DOKTORI (PhD) DISSZERTÁCIÓ
Adapting to the requirements of written academic discourse
on entering university
Francis J. Prescott-Pickup
2012
Eötvös Lóránd Tudományegyetem Pedagógiai és Pszichológiai Kar
DOCTORAL (PHD) DISSERTATION DOKTORI (PHD) DISSZERTÁCIÓ
Francis J. Prescott-Pickup
Adapting to the requirements of written academic discourse on entering university
Az írott tudományos diskurzus követelményeihez való alkalmazkodás az egyetemi tanulmányok kezdetén
Neveléstudományi Doktori Iskola Doktori iskola vezetője:
Dr. Szabolcs Éva, habil. egyetemi docens, ELTE PPK Nyelvpedagógiai Doktori Program
Doktori program vezetője:
Dr. Medgyes Péter, egyetemi tanár, ELTE BTK
Témavezető:
Kontráné Dr. Hegybíró Edit, habil. egyetemi docens, ELTE BTK
Tudományos bizottság:
Elnök: Dr. Klaudy Kinga, egyetemi tanár, ELTE BTK
Belső bíráló: Dr. Medgyes Péter, egyetemi tanár, ELTE BTK Külső bíráló: Dr. László János, egyetemi tanár, DE
Titkár: Dr. Illés Éva, adjunktus, ELTE BTK
Tagok: Dr. Szerencsi Katalin, főiskolai tanár, NYF
Kovátsné Dr. Loch Ágnes, főiskolai docens, BGF KVIFK Dr. Tankó Gyula, adjunktus, ELTE BTK
Budapest, 2012
Abstract
In this longitudinal qualitative study, the experiences of 20 first-year students as they begin their studies in English at a large university in Budapest are described. In particular, the aim of the research is to find out how they adapt to the requirements of written academic discourse in the different subjects that they study over their first year. The role of an obligatory academic skills course (ASC) principally designed to help them learn academic writing was also investigated. The research takes an outer-directed view of writing enculturation into academic discourse communities (ADCs) being situated in its social context (Bizzell, 1982a;
Swales, 1987; 1990) and proceeding through peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991).
The research design involved a series of long qualitative interviews done with 20 volunteer students over their first three semesters. Some of their ASC classes were observed and their ASC teachers and 10 of their subject teachers were also interviewed. All interviews were transcribed and relevant documents were also gathered (essays, department course requirements, writing tasks etc.). Data analysis used the constant comparative method developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967) and the constructive approach to grounded theory generation promulgated by Charmaz (2000; 2006). The theoretical model which emerged from this process showed that while the students’ previous writing experience and language proficiency at the time of entering the university were critical, their development as writers of academic discourse was contingent on a number of other factors which interacted in complex ways.
Acknowledgements and Dedication
I would like to thank everybody who helped me to complete this magnum opus: the students and teachers who gave me their time, their thoughts and access to their classrooms and their writing; my very thorough and clear-sighted supervisor, Dr Kontra Edit, who always gave me good advice for improving what I had written, and did her best to keep my rather wayward ship on an even keel; and my patient and loving family, who put up with me while I was consumed with writing this work. I would also like to thank my colleagues, who have all helped and supported me in various ways.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this dissertation to the two people who sadly cannot be here to celebrate it with me but who I know are very proud of this achievement: my beloved parents, Vernon and Eve.
Table of Contents
Abstract 3
Acknowledgements and Dedication 4
List of Tables 8
List of Figures 9
List of abbreviations and acronyms 10
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 11
CHAPTER 2: LEARNING AS A SOCIAL PROCESS: PUTTING THE STUDY INTO A THEORETICAL CONTEXT 16
2.1 Going Beyond the Cognitive Model: Learning to Write in an Academic Discourse Community 17
2.2 The Swalian View of the Discourse Community 22
2.3 Problematising the Notion of the Discourse Community 23
2.4 Communities of Practice and Situated Learning: Another Viewpoint 26
2.5 Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Complementary Conceptual Lenses for Looking at Learning as a Social Process 30
2.6 Research into University Students’ Experience of Writing in ESL and EFL Contexts 34
CHAPTER 3: TAKING A QUALITATIVE STANCE: A CONSTRUCTIVIST VIEW OF GROUNDED THEORY 43
3.1 What is Constructivist Grounded Theory? 47
3.2 The Use of Constructivist Grounded Theory in the Present Study 52
CHAPTER 4: METHOD 53
4.1 Early Research and Pilot Studies 54
4.2 Research Questions and Initial Plan 55
4.3 The Educational Context at the Time of the Study 58
4.4 Research Setting and Participants 60
4.5 Data Collection 63
4.5.1 Student questionnaire and consent form 64
4.5.2 Participant observation of ASC classes 64
4.5.3 Semi-structured interviews with students 65
4.5.4 Semi-structured interviews with teachers of Literature and Linguistics 68
4.5.5 Long ethnographic interviews with 3 ASC teachers 69
4.6 A Note on Data Triangulation 70
4.7 Data Analysis 72
4.8 Trustworthiness 76
4.9 Research Ethics 77
CHAPTER 5: CODING AND BUILDING OF CONCEPTUAL CATEGORIES 80
5.1 Initial Coding of Student Interviews 80
5.2 Focused Coding 85
5.3 Conceptual Category Building 88
5.4 Coding and Analysis of Other Data 98
5.5 The Development of the Theoretical Model 101
CHAPTER 6: STUDENT ENCULTURATION INTO ACADEMIC DISCOURSE: WHAT THE DATA SHOWS 104
6.1 Phase One (Part 1): English Learning before Coming to University 104
6.1.1 Learning English at school 104
6.1.2 Learning English outside school 109
6.1.3 English writing experience 112
6.1.4 Students’ English proficiency at the time of starting university 115
6.2 Phase One (Part 2): On First Entering the University – Experiencing a Culture Shock 117
6.2.1 The first few weeks: Getting organised and getting used to studying 118
6.2.2 Enduring a crisis of confidence: Am I good enough? 124
6.2.3 Other factors which can affect students enculturation 131
6.2.4 Phase one summary. 133
6.3 Phase Two: Learning to Write about Subject Content 134
6.3.1 Typical home paper tasks 136
6.3.2 Writing home papers – the difficulties experienced by the students 145
6.3.2.1 Feelings of anxiety about the task 145
6.3.2.2 Meeting the challenge – doing library research 150
6.3.2.3 Learning to organise long papers 154
6.3.2.4 Learning to write in an academic style 157
6.3.2.5 Difficulties with mastering the formal requirements of academic writing 162
6.3.2.6 Developing coping strategies for difficult papers 168
6.3.3 Other factors affecting students’ writing development 180
6.3.3.1 Giving or denying students the opportunity to write long papers 180
6.3.3.2 The teaching of subject content 188
6.3.3.3 The importance of teacher feedback 192
6.3.3.4 Maintaining motivation through the year 201
6.3.4 Learning academic writing skills in the ASC 203
6.3.4.1 The ASC contents 204
6.3.4.2 How the ASC helped the students with their writing 205
6.3.4.3 How far the ASC helped with writing home papers 208
6.3.4.4 The students’ attitude to the ASC 211
6.4 Phase Three: The Students at the End of their First Year 217
6.4.1 The leavers 218
6.4.2 The survivors 219
6.4.3 The apprentices 222
6.4.4 The acolytes 226
CHAPTER 7: A THEORETICAL MODEL OF STUDENT ENCULTURATION INTO WRITTEN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE 229
7.1 Diagramming the Theoretical Model 230
7.2 Phase One: On First Entering the University 231
7.3 Phase Two: Learning to Write about Subject Content 234
7.3.1 Developing coping strategies to deal with challenging home papers 236
7.3.2 “Filters” which can affect students’ writing development 237
7.3.3 The role of the ASC 240
7.4 The Students at the End of their First Year 242
7.5 The Usefulness of the Theoretical Model 243
CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSION 245
8.1 Summary of the Study 245
8.2 Pedagogical Implications 250
8.3 Limitations 253
8.4 Directions for Further Research 254
REFERENCES 256
APPENDICES 272
Appendix A: Student Questionnaire 272
Appendix B: Research Consent Form 273
Appendix C: Interview schedule for Round 1 of the student interviews 274
Appendix D: Interview Schedule for Linguistics Teachers 275
Appendix E: Interview Schedule for Literature Teachers 276
Appendix F: Interview Schedule for Academic Skills Teachers 277
Appendix G: Main Categories from the Student Interviews 280
Appendix H: List of Focused Codes for Subject Teacher Interviews 284
Appendix I: Home Paper Task for Syntax I Seminar, Spring Semester 2006 285
Appendix J: Example of internet plagiarism in an Introduction to Literature home paper 288
Appendix K: Course Contents and Requirements for the ASC 1 and 2 290
List of Tables
Table 1 The new model of learning proposed in Lave and Wenger (Cox, 2005, p. 529) 27 Table 2 Postulates of traditional (positivist) and qualitative (phenomenological)
research paradigms as adapted by Maykut and Morehouse (1994, p. 12)
from Lincoln and Guba (1985) 45 Table 3 A timetable showing the development of the research study 57 Table 4 Basic information about the student participants 62 Table 5 A summary of the data collected in the study 63
Table 6 Timetable of student interviews 66
Table 7 Focused codes from early coding of student interview data 87 Table 8 The conceptual categories which emerged from the data 94 Table 9 List of codes from the interviews with Literature and Linguistics teachers 100 Table 10 The students’ EFL experience at school and in English-speaking countries 105
Table 11 Home papers written by each student in their first year 143 Table 12 Problems experienced by students when writing home papers 149
List of Figures
Figure 1. Bizzell’s model of social learning in discourse communities. 21 Figure 2. Conceptual map of new students entering university discourse communities. 31 Figure 3. Saldana’s streamlined codes-to-theory model for qualitative inquiry
(2009, p. 12). 73
Figure 4. Example of line by line coding of interview data (Extract 1). 81 Figure 5. Example of line by line coding of interview data (Extract 2). 83 Figure 6. Three data extracts showing the use of focused coding. 85 Figure 7. The category of English learning experience. 89 Figure 8. Early memos relating to students’ difficulties adapting to university. 90 Figure 9. Extract from advanced memo about culture shock. 92 Figure 10. The conceptual category of Experiencing culture shock. 93 Figure 11. Using data triangulation to gain deeper understanding of a teacher’s style. 99 Figure 12. The three phases in the theoretical model of student enculturation into
written academic discourse. 103
Figure 13. Opening of argumentative essay written for the ASC. 127
Figure 14. Task sheet for ICEL home essay. 137
Figure 15. Extract from the HERTE of the Linguistics Department. 164 Figure 16. A comparison of an internet text with a student essay, showing unattributed
borrowing. 178
Figure 17. Teacher’s comments on an Introduction to Linguistics paper. 193 Figure 18. Model of the enculturation of first-year students into university academic
writing practices. 231
Figure 19. Membership categories of university ADCs 242
List of Acronyms and Abbreviations ADC Academic Discourse Community
APA American Psychological Association ASC Academic Skills Course
DEAL Department of English Applied Linguistics DPP Department of Psychology and Pedagogy EAP English for Academic Purposes
EFL English as a Foreign Language ESL English as a Second Language GPA Grade point average
HE Higher Education
HERTE Home Essay Requirements: The Essentials L1 First language
L2 Second language
MLA Modern Languages Association
OKTV Országos Középiskolai Tanulmányi Verseny, which can be translated as National Secondary School Academic Competition.
SEAS School of English and American Studies
1 Introduction
Any teacher of academic writing will agree that there are huge differences between how their students tackle their writing assignments and the quality of the writing they produce. As an experienced teacher in this area I have long been interested in how best to cope with these differences in my classroom. Combined with this interest I have been increasingly aware that many of my colleagues, both in my own Department of English Applied Linguistics (DEAL) and in other departments in the School of English and American Studies (SEAS) at my university have a very pessimistic view of the standard of students’
writing. In short, they believe that the standard is dropping noticeably and that student writing has become a problem which is very difficult to deal with. The root of this problem is usually seen as the lack of writing tuition in schools and so the blame is put on the school teacher, but I have always felt that such a view of student writing is too one dimensional.
It is true that in Hungary there has long been a problem with training and retaining skilled foreign language teachers in public education largely due to the very low levels of pay (Eurydice, 2005; Lukács, 2002; Nikolov, 1999), but such discourses of student writing being a problem at university are not restricted to countries where English is a foreign language.
Official government sponsored reports in the United States (National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges, 2003) and in Great Britain explicitly deal with the same phenomenon. Here is a selection of teacher comments from one focus group discussion reported on in the government sponsored Nuffield Review Preliminary Report, an independent research study carried out in 21 Higher Education (HE) institutions across England and Wales:
Basic writing skills are lacking. (admissions office)
They can’t even write in sentences. Their spelling is appalling. They can’t be understood. (physics)
They don’t know how to write essays – they just assemble bits from the Internet.
Elementary maths is missing. They can’t put decent sentences together. There is no provision in university for people who can’t write essays. (biology)
They can’t structure a set of ideas in a logical sequence. (physics)
They can’t write in sentences – they produce meaningless work. (mathematics) They graduate with a 2:1 but they still can’t spell or write English! (physics) (Wilde, Wright, Hayward, Johnson, & Skerrett, 2006, p. 14)
Clearly there is a much wider crisis in confidence concerning the writing skills of students taking place. Such crises in literacy are nothing new, and to some extent they can be explained by greatly increased access to HE in developed countries (Grabe & Kaplan, 1996;
Lillis, 2001; Hyland, 2011), but the problem of having to deal with students who have weak literacy skills is nonetheless a real one.
On the other hand, the demanding nature of the step up from high school to university for students has often been pointed out, not only in first language contexts (e.g., Kruse, 2003), but particularly in contexts where English, as the preeminent global language, is the medium of instruction for university students who have a different first language (Spack, 1988;
Hyland, 2002b, 2011; Paltridge, 2004; Zhu, 2004b). At the end of the nineteenth century in the new era of mass education American universities first developed freshman composition courses to help new students deal with the writing requirements of the academy (Berlin, 1984). The teaching of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) to English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students would eventually evolve from such courses and spread to universities around the world in the late twentieth century.
EAP courses are now a standard part of university education for ESL students studying abroad and for EFL students studying in English in their home country. As a teacher of such courses for first-year students in one of Hungary’s leading universities, I have a direct interest in finding out how effective they are in preparing new students to meet the challenges of studying in their chosen subjects and what the expectations of student writing are in those subjects. At this university there are compulsory EAP classes, known as the Academic Skills
Course (ASC) 1 and 2, in the first two semesters of study for students in SEAS and they focus primarily on writing skills. Following some initial research on how these courses are taught by different teachers, my interest in student writing being seen as a problem and in the effectiveness of the ASC came together as the focus for my PhD. What I wanted to find out was how new students adapted to the requirements of academic writing at the university and how effective the ASC was in helping them to adapt. I wanted to know what problems they had with their writing and what were the main factors which dictated their degree of success in entering the new world of academic discourse.
Since the purpose of the ASC was to help students coming from high school make the transition to university study and in particular to help them learn academic writing conventions, this would obviously be an important part of the research. However, I wanted to get an understanding of the phenomenon from the participants’ viewpoints, meaning both the students’ and the teachers’, so it was important to look at what was going on outside the ASC, as well. Using a theoretical framework based on the concept of the academic discourse community (ADC) developed by Bizzell (1982a) and given a set of defining characteristics by Swales (1987; 1990), I designed a research plan for a qualitative ethnographic study over a whole academic year, looking at first-year students’ experiences both in their ASC and in their subject courses, particularly the writing assignments they had to deal with. Later on, as I began collecting and analysing data, the concept of situated learning in communities of practice as developed by Lave and Wenger (1991) was also utilised as a theoretical tool to facilitate my understanding of the students learning processes in the new communities they had entered.
The specific qualitative research approach chosen to investigate the phenomenon was grounded theory, developed by Glaser and Strauss in 1965 in their study of how people cope with terminal illness. This approach attempts to construct a theoretical model to describe the
phenomenon based on the actual data collected, principally through a series of in-depth interviews. In this study, the aim was to construct a grounded theory which would describe what the factors were that affected the enculturation of novice students into the various written academic discourse requirements of the university, and what the consequences were of different combinations of these factors in the overall success of the student in becoming accepted as a legitimate, though still peripheral, member of different ADCs. The data which served as the basis of this theory came principally from a series of in-depth qualitative interviews with a number of volunteer students over their first year, and also with ASC teachers, and teachers of the students’ main subjects.
Research into student enculturation into academic discourse practices at tertiary level first began in the 1980s in the U.S., but although a great deal of research has been done on EAP since then, most of it looks at ESL contexts in English speaking countries or in universities in Asia, and only a small part of it uses a qualitative approach to examine participant perspectives over time. In Hungary very little qualitative research has been done on undergraduate writing, and to the best of my knowledge nobody else has examined the experiences of first-year students as they enter the university. It is hoped that this study will add to the existing body of work on how students whose first language is not English cope with high-level writing tasks in that language, and will offer a clearer picture of how Hungarian students manage the transition from high school to university. As such, the study may be of interest to both university teachers and students.
Chapter 2 of the thesis will give a full account of the theoretical background of the study and explain how it fits in with previous research on this topic. Other relevant literature related to the main aspects of the study will also be discussed. In Chapter 3 the philosophical underpinnings of qualitative research will be outlined and the main principles of grounded theory research will be explained. The main differences between classical grounded theory
and the constructivist approach to grounded theory that was used in this study will then be discussed. The research method will be described in detail in Chapter 4 and in Chapter 5 the analysis and coding of the data will be explained with examples and the main conceptual categories which emerged will be presented. Chapter 6 will give a detailed account of the principal categories that formed the basis of the theoretical model and the relationship between them, and in Chapter 7 the model itself will be presented and discussed with reference to relevant research literature. The conclusion will summarise the main findings, looking at the strengths and weaknesses of the research as a whole, as well as considering some practical implications and the effect in terms of personal growth on the researcher.
2 Learning as a Social Process: Putting the Study into a Theoretical Context Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion . . . He has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. (David Bartholomae, 1985, p. 273)
Since the research approach used in this study views student engagement in university writing practices as a social process, whereby students entering a new community are required to adopt the forms and habits of that community, the chapter will begin by examining the way that the theoretical views of how high level writing is done have developed from seeing it as an almost exclusively cognitive process to one in which the social context is of paramount importance.
It should be stressed, however, that though this theoretical context comes first in the written study, it does not fully reflect my theoretical thinking at the time the study itself was undertaken. A lot has been written about qualitative research being inductive and not being based on preconceptions. Glaser and Strauss, the creators of grounded theory, the qualitative approach used in this research, advised delaying any review of literature until after the analysis is finished so as not to be influenced by previous ideas (Glaser & Strauss, 1967;
Glaser, 1978). However, later generations of grounded theorists have debated this issue and there is no clear agreement. Dey (1999) suggests that it is naive to consider the researcher as a tabula rasa and that is the position taken in this study. My early thinking about the research situation was highly influenced by the concept of discourse communities, which I was already familiar with from earlier work. It was not until I was at a relatively advanced stage in the research and had already been collecting and analysing data for some time that I was made aware by a colleague of the work of Lave and Wenger (1991) on situated learning in communities of practice. I found that their theoretical perspective was useful in helping me understand several of the categories which were emerging from my own data.
In this section I will discuss both views of learning as a social process and how they connect with the present research in order to make it easier for the reader to grasp important elements of the research context, even though these theoretical frameworks impacted this study at different stages in its development. An overview of those previous research studies that had some similarity in approach and topic to the present study is also included.
2.1 Going Beyond the Cognitive Model: Learning to Write in an Academic Discourse Community
The view of writing as taking place in different communities, each with their own discourse conventions, came about partly as a reaction to the view of writing as a cognitive process that became popular in the late 1970s and 1980s. The Flower and Hayes model (1977, 1980, 1981), which attempted to answer the question of how good and bad writers’
rhetorical choices differed during the process of writing, was a highly influential theory at this time. According to Flower and Hayes, “the process of writing is best understood as a set of distinctive thinking processes which writers orchestrate or organize during the act of composing” and “the act of composing itself is a goal-directed thinking process, guided by the writer's own growing network of goals” (Flower & Hayes, 1981, p. 366). Their model was itself a reaction to the then current stage process model of writing and the idea of writing as a means of self-expression, which was subsequently termed the expressive stage of the writing process (Grabe & Kaplan, 1996). Flower and Hayes cognitive process model was an attempt to provide a more rigorous account of what writers were actually doing, underpinned by research in cognitive psychology. Their model, based on actual research data, mostly using think-aloud protocols, provided a far more sophisticated view of the complexity of writing than the pragmatic insights of the expressive movement (Grabe & Kaplan, 1996), a view which saw writing as a network of recursive and interactive processes driven by the goals of the writer, themselves constantly evolving as the writing took shape. Paradoxically, even
though their model focused on both the task environment and the individual writer, by seeing writing in terms of interacting sets of cognitive processes the individual actually became no more than the site of these processes and the social world was tightly restricted to the limits of the writing task itself: “all of those things outside the writer's skin, starting with the rhetorical problem or assignment and eventually including the growing text itself” (Flower & Hayes, 1981, p. 369). The consideration of the writer as a social agent and writing as an activity which takes place within a particular social context within the wider world is completely missing. In the Flower and Hayes model the writer is reduced to no more than a cipher.
Following the work of Flower and Hayes, there were several other cognitive models of writing which attempted to refine and improve upon their model. Indeed, in later years Hayes attempted to address criticisms of their early model by elaborating it and including a social aspect. Perhaps the most notable (and noticed) of the other models is the knowledge-telling model of Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987). Their theory is more explicit and does a better job of accounting for the differences between what expert and novice writers do. It also accounts for findings from different kinds of research and not just protocol analysis, a major criticism of Flower and Hayes’ work. However, it remains very similar to Flower and Hayes in respect of not seeing the writer as an actor in the social world.
Dissatisfaction with this general approach to writing as an internal cognitive process led to an increased focus on understanding the social context of writing in the early 1980s. In the US several researchers were doing work on the social contexts of literacy and writing in relation to various communities, drawing on the ideas of social constructionist theorists such as Dell Hymes, Michel Foucault, Stanley Fish and Thomas Kuhn. For example, Brice Heath (1982, 1983) published studies on literacy practices at home and at school in small town communities, Graves (1983) used a participatory ethnographic approach to study writing in elementary schools, Bazerman (1981) looked at three scholarly texts from the three traditional
academic fields of sciences, social sciences and humanities, examining how the expectations of the different contexts and communities in which they were written affected the way knowledge was presented in the three papers, and Bartholomae (1983) examined undergraduate writing assignments given for different subjects at university.
It was Patricia Bizzell, in a 1982 article dealing with how writing composition teachers’ theoretical view of writing affects the teaching of students in the classroom, who first seems to have used the term ‘discourse community’ (1982a). Citing Flower and Hayes as leading representatives of the view of writing as an inner-directed activity, Bizzell maintained that writing must also be seen as being outer-directed, and therefore influenced by social context. Following on from this, she claimed that it is the responsibility of those helping students learn to write to “explain that their writing takes place in a community, and to explain what the community’s conventions are” (p. 230). It is important to note that Bizzell’s aim was not to discredit the findings of cognitive research, but rather to dispute the idea that they can ever provide a definitive account (i.e., an account which is universally true for all writers) of the writing process: while the Flower and Hayes model “describes the form of the composing process, the process cannot go on without the content which is knowledge of the conventions of discourse communities” (p. 231). According to Bizzell, only by taking account of the way the social context influences writing can we hope to gain a full understanding of the problems our students have and be able to discover why writers make the decisions they do, rather than just describe how the process works.
Bizzell points out that the Flower and Hayes model gives an answer to the question of how the writing process works but that this does not actually help us discover why writer’s make the decisions they do. Only by taking an outer-directed view and looking at writing as occurring within a discourse community that defines how problems and solutions are understood can we help students to make appropriate decisions. In other words, language use
has to be understood as being conditioned by social context: “educational problems associated with language use should be understood as difficulties with joining an unfamiliar discourse community” (p. 227). This point will also turn out to have considerable analytical purchase in the current study.
While Bizzell did not give an explicit definition of what constitutes a discourse community in the article, some key features, such as shared discourse conventions, including habits of language use, expectations, ways of understanding experience, and patterns of interaction with the world, were mentioned. In addition, she stated that we move out of our native discourse community into which we are born into other discourse communities in the wider society. The ease of an individual’s transition into what Bizzell refers to as ‘the academic discourse community’ may depend on how far removed the conventions of their native discourse community are from it. Bizzell represented this view of multiple discourse communities by using a Venn diagram of partially overlapping circles (see Figure 1 below).
This point of relative proximity or distance between the conventions of native and academic discourse communities dictating the ease or difficulty of transition for individuals going from one to the other seems to have close similarities with sociologist Basil Bernstein’s controversial theory of restricted and elaborated code in lower and middle class homes making it more difficult or easier for children to understand the elaborated discourse of school (1971, 1973), but Bizzell places the linguistic socialization of children, and by extension, university students, within a much broader social and theoretical framework.
An outer-directed model of the development of language and thought. Note that innate capacities have no expression outside discourse communities and that society is made up entirely of discourse communities. Individual has unequal access to different communities.
Direction of development is outward from native community.
2. Society: aggregate of discourse communities that all share certain patterns of language- using, thinking conditioned by historical, cultural circumstances.
e. another discourse community d. another discourse
community f. another b. work discourse discourse community: some community other conventions,
some common with native community a. native discourse
community: conventions for preferred language- using, thinking directed
toward a project of c. school discourse interaction with the community: some world other conventions, some common with native community 1. Individual: innate
capacities to learn language, to assemble conceptual structures;
starts here (social origins).
Figure 1. Bizzell’s model of social learning in discourse communities (1982a, p. 217).
Bizzell’s view of the discourse community emphasizes the uneven power relationships in society and the need to provide those with less access to the discourse conventions of privileged knowledge-producing discourse communities with help in order to learn them. In another article (1982b), she argued that learning how to use the conventions of academic discourse is the most important part of an individual’s socialisation into the academic
discourse community because it enables them to make themselves heard. For Bizzell, it is the duty of the specialist composition instructor to teach students these conventions.
2.2 The Swalian View of the Discourse Community
The linguist and teacher John Swales, because of his research into the use of English in academic settings and the teaching of English at tertiary level, became interested in the notion of the discourse community, but was dissatisfied with the lack of a clear definition of the term. In his 1987 conference paper, Approaching the concept of discourse community, he announced his “wish to do something useful for the concept of discourse community” (p. 2).
In his landmark book on genre analysis, published three years later, he went further, saying he
“wish[ed] to explore and in turn appropriate” the term (Swales, 1990, p.21). His main concern was to differentiate discourse communities from speech communities, pointing out that the fact a group shares certain rules is not enough to identify it as a discourse community.
Swales said that whereas speech communities are local, face-to-face groups whose primary purpose was to foster socialization and group solidarity, discourse communities are spatially dispersed, have shared socio-rhetorical goals, and are mediated rather by written texts than speech (1990). Moreover, while speech communities are centripetal in that they have the effect of pulling people into themselves, according to Swales discourse communities are centrifugal, in that they have the effect of separating people into special interest groups (1987;
1990).
Swales therefore came up with a definition of the term which focused on six defining characteristics of a discourse community:
a) The discourse community has a communality of interest [...]
b) The discourse community has mechanisms for intercommunication between members [...]
c) In consequence of a) and b) the discourse community survives by providing information and feedback [...]
d) the discourse community has developed and continues to develop discoursal expectations [...]
e) As a result of all the above, the discourse community possesses an inbuilt dynamic towards an increasingly shared and specialized terminology [...]
f) The discourse community has a critical mass of members with a suitable degree of relevant discoursal and content expertise.
(Swales, 1987, pp. 5-6)
These six identifying characteristics were further refined in his 1990 book about genre analysis:
1. A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals. [...]
2. A discourse community has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members. [...]
3. A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback. [...]
4. A discourse community utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims. [...]
5. In addition to owning genres, a discourse community has acquired some specific lexis. [...]
6. A discourse community has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise.
(Swales, 1990, pp. 24-27, author’s italics)
Swales view of the discourse community is extremely useful in that it allows us to identify more clearly the nature of different communities and in particular the academic discourse community. However, it should be pointed out that Swales was not interested in the notions of privilege and access but merely in defining the concept.
2.3 Problematising the notion of the discourse community
Swales was mostly interested in discourse communities from the point of view of the specific genres that they produced, and more especially academic genres, but his desire to
arrive at a clear definition led to disagreement with other researchers who felt that the concept could not be so easily delineated. Even as he first presented his six characteristics, the idea of the academic discourse community (henceforth referred to as ADC) was being problematised by other academics. Harris (1989) identifying himself as coming from a working-class home, signalled his awareness of the conflicting and overlapping natures of different discourse communities and the unreality of fixed ideas of university discourse in his call for a more critical examination of ideas of writing within an academic community:
Similarly, most of the "communities" to which other current theorists refer exist at a vague remove from actual experience: The University, The Profession, The Discipline, The Academic Discourse Community. They are all quite literally utopias – nowheres, meta-communities – tied to no particular time or place, and thus oddly free of many of the tensions, discontinuities, and conflicts in the sorts of talk and writing that go on everyday in the classrooms and departments of an actual university.
(Harris, 1989, p. 14)
Cooper (1989) also called for a more nuanced view of ADCs; citing Swales’ 1987 conference paper, she pointed out that his definition was satisfactory only from an institutional perspective. She suggested that what was needed was an understanding more in touch with actual local groupings and less an abstraction used as “a way of labelling individuals as insiders or outsiders, as people who either have the requisite values, knowledge, and skills to belong, or lack these necessary qualifications” (Cooper, 1989, p. 204).
Cooper (1989) went further than just questioning the definition of a discourse community: along with Bartholomae (1985) and Bizzell (1986), she was concerned with how individuals are initiated into discourse communities and become accepted members. Bizzell and Cooper both question the desirability of seeking to make all students members of an ADC. Cooper (1989) puts it this way:
If we insist that students adopt what we see as the values of our community (our values), we will effectively withhold power within academic discourse from all students who come from a different generation, a different ethnic background, a different race, a different sex, a different economic class. (p. 219)
This point about the fundamental desirability or otherwise of making new students members of an ADC, though highly problematic, is an important one and has some bearing on the present study as will be seen in the discussion of the theoretical model in Chapter 7.
Subsequent situated research on academic writing and the enculturation of undergraduate and graduate students in a wide range of disciplines and contexts has revealed that ADCs are indeed highly heterogenous spaces with conflicting and competing demands which students have to deal with. Each ADC is itself the subject of flux and contest over meaning. Together they contain multiple discourses, practices and identities in which students have to negotiate their own identity and resolve the problems of competing requirements (Herrington, 1985, 1988, 1992; Chiseri-Strater, 1991; Prior, 1991, 1995, 1998; Chin, 1994;
Ivanic, 1998; Hyland, 2000; Dysthe, 2002). This, of course, has profound implications for how writing is taught in the university.
This realisation of the complexity of ADCs led to Swales (1998) revising his initial view of how discourse communities can be defined in his closely observed qualitative study of three ADCs on three floors of a building in his own university. In the closing section of the book, Swales distinguishes place discourse communities from focus discourse communities in an attempt to better reflect the complex reality. While focus discourse communities consist of individuals who jointly participate in discursive practices with a particular focus but may be widely separated in space and time, place discourse communities, such as the three he studied, are locally situated groups involved in shared work who, while they might not completely agree about their roles and purpose, use a common lexis and common communicative genres.
It is interesting to note that in this reinterpretation of the discourse community Swales’
original privileging of the distinctions between speech communities and discourse communities seems to have been somewhat overturned. However, what is most salient for the present study is the understanding that ADCs cannot be easily defined and are not static or
stable entities but constantly shifting sites of socially constructed and contested meaning.
Moreover, the interplay of ADCs in particular institutions needs to be closely examined over time in their local setting, just as Swales did in his 1998 study. This, of course, applies equally when the object of research is to understand what happens when new students are required to adopt the writing conventions of one or several ADCs.
2.4 Communities of Practice and Situated Learning: Another Viewpoint
In his rethinking of the notion of discourse community, Swales (1998) was clearly influenced by another social constructivist view of learning, that of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory that learning takes place through participation in communities of practice. In fact, Swales used the term at several points in his study. Their initial treatise in 1991 offered a view of learning which sought to foreground its quintessentially social character and move away from purely cognitive accounts of how knowledge is acquired by learners: “we mean to draw attention to the point that learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community” (p. 29). In doing so, Lave and Wenger were chiefly concerned with the idea of apprenticeship and how novice learners are taken in and become masters through peripheral participation in the practices of the community. By peripheral participation they mean the stage when an apprentice is just beginning to learn by doing small tasks which are only a small part of the set of skills possessed by full members of the community.
Interestingly, Swales (1987; 1990) spoke about apprentices in the sixth characteristic of his early definition of discourse communities. He noted that a discourse community had a changing membership with individuals entering as apprentices and leaving through death “or in other less involuntary ways” (1990, p.27). However, Swales left the question of how an apprentice becomes a full member unexamined, as his interests lay elsewhere. Other writers
on discourse communities have also made use of the term (e.g., Bartholomae, 1985; Cooper, 1989).
Cox (2005), in his comparative review of four major works which develop the concept of communities of practice, provides a helpful table (see Table 1 below) which contrasts the main features of the orthodox cognitive view of learning with those of Lave and Wenger’s new account in 1991, “as the authors themselves construct them” (p. 528).
Table 1
The new model of learning proposed in Lave and Wenger (Cox, 2005, p. 529)
Old model (cognitive) New model (constructivism, situativism)
Teaching Learning
Classroom In situ
By teaching By observation (therefore social)
By peripheral participation
(Individualized) pupil learns from teacher Learning from other learners (therefore social) Planned in a curriculum Informal, driven by the task (though elements
of the apprenticeship are formal)
Learning is a mechanistic, cerebral process Learning is as much about understanding of transmission and absorption of ideas how to behave as what to do, and is an
identity change
As Cox (2005) points out, there are some ambiguities in the way situated learning in a community of practice is described in the key publications by Lave and Wenger (1991), Wenger (1998; 2000), and Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002). This is largely because after the initial focus by Lave and Wenger on learning through apprenticeship using various previous ethnographic studies to provide the basis for their theoretical discussion – the studies were of the apprenticeship of midwives in a Mayan Indian tribe, of Vai and Gola tailors in Liberia, of U.S. naval quartermasters, of meat cutters in a U.S. supermarket, and of nondrinking alcoholics in a branch of Alcoholics Anonymous in the U.S. – Wenger became increasingly focused on the use of social learning systems in large commercial organisations where individuals have to cooperate on joint projects and find solutions independently from
management. Since the focus of this study is on a formal educational setting, only the early analytical description of situated learning from the point of view of apprenticeship will be examined, beginning with the question of how a community of practice is defined.
Lave and Wenger (1991), similarly to the early researchers on discourse communities, have been criticised for the vagueness of their description of what a community of practice is.
Their original definition is as follows:
A community of practice is a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice. A community of practice is an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge, not least because it provides the interpretive support necessary for making sense of its heritage. Thus, participation in the cultural practice in which any knowledge exists is an epistemological principle of learning. The social structure of this practice, its power relations, and its conditions for legitimacy define possibilities for learning (i.e., for legitimate peripheral participation). (p. 98)
Despite its somewhat amorphous nature, the similarities here with Bizzell’s (1982) Venn diagram of overlapping discourse communities are too obvious to miss, and of course, both views of learning in communities are consciously contrasted to earlier cognitive theories of learning. They also share the same concern with access to knowledge and the power it provides.
There are also some clear differences between the two views. Obviously, the concept of a discourse community focuses specifically on communication through language in relation to a shared goal or purpose, but perhaps the biggest difference between them is that the first one is largely descriptive (and in the case of Swales’ six characteristics is described from an institutional perspective), whereas the latter view attempts to explain how learning actually takes place and how an apprentice becomes a full member of the community, and therein lies its attractiveness as a theoretical framework.
The key concept in this account of how learning takes place is that of legitimate peripheral participation. According to Lave and Wenger (1991), learning is not just situated in practice, but “is an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world” (p. 35). It
is through taking an active part in the practices of a community that a learner begins the trajectory of developing their identity as a member and moving from peripheral to full participation:
“Legitimate peripheral participation” provides a way to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, artefacts, and communities of knowledge and practice. It concerns the process by which newcomers become part of a community of practice. A person’s intentions to learn are engaged and the meaning of the learning is configured through the process of becoming a full participant in a sociocultural practice. This social process includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills. (1991, p. 29)
In essence what they are saying here is that learning within a community of practice is also an act of socialisation: as the learner becomes socialised into the community through taking an increasing part in its activities their identity as a legitimate member of the group is formed.
The learning of the core skills of the community is the means by which this happens but the process is about much more than just the acquisition of skills.
Furthermore, by including the ideas of legitimacy and peripherality in their framework, the two researchers are able to examine the power roles which are at play in the process of learning. They show in their analysis of the ethnographic studies of apprenticeship that novice learners may sometimes be denied access to the necessary resources and opportunities to learn. This gives another point of view on the questions raised by Cooper (1989) and others about the problematic issue of power relations in learning communities.
Lave and Wenger (1991) use the term “the problem of access” (p. 100) when examining this phenomenon and they consider it to be a central issue:
The key to legitimate peripherality is access by newcomers to the community of practice and all that membership entails. But though this is essential to the reproduction of any community, it is always problematic at the same time. To become a full member of a community of practice requires access to a wide range of ongoing activity, old-timers, and other members of the community; and to information, resources, and opportunities for participation. The issue is so central to membership in communities of practice that, in a sense, all that we have said so far is about access.
(p. 100-101)
This problem of access may offer another way of understanding the experiences of those students who find it difficult or impossible to adopt new requirements when they begin their studies at university. It may also help to answer the question of whether it is a desirable or even legitimate aim to make all new entrants full members of an ADC.
A closely related aspect to those of access and power is that of identity. Lave and Wenger put a strong emphasis on the importance of the individual’s identity and how it develops whilst learning through participation. As they put it, “identity, knowing, and social membership entail one another” (1991, p. 53), and it is clear that for them learning is a process of identity building:
the development of identity is central to the careers of newcomers in communities of practice, and thus fundamental to the concept of legitimate peripheral participation.
[...] In fact, we have argued that, from the perspective we have developed here, learning and a sense of identity are inseparable: They are aspects of the same phenomenon. (p. 115)
This focus on the role of identity in learning fits in with much recent research on the importance of identity and power relations in academic writing at university (Clark & Ivanic, 1997; Ivanic,1998; Tang & John, 1999; Hyland, 2000; Hyland, 2002a, 2002b; Lea, 2004;
Fairclough, 2010) and once again indicates the potential of Lave and Wenger’s framework as an analytic tool to aid understanding of learning as a social process.
How these twin theoretical constructs of discourse communities and situated learning in communities of practice were used in the present research to approach and interpret the research problem will now be briefly discussed.
2.5 Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Complementary Conceptual Lenses for Looking at Learning as a Social Process
This study is by no means the first to combine elements of these two views of learning communities – Swales’ 1998 book examining three adjacent ADCs was clearly influenced by Lave and Wenger’s ideas, as has already been mentioned, and several other studies have
incorporated both views. Prior (2003) sees communities of practice as alternatives to discourse communities but suggests that both are inherently limited because they are based on an overly structuralist and abstract view of society which according to him forms “a deep foundation for our thinking about community, identity and discourses” (p. 19). It seems highly likely that Prior is right about the dialogic complexity in both space and time of cultural and personal-biographical networks of experience. However, the aim of this empirical study is to understand a specific and limited piece of cultural and social reality, and to do this both of these theoretical views have been utilised.
ADC 1 ADC 2
Entering student Overlapping ADCs within the university
ADC 3 ADC 4
Figure 2. Conceptual map of new students entering university discourse communities.
To begin with, the idea of new students entering a series of overlapping discourse communities was the conceptual starting point with which the research was framed (see Figure 2 above). Of course, other social influences are at play in this situation, both before and during the time span of the research, but they are not the main focus of the research.
Some of these influences, such as previous schooling and home life, are susceptible to enquiry, but the main focus of the research is the university setting itself, and for this the notion of ADCs forms an adequate frame in which to organise the study. The aim was to gain an understanding of both the students’ experience as they encountered these communities and
the nature of the ADCs they were entering. In other words, the idea of overlapping ADCs gave a framework to the research but it was part of the aim of the research to investigate exactly what these ADCs were and how they worked in this particular setting.
Once the research was under way, with the process of data gathering and analysis already begun, major categories began to develop from the initial coding. It was at this stage that Lave and Wenger’s conceptual model of situated learning in communities of practice was used, not to impose ‘outside’ categories on the data, but to examine the emerging categories through Lave and Wenger’s ‘conceptual lense’ in order to assist understanding of the learning processes within this particular setting. In some cases Lave and Wenger’s ideas did not enable a sharper picture to be gained and in others, the limitations of their model became apparent, such as the lack of consideration of tensions between related communities and between full members of the same community. However, some of their main ideas did prove to be helpful in getting an analytical grip on major categories and what they might mean. In using Lave and Wenger’s work to explore learning at a university in this way, I am following an already existing path.
In their 1991 monograph the two researchers directed their attention towards apprenticeship in the work place and explicitly avoided applying their framework to organised schooling at any level because they felt it would lead to conflict with existing claims about education: “We wanted to develop a view of learning that would stand on its own, reserving the analysis of schooling and other specific educational forms for the future” (p. 40).1 While Wenger in particular chose to go in a different direction, many other researchers were not slow to adopt their ideas in research on various formal learning situations.
At the level of Higher Education (HE), Flowerdew (2000) applied elements of both Swales’ 1990 view of discourse community and Lave and Wenger’s 1991 notion of legitimate
1 Some earlier research using the concept of situated learning was based in schools, for example, Brown, Collins and Duguid’s (1989) study of two mathematics teachers in a US high school, but such research was prior to the development of the theory of learning in communities of practice through legitimate peripheral participation.
peripheral participation to interpret the difficulties of a non-native-English speaking doctoral graduate attempting to get an article published in an international refereed journal. O’Donnell and Tobbell (2007), following the suggestion of Merriam, Courtenay and Baumgartner (2003), used communities of practice theory to explore the transition of adult students to HE through a UK university program designed for that purpose. Hall (2003) examined the effect of a web-based learning project in motivating participation of undergraduates in several English university departments using ideas of collaborative learning and communities of practice. Knights (2005) looks at the formation of learner identity through the practices of a particular university discipline (English) at two key moments in its historical development, using social contructivist ideas including communities of practice to frame his analysis.
Perhaps the closest piece of research to the present study which incorporates the ideas of situated learning in a community of practice is Carter, Ferzli and Wiebe’s (2007) interview study of US university students writing in a particular discipline. The researchers examine how learning to write according to discipline specific genre requirements can facilitate socialization into the discipline. By interviewing 10 undergraduates at the end of a one semester Biology course about their experiences and attitudes concerning the writing of lab reports for the course, they were able to show several ways in which the practice of writing lab reports “encourages socialization into the sciences by giving students the opportunity to write as scientists” (p. 298). Although the aim of their research and the context was rather different, the general view of writing as socialization into academic disciplines and the theoretical underpinnings of the research bear strong similarities to this study.
In the remaining pages of this chapter, I will provide an overview of the research on student enculturation into the writing practices of university disciplines where English is not the first language of the students.
2.6 Research into University Students’ Experience of Writing in ESL and EFL Contexts Early research into ESL undergraduate writing was stimulated by the growing numbers of international students in large universities in the last decades of the twentieth century, particularly in the USA and other English-speaking countries, as well as several Pacific Rim countries. Much of this research was centred on student writing instruction (see Raimes (1991) for a good account of this). Studies that focused on second language (L2) student writing practices in English, just as with first language (L1) research, began by seeing writing in terms of composition processes and revision strategies (for example, Zamel 1983, 1985; Raimes 1985; and Krapels, 1990, gives an overview). It was only in the 90s that researchers began to ask questions about the students’ experience as they struggled to cope in an L1 university. A great deal of this work was done in US universities as was the case initially for the L1 writing research that regarded student enculturation into writing practices as a social process a decade earlier.
Two researchers who did groundbreaking work on first-year and undergraduate ESL students in US universities in the 1990s were Ilona Leki and Joan Carson (of the University of Tennessee and Georgia State University, respectively). In their co-authored survey study published in 1994 they looked at how ESL students’ experiences of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing classes matched their later writing needs in different disciplines.
Although this was a survey study (77 students who had taken first-year EAP courses and who were studying in 23 different disciplines where they were required to do writing were surveyed), the survey instruments included open-ended questions and the main aim of the research was to investigate student perceptions. One of their most pertinent findings for the current study is that students, while largely finding the EAP courses useful, wanted more help with vocabulary and grammar.
Leki (1995) looked at the writing experiences of five ESL students (two undergraduates and three graduates) in their first semester of study. She chose to look closely at how these students coped with the writing requirements in the disciplines they were studying and she did so using a broadly ethnographic qualitative approach consisting of weekly interviews with the students over the semester and long interviews with several of their disciplinary teachers. Results were reported in the form of case profiles and then the main strategies that the students had used to deal with their writing tasks were described.
Among the strategies were several that are comparable to the strategies that students used in this study to cope with demanding tasks. Clarifying strategies involved asking the teacher to understand the assignment better or talking to other students to help understand the assignment. Relying on past writing experiences meant using what they already knew about writing to help them complete the current assignment. Managing competing demands referred to the way students juggled various tasks in order to cope with the numerous demands on their time both from within the academy and within their personal lives. This strategy can be seen as a part of the process of adapting to a new learning culture which was a major category in this research.
As a follow-up to their 1994 study, Leki and Carson (1997) used qualitative interviews to explore how ESL students experience different kinds of writing task in their EAP classes and in their other courses. The three types of task they looked at were writing about their own ideas without using a source text, writing in response to ideas in a source text, and writing to display knowledge of a source text, for which the term text-responsible writing was used by the researchers. As well as using data from the 1994 study, they conducted in-depth semi- structured interviews at the beginning and end of a fall semester with a mixed group of undergraduate and graduate ESL students (27 students in the first round of interviews and 21 in the second) who were attending an EAP course. What they found was that in their EAP
courses students were required to produce text-responsible writing much less than they were in their content courses. The writers contend that the ability to engage seriously with high level texts is at the centre of academic and intellectual development and is therefore a highly desirable element of EAP courses. Further observations on students’ perceptions of their audience and language needs, the importance of content rather than linguistic accuracy in disciplinary writing, and the connections between EAP writing courses and disciplinary writing make this a fascinating piece of research with many points of relevance for this study.
Another university-based researcher in the US, Johns (1995), was also interested in the types of writing done in undergraduate EAP courses for ESL students. She sees the need for EAP courses to go beyond the traditional process approach and provide undergraduates with experience of the kinds of writing they will meet in their university courses. Through observations of her own class, she presents examples of two kinds of writing assignment designed to introduce what she terms classroom genres (for example, essay exams and library research papers) and authentic genres (the kinds of writing that experts in the discipline produce). She recognises that undergraduates seldom have to produce authentic genre writing but Johns contends that they need to be exposed to these genres in order to understand how academic discourse works and to appreciate the limited purposes and forms of classroom genres. This study is particularly interesting for its focus on freshman writing and the tasks they have to deal with in their chosen content courses. It also gives a pedagogical perspective on the matter of how EAP courses should be structured and what they should attempt to teach.
At this point it is also worth mentioning a theoretical article published in the US which has a similar pedagogical focus on the teaching of disciplinary genres in university writing courses. Ramanathan and Kaplan (2000) are particularly interested in the ways disciplinary genres both evolve and remain stable, and the importance of L2 writing instructors being aware of this. Of most interest for this study is their assertion that these instructors have an
obligation to raise the genre-sensitivity of their ESL students so that they can have access to and use disciplinary genres.
Perhaps the closest piece of research to the present study in terms of methodological approach is Leki’s (2007) five-year longitudinal study of the full undergraduate career of four ESL students at the author’s university. By conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews with the students at regular intervals through each semester, as well as examining relevant documentation and doing non-participant observation of selected classes, Leki was able to build up detailed long-term case studies of the students’ academic literacy development.
Leki also conducted interviews with the instructors of the students’ courses, as was done in this study. Unlike the present study, she asked the participating students to keep weekly journal entries on their work and how they felt about it, but this technique was abandoned in the second year as it proved to be too much of a burden on the students and failed to produce new insights. In Leki’s study the students were doing vocational courses (engineering, nursing, business, and social work) which had varying requirements in terms of the quantity and nature of writing tasks, and she was able to look into the students’ entire academic career.
Her general research questions focused on the students experience in meeting the writing demands of their courses and how well their writing classes helped them meet these demands.
Consequently, the findings of Leki’s research are of considerable interest for comparative purposes.
There are two pieces of research from English medium universities in the Asian region which are of interest for the present study. Hu (2007) looked at the creation of an EAP course to help students from China develop sufficient writing competence to cope with their courses in a technical university in Singapore. All aspects of the design, content, and assessment of the course are described. The use of a self-assessment process to encourage the students to monitor and evaluate their own progress and identify weaknesses that they need to work on
and hence foster student autonomy is an interesting technique and is similar to an early study done by Prescott (2005) in a Hungarian university EAP course for EFL undergraduates. The importance of becoming an independent learner is an issue which emerges in the present research, as well. The discussion of the evaluation of such courses is also relevant; Hu points out that summative assessment focusing purely on written products does not match a pedagogy which places an emphasis on process as well as product. Therefore, some form of formative assessment is also necessary.
The large scale survey study of Evans and Green (2007) (done as a follow up to an earlier survey study by Hyland (1997)), investigated the language problems of Cantonese- speaking undergraduates in an English-medium university, although unlike the present study it took a quantitative approach. The baseline data of the study consisted of a self-report questionnaire filled in by 4,932 students from all 32 departments of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and analysed with statistical software. Just over two thirds of the students were first years. Some programme leaders also filled in a modified version of the questionnaire and took part in 6-hour long focus-group discussions.
Despite the motivation of the research being connected to specific localised language problems to do with the status of English in secondary education in Hong Kong and the necessity or otherwise of university EAP courses there, the findings in relation to students experiencing problems due to having an inadequate vocabulary and the undermining effect of a basic lack of language competence on students’ confidence when tackling complex writing tasks are both reflected in the data of the current study. In addition, the authors’ conclusion that EAP courses need to focus more directly on accommodating identified student needs is worth noting. It is important to ask of any similar university EAP course how well it meets the real needs of its students.
