texts and
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to establish an account of successful and less successful practice. More importantly, however, it encourages the integration of literacy instruction into the pedagogic praxis of the discipline itself, with subject specialists giving writing specialists the information and insights required for the development of instructional resources, and also participating in the writing workshops. In these workshops, they not only clarify discipline-specific questions, but more importantly, their presence signals to students that literacy is an essential part of the discipline. In the discipline-specific writing workshops that are part of our project, we used the learning and teaching cycle that was developed in SFL approaches to writing instruction (Rothery, 1996). The details are explained in Section 4.3, and some examples from the workshops are given in Section 4.4. 2.4. Previous applications of corpora in writing instruction As mentioned earlier, EAP has been one of the areas where corpora have been widely drawn on for pedagogic purposes (Ro¨mer, 2011). However, to date, the majority of these applications have focused on either what a corpus can tell us about disciplinary writing, or how students can interrogate a corpus to enhance their awareness of aspects of academic writing that are relevant to their writing needs. Thus, these studies have offered accounts of for instance contrasts between the citational practices of apprentice writers and those of published writers (Thompson and Tribble, 2001); remedial grammar instruction using published and apprentice texts (Lee and Swales, 2006); the enhancement of apprentice writers’ control of rhetorical functions through the study of mini-corpora of published texts (Charles, 2007) and the differentiation between expert published and apprentice writing through the analysis of lexical bundles (Hyland, 2008). While recent major studies have added significantly to our understanding of the genres that learners need to control (Biber, 2006; Nesi and Gardner, 2012), corpus developers and writing instructors have unsurprisingly tended to see the direction of travel from research to application as moving from corpus to text, rather than in the opposite direction. Our intention in developing an Apprentice Writing Corpus (AWC) at King’s College is different, as, in the first instance, we wish to use the corpus as an exemplar (and counter-examplar) data-base, drawing on the corpus qua corpus in a second stage of programme development. At the time of writing we have completed Phase 1 of this project, with Phase 2 ongoing. In the following sections we will briefly discuss the compilation of the AWC and the data that we are currently drawing on for materials development. We will then present the rationale which has informed materials development, and the stages which have been involved in producing the currently available sets of teaching/learning resources. After discussing the initial evaluation of Phase 1, we will provide some examples of the corpus based supplementary materials which are still under development. 3. Corpus resources 3.1. Which text genres? Corpus based research into variation across disciplinary texts has clearly demonstrated the problems that are inherent in any assumption of the existence of a general academic register (Hyland, 2000; Biber, 2006), a general academic vocabulary (Hyland & Tse, 2007), or a single academic style appropriate to all disciplines (Nesi and Gardner, 2012). With this in mind, we adopted an approach which focuses on strategically important genres in those disciplines we were able to include in the KCL project (initially Applied Linguistics and Pharmacy, with Management and History slated for subsequent development). Although we would have liked to make use of existing corpus resources, we found that an absence of relevant texts, or restrictions on their use, made none of the major corpora which contain significant amounts of academic writing particularly useful. The limitations of each are summarised in Table 1. We decided, therefore, to work with faculty members to identify genre categories which present specific challenges to students, and which have high value in each of the programmes included in our project. In the first instance, we focused on student writing in the two disciplines of Applied Linguistics, and Pharmacy. Drawing on the ‘genre family’ categories outlined in Nesi and Gardner (2012), the MA Applied Linguistics texts (course assignments and dissertations) can be seen as fitting in to the Essay and Research Report families, the MSc in Pharmacy texts (laboratory reports) are members of Methodology Recount. Based on our own earlier experience in supporting dissertation writing on MA programmes, we also decided to include both high scoring and low scoring text instances in the corpus. This decision was based on feedback from these programmes where students had commented on the usefulness of seeing what goes wrong, as well as working with examples of good practice.
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Table 1 EAP corpora of academic writing. BNC (British National Corpus) MICUSP (Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers) BAWE (British Academic Written English)
100 Million words of written and spoken text, but only 5 chemistry texts/13 linguistics texts, all from book or journal sources 830 ‘A’ grade papers from a range of disciplines across four academic divisions (Humanities and Arts, Social Sciences, Biological and Health Sciences, Physical Sciences), but no pharmacy or linguistics texts No pharmacy, but 89 chemistry papers (high scoring/across BA/Masters)/115 linguistics scripts (high scoring/across BA/Masters) e but BAWE data restricted; cannot be used for teaching materials
3.2. Building the corpus In order to develop the AWC we needed to have approval from the College Research Ethics Committee and also to have the agreement of students to include their texts in the corpus. We then used an internet survey system circulated to all students on the Applied Linguistics and Pharmacy programmes inviting them to participate in the project by contributing their texts. Agreement was indicated by students agreeing to complete a brief survey. This included a request for their student number, family name and first name (essential for tracking texts prior to entering in the data base). Access to student texts was simplified by the fact that programmes at King’s College now require electronic submission (usually through the plagiarism checker Turnitin), although the process of weeding out which texts could be used and which texts were not available has proved to be time consuming. Once we had identified those texts for which we had permission, additional information, along with the grade that the texts had been awarded could then be added to in the form of a Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) compliant header.1 The texts were then anonymised. As we have permission from students to collect all the texts that they submit for assessment during their studies, we have the potential to carry out both synchronic studies of populations and diachronic studies of individual writers. To date, AWC contains the following data: MSc Pharmacy: 264 texts/746,038 words (laboratory reports) MA ELT and Applied Linguistics: 199 texts/849,239 words (course assignments and dissertations). 4. Developing the writing course e examples from Applied Linguistics and Pharmacy Our project consists of two distinct phases; the first is concerned with text analysis and the development of materials that help students to understand and control the discursive conventions of the genres they have to write. For this phase, a smaller set of exemplar texts is sufficient. The second phase aims to develop extension materials for students who need support with linguistic aspects of writing; these materials, as will be shown later, require corpus analysis. In this section we discuss the approach that we have taken to the first phase. We would propose that even if an extensive corpus of assessed student texts is not available, the strategy outlined here provides a sufficient basis for the development of useful resources to enhance disciplinary writing. However, as we will demonstrate towards the end of this paper, the value of disciplinespecific corpora cannot be underestimated when it comes to the development of linguistic skills at the level of wording. 4.1. Identifying exemplars As we had grades for each of the assignments in our corpus, it was possible to identify high and low scoring text examples. In the case of Applied Linguistics, a shortlist of high scoring and low scoring scripts was drawn up and, through discussion with the disciplinary specialists, a working set of exemplar texts was established. The one major problem that we had in developing the Pharmacy materials was that there was a shortage of low scoring scripts as less successful students were unwilling to contribute their texts. This meant that we had to rely on a very small sample of low scoring scripts in the development of Pharmacy materials. 1
http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml
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4.2. Genre analysis In order to prepare teaching materials, we decided to restrict our analysis to the exemplar texts identified by the subject specialists. These texts provided sufficient data to raise an overall awareness of discourse requirements of the discipline, which was the main aim in Phase 1. The analysis focused on moves across the texts, following the EAP tradition of moves analysis (e.g. Swales, 1981; Hopkins and Dudley-Evans, 1988). The process was facilitated by making full use of whatever section heading information existed in the original word-processed document along the lines outlined in Gardner and Holmes (2010). An example of the move analyses of three Pharmacy laboratory reports, ranging from high scoring (grade 71), medium scoring (grade 60) and low scoring (grade 52) is given in Table 2. This example, used in the teaching materials for Pharmacy, demonstrates that the low scoring assignment (shown in the two columns to the right) does not present the ‘moves’ expected in the laboratory report, resulting in a lack of focus and a structure. Once moves were analysed it was possible to identify obligatory and optional elements, and, through discussion with disciplinary specialists, to develop a commentary which unpacked the “goodness” of the high scoring examples and the problematic aspects of those which scored poorly. This analysis has proved to be sufficient for the first round of materials development. A specific linguistic analysis combining systemic functional and corpus approaches is carried out in the second, corpus-focused, stage of materials development. 4.3. Materials development Materials development so far has involved: a) identifying those moves which are considered by disciplinary specialists to be strategically important and challenging for students b) selecting examples of these moves from the text data base Table 2 Move analysis of Pharmacy students’ ‘Optimisation reports’.
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c) developing a commentary on successful and less successful realisations of these moves within the genre d) formulating these as learning materials e) formulating introductory materials which contextualise the resources and explain the pedagogic approach. 4.4. Materials The materials were provided to students as printed resource manuals. For Applied Linguistics, the resource manuals contain text examples with commentaries for the following sections/chapters: Introduction, Discussing Literature, Presenting and Discussing Findings, Conclusion. For Pharmacy, the manuals include text examples with commentaries on the following sections of the scientific report: Introduction, Definitions and Descriptions, Describing the Experiment, Presenting Results, Discussion. Within the scope of this article, it is difficult to give a full sense of the materials. The brief extract in Table 3 (from a section on Introductions in Applied Linguistics) is offered as illustration of some of the essential features of the materials. As can be seen, the first examples provide comments on positive aspects of the discourse and moves required in Introductions. Following their reflection on the ‘desirable features’, students are then asked to analyse and provide their own comments on another text example. In this process, students make use of the labels and comments which have been applied in the earlier analysis. Next, they review Introductions in low scoring assignments such as the example shown in Table 4. The evaluation showed that being offered exemplars from low scoring assignments was highly appreciated by students. While it is useful to learn from good practice, sometimes it is even more useful to get a sense of what does not work. Table 3 Example from applied linguistics materials: introduction with commentary.
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Table 4 Introduction in low scoring assignment.
4.5. Pedagogic approach and implementation Our approach to writing pedagogy has been closely aligned to the SFL tradition and makes use of the teaching/ learning cycle proposed by Rothery (1996). The approach leads from scaffolded to independent learning. Scaffolded learning takes place in writing workshops and involves the deconstruction and joint instruction phases of the teaching/learning cycle. The writing workshops cover one or two parts of the target genre, for instance ‘Introductions’ or ‘Presenting and Discussing Research Findings’. Usually, two or three workshops are offered in a programme to all students, leaving them the choice to select the areas where they feel they need instruction. The workshops have the following format: (1) Deconstruction phase: this phase requires the critical analysis of exemplar texts from the perspective of what ‘job they have to do’, and which linguistic resources are needed to do the job (Tribble, 2010: 161). The participants work in small groups to analyse high and low scoring exemplars and their commentaries. They then reflect on learning points derived from this analysis and write up and share these observations. (2) Joint construction phase: participants were invited before the workshop to bring with them the electronic version of an extract of their current writing in the relevant part (i.e. Introduction). The group members work together to comment on and revise these extracts, informed by what they have learned in the deconstruction phase. Collaboration between writing and the subject tutors is essential in the deconstruction phase to provide the scaffolding students need to make sense of both the discursive and subject-related aspects of academic writing. Both tutors are present in the workshops to assist students, and our experience so far has shown that questions and discussion points arising from students’ work with the materials require specific advice concerning both writing issues as well as subject matter issues. The last phase of the teaching/learning cycle takes place outside the classroom: (3) Independent construction phase: after the workshops, participants go back to their own texts and make changes according to what they have learned in the workshops. So far, we have conducted seven workshops with a total of 112 participants in Applied Linguistics (59 participants) and Pharmacy (53 participants). The workshops were offered to all students in two postgraduate programmes
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Table 5 Disciplinary contrasts demonstrated through frequency of lexical bundles. Applied linguistics Orientation Research Topic Location Description Citation Quantification Procedure Text Framing Structuring Resultative Transition Participant Engagement Stance
per M 38 16 13 12 5 4 14 2 1 1 8 8
Pharmacy Orientation Research Quantification Topic Description Procedure Citation Location Text Resultative Framing Transition Participant Engagement Stance
per M 41 21 12 6 4 0 6 5 1
2 2
(Pharmacy and Applied Linguistics). For Pharmacy, a one-off three-hour workshop was conducted with three groups of students; in Applied Linguistics, two two-hour workshops were conducted with the cohorts of two consecutive years (2010/2011). Between 42 and 60 per cent of the programmes’ overall cohort participated, and no student group (for instance non-native speakers of English) was overrepresented. 5. Evaluation The evaluation of the instructional approach was carried out by (1) a questionnaire administered to participants immediately after each workshop, (2) the analysis of audio-recordings of the group discussions during the deconstruction and joint construction phases, and (3) the analysis of amendments students made to their own texts in the joint construction phase. These evaluation methods were useful to assess the immediate effect of the instructional approach, in terms of their perceptions as well as improved understanding of the target genres. For a more comprehensive evaluation, it would have been desirable to ask students to write pre- and post-assignments. However, as the workshops took place outside the timetabled curriculum, students had to find extra time to participate and could not be asked to take on additional writing tasks. 5.1. Questionnaire results The questionnaire required students to rate how useful they perceived different aspects of the material to be. 99 of 112 participants (49 from Pharmacy and 50 from Applied Linguistics) returned the questionnaire. Almost all Table 6 Framing and quantification bundles from the AWC. Applied linguistics
Pharmacy
Framing that there is a when it comes to as well as the in terms of the in the same way in addition to the on the basis of due to the fact in the sense that
Quantification the angle of repose uniformity of weight angle of repose and uniformity of capsule content the uniformity of capsule mean angle of repose bp limits for uniformity weight and content of
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respondents regarded the materials as very useful/useful for writing their next assignments. The main features of the materials, i.e. that they are based on student texts and offer a commentary, were rated equally highly (see the relevant questions and student responses in Appendix 1). The students were also asked to evaluate the individual sections of the materials, and to comment on the quality of the workshops. The responses showed that students appreciated the group work as well as the presence of the writing and subject tutors. Critical comments were concerned with the amount of text to read and the resulting time pressure. This critique occurred mainly in relation to workshops where more than one part of assignments/reports was covered. It will need to be addressed by either extending the length of the workshops or restricting the content. 5.2. Audio-recordings of group discussions One group in each of the seven workshops was audio-recorded in order to assess how the students responded to the materials and what they learned from them. As the workshops took between one and a half and two hours, we obtained 720 min of recordings which were transcribed. The analysis revealed several ‘learning episodes’ in each recording. We use the term ‘learning episode’ for those instances when the utterances revealed that the students, through the text analysis, had understood something that they had not known before. Here, we provide a couple of extracts from the group discussions as examples. Example 1. Pharmacy students analysing the structure of scientific reports.In this example, five students were comparing the structure of six reports (three of them are shown in Table 2). S1: And there is a difference between these and this. The moment you look at this one, the 71, you can see that there is a lot of organisation and skills the student has and this one is far too lengthy, the 52, he should have pulled things together. S2: Yeah just a list a list of experiments.The group members agreed that the low scoring report had a ’totally fragmented’ (S3) structure. They came to the conclusion that
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S2: what you need in the report is Introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, conclusion, don’t launch into hundreds of experiments.The learning episode in this example occurred through the comparison between the structures of high and low scoring reports which helped the students identify the sections needed in a report, and notice that ‘lists’ should be avoided. Example 2. Applied Linguistic students analysing introductions.These extracts are from the discussion of four students about the Introduction of a low scoring assignment (see Table 4). The first is concerned with Comment 1 which raised awareness of a problem in the student’s own writing: S1: ‘Goes directly to outlining what is going to be done in the assignment, without providing any intellectual or social context.’ That’s exactly my problem. I must talk about some background first.The second extract relates to Comment 4 in the same exemplar; it demonstrates how students’ understanding develops through the comments as well as through their discussion: S2: I am not sure about point 4 ‘.gives no forward map to guide the reader in relation to the rest of the assignment’. But I think it’s provided already in the beginning when it said: ’I am going to investigate the different goals of English users.’ S1: But I think the important point is it should be at the end of the Introduction? The problem here is not that there is no map but that the map is spread all over the Introduction.In the following joint construction phase, S1’s text was changed according to what the group had learned from the materials on Introductions. This is shown in the next section. 5.3. Analysis of amendments in student texts As explained in Section 4.5, the students worked jointly on extracts of their own work in the joint construction phase to make improvements if necessary. As the group worked on electronic versions, any amendments were recorded by the function ‘Track Changes’, and could subsequently be analysed in relation to the preceding discussion. Appendix 2 shows the changes made to the Introduction of S1, following the discussion reported in extracts in the previous section (Example 2). In S1’s original text, the outline of the paper (‘In the following paper I am going to discuss how. First of all I am going to define.. Next I am going to describe.’) was presented at the beginning, preceded only by a very short introductory paragraph. This outline was deleted by the group; instead a longer paragraph was inserted which explains, with reference to relevant literature, the concept that forms the topic of the assignment. A more detailed outline is then provided at the end of the revised Introduction. This revision was a direct result of the students’ newly acquired understanding of the moves required in Introductions. 5.4. Evaluation e summary The evaluation carried out so far was concerned with the immediate impact of the instructional approach and included only the deconstruction and joint construction phases of the teaching/learning cycle. It showed the participants’ appreciation of the instructional method, as well as numerous instances of how students’ understanding of features and moves in academic texts was developed. However, as mentioned earlier, an evaluation of the long-term impact of the instructional approach still needs to be carried out, which assesses whether students applied what they learned from the materials to subsequent pieces of writing. For this evaluation, we plan to carry out a series of interviews with workshop participants after they have written further assignments and received feedback on them. 6. From text to corpus Thus far we have focused on materials which will help students to understand the overall structure of texts within key disciplinary genres and on how major moves within these texts are realised. The next stage focuses on
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the exploitation of disciplinary corpora for the development of linguistic knowledge and skills at the level of wording. In this second phase we are drawing on the same discipline-specific corpora which we have used for the textoriented teaching materials. However, as we shift our focus from text to corpus, we are making a fuller use of the corpus resource in order to enhance students’ understanding of the use of lexis and grammar in the genres they have to write. In this process we are drawing on the ‘Kibbitzers’ model (Johns, 1997), research into citational practices (Thompson and Tribble, 2001), evaluation in text (Hunston and Thompson, 2000), and lexical bundles (Biber, 2006; Ward, 2007; Hyland, 2008). Within the scope of this article, we can only give two examples of the use of the AWC for writing instruction. The first example is the analysis of lexical bundles. Hyland (2008) has shown how an analysis of lexical bundles can be used to distinguish between expert and apprentice writing as well as texts produced within disciplinary settings. Hyland categorises lexical bundles by research -, text, or participant-orientation; this framework, along with an explanation of these categories, is presented in Appendix 3. Lexical bundles are used in our project in two ways; first to raise students’ awareness of the strong contrasts between the rhetorical requirements of different disciplines, and second to show how this variation is realised at the level of wording. As an example, using Hyland’s categories for the analysis of the most frequent lexical 4-word bundles in the AWC provides a striking difference in the orientation and emphasis of writing between Applied Linguistics and Pharmacy. For instance, as can be seen in Table 5, writers in Applied Linguistics are more strongly concerned with the framing of argument (text orientation) and managing the engagement of the reader (participant orientation). By contrast, the texts in the Pharmacy corpus show a much greater concern with quantification (research orientation). By exposing students to practices in other disciplinary areas, we find that they gain a fuller understanding of how meanings are instantiated within their own fields, and why these contrasts matter in the development and transmission of disciplinary knowledge. By reviewing the most frequently used bundles which realise core functions within the disciplinary area, students are enabled to critique their own texts and are provided with a resource bank which they can draw on in future writing. Table 6 shows the most frequent bundles of framing in Applied Linguistics, and of quantification in Pharmacy. The second example of the use of the AWC follows the ‘Kibbitzers’ model developed by Johns (1997). In the light of evidence from feedback to students on their own writing, they can be given access to edited concordances or collocate tables from the relevant discipline- and genre-specific corpus and use these to review how they might better word a particular function. Thus, if a student is having problems with the contrast between the ways in which e.g. claim, believe, hold, and consider are used in Applied Linguistics, it is an easy task to prepare a concordance of examples which can then provide the starting point for a discussion of how these words are used in their disciplinary contexts (see Table 7). 7. Conclusion: current resources, future plans Although it requires time and resources to develop this kind of writing courses within disciplines, the proposed approach offers a realistic and sustainable way of providing focused, discipline-specific writing instruction to students across all levels in higher education. Unlike other models, it distributes responsibility in a reasonable and feasible way between writing and subject experts, and, through the involvement of subject experts, it ensures the authenticity and subject-specificity of the instruction. The involvement of the writing expert ensures that not too much demand is placed on the subject experts, particularly when it comes to linguistic issues. We would argue, therefore, that Phase 1 of our approach, based on a set of exemplar texts collected by the subject tutor and developed into learning resources by writing experts, could be fairly easily implemented across a wide range of disciplines and institutions, once a more comprehensive evaluation has established that the instructional approach does indeed lead to improvements in students’ writing. Phase 2, corpus informed materials for linguistic extension work may be less easy to develop, as it requires the compilation of corpora and some knowledge in corpus analysis, but, we would hold, is still very valuable. The development of both types of materials will constitute a worthwhile long term investment for university programmes, as they can be used for many cohorts of students, and will, therefore, have a good level of sustainability.
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Appendix 1. Extract of evaluation questionnaire
Appendix 2. Changes made to Introduction in Joint Construction Phase
Appendix 3. Hyland’s classification of lexical bundles Research-oriented: help writers to structure their activities and experiences of the real world. Types: Location e indicating time and place (e.g. at the beginning of, at the same time) Procedure (e.g. the use of, the role of) Quantification (e.g. the magnitude of the, a wide range of) Description (e.g. the structure of the, the size of the); Topic e related to the field of research (e.g. the currency board system).
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Text-oriented: concerned with the organisation of the text and the meaning of its elements as a message or argument. Types: Transition signals e establishing additive or contrastive links between elements (e.g. on the other hand, in addition to) Resultative signals e mark inferential or causative relations between elements (e.g. as a result of, it was found that) Structuring signals e text-reflexive markers which organise discourse and direct reader elsewhere in text (e.g. in the present study, in the next section) Framing signals e situating arguments by specifying limiting conditions (e.g. in the case of, with respect to) Participant-oriented: focused on the writer or reader of the text. Types: Stance features e convey writer’s attitudes and evaluations (e.g. are likely to be, may be due to) Engagement features e address readers directly (it should be noted that, as can be seen) References Bawarshi, A.S., Reiff, M.J., 2010. Genre: an Introduction To History, Theory, Research, And Pedagogy. Parlor Press and the WAC Clearinghouse, West Lafayette, Indiana. Benesch, S., 2001. Critical English for Academic Purposes. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ. Biber, D., 2006. University Language: a Corpus-based Study of Spoken and Written Registers. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia. Charles, M., 2003. ‘This mystery...’: a corpus-based study of the use of nouns to construct stance in theses from two contrasting disciplines. J. English Acad. Purposes 2, 313e316. Charles, M., 2007. Reconciling top-down and bottom-up approaches to graduate writing: using a corpus to teach rhetorical functions. J. English Acad. Purposes 6, 289e302. Coffin, C., Donohue, J., 2012. Academic Literacies and systemic functional linguistics: How do they relate? J. English Acad. Purposes 11, 64e75. Dias, P., 1994. Initiating students into genres of discipline-based reading and writing. In: Freedman, A., Medway, P. (Eds.), Genre and the New Rhetoric. Taylor & Francis, London, pp. 191e210. Dudley-Evans, T., 2001. English for specific purposes. In: Carter, R., Nunan, D. (Eds.), The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 131e136. Freedman, A., Medway, P. (Eds.), 1994. Genre and the New Rhetoric. Taylor & Francis, London. Gardner, S., Holmes, J., 2010. From section headings to assignment macrostructures in undergraduate student writing. In: Swain, E. (Ed.), Thresholds and Potentialities of Systemic Functional Linguistics: Multilingual, Multimodal and Other Specialised Discourses. EUT Edizioni Universita` di Trieste, Trieste, pp. 268e283 (. http://etabeta.univ.trieste.it/dspace/bitstream/10077/3652/1/Gardner%20Holmes%20Thresholds. pdf (accessed 11.04.12.). Hopkins, A., Dudley-Evans, T., 1988. A genre-based investigation of the discussion sections in articles and dissertations. English Specif. Purposes 7 (2), 113e121. Hunston, S., Thompson, G., 2000. Evaluation in Text. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hyland, K., 2002. Specificity revisited: how far should we go now? English Specif. Purposes 21, 385e395. Hyland, K., 2000. Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing. Longman, Harlow. Hyland, K., 2008. Academic clusters: text patterning in published and postgraduate writing. Int. J. Appl. Linguistics 18 (1), 41e62. Hyland, K., Tse, P., 2007. Is there an “Academic Vocabulary”? TESOL Q. 41 (2), 235e253. Hyon, S., 1996. Genre in three traditions: Implications for ESL. TESOL Q. 30 (4), 693e722. Ivanic, R., Lea, M., 2006. New contexts, new challenges: the teaching of writing in UK higher education. In: Ganobcsik-Williams, L. (Ed.), Teaching Academic Writing in UK Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 6e15. Johns, T., 1997. Kibbitzing one-to-Ones. In: Web Version of Notes for Presentation at BALEAP Meeting on Academic Writing, University of Reading, 29th November 1997. materials presented at. http://www.lexically.net/TimJohns/index.html. http://micusp.elicorpora.info/micuspkibbitzers (accessed 25.11.12.). Lea, M., Street, B., 1998. Student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach. Stud. Higher Educ. 23 (2), 157e172. Lee, D., Swales, J., 2006. A corpus-based EAP course for NNS doctoral students: moving from available specialized corpora to self-compiled corpora. English Specif. Purposes 25 (1), 56e75. Li, Y., Flowerdew, J., 2007. Shaping Chinese novice scientists’ manuscripts for publication. J. Second Lang. Writing 16, 100e117. Lillis, T.M., Scott, M., 2007. Defining Academic Literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy. J. Appl. Linguistics 4 (1), 5e32.
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