Teaching Academic Writing in European Higher Education (Studies in Writing)

244 Pages·2003·4.23 MB·English

by  Lennart Björk

TEACHING ACADEMIC WRITING IN
EUROPEAN HIGHER EDUCATION
STUDIES IN WRITING
VOLUME 12
Series Editor:
Gert Rijlaarsdam, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Editorial Board:
Linda Allal, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Eric Espéret, University of Poitiers, France
David Galbraith, Staffordshire University, UK
Joachim Grabowski, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Ronald Kellogg, St. Louis University, USA
Lucia Mason, University of Padova, Italy
Marta Milian, Universitat Autonoma Barcelona, Spain
Sarah Ransdell, Florida Atlantic University, USA
Liliana Tolchinsky, University of Barcelona, Spain
Mark Torrance, Staffordshire University, UK
Annie Piolat, University of Aix-en-Provence, France
Païvi Tynjala, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Carel van Wijk, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Kluwer Academic Publishers continues to publish the international book series Studies
in Writing, founded by Amsterdam University Press. The intended readers are all those
interested in the foundations of writing and learning and teaching processes in written
composition. The series aims at multiple perspectives of writing, education and texts.
Therefore authors and readers come from various fields of research, from curriculum
development and from teacher training. Fields of research covered are cognitive, socio-
cognitive and developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, text linguistics, curriculum
development, instructional science. The series aim to cover theoretical issues, supported
by empirical research, quantitative as well as qualitative, representing a wide range of
nationalities. The series provides a forum for research from established researchers and
welcomes contributions from young researchers.
Teaching Academic Writing
in European Higher
Education
Edited by
Lennart Björk
University of Göteborg, Sweden
Gerd Bräuer
Emory University, Atlanta, U.S.A. and
University of Education, Freiburg, Germany
Lotte Rienecker
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
and
Peter Stray Jörgensen
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK,BOSTON, DORDRECHT, LONDON, MOSCOW
eBookISBN: 0-306-48195-2
Print ISBN: 1-4020-1208-X
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE v
David A. Russell
TEACHING ACADEMIC WRITING IN EUROPEAN HIGHER 1
EDUCATION: AN INTRODUCTION
Lennart Björk, Gerd Bräuer, Lotte Rienecker & Peter Stray Jörgensen
PART ONE: TEXT AND WRITER
GETTING STARTED: ACADEMIC WRITING IN THE FIRST YEAR 19
OF A UNIVERSITY EDUCATION
Otto Kruse
TEXT TYPES, TEXTUAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND ACADEMIC 29
WRITING ABILITY
Lennart Björk
TEACHING ACADEMIC WRITING TO INTERNATIONAL 41
STUDENTS: INDIVIDUAL TUTORING AS A SUPPLEMENT TO
WORKSHOPS
Stella Büker
THE GENRE IN FOCUS, NOT THE WRITER: USING MODEL 59
EXAMPLES IN LARGE-CLASS WORKSHOPS
Lotte Rienecker & Peter Stray Jörgensen
A GOOD PAPER MAKES A CASE: TEACHING ACADEMIC 75
WRITING THE MACRO-TOULMIN WAY
Signe Hegelund & Christian Kock
RETHINKING FEEDBACK: ASYMMETRY IN DISGUISE 87
Mary Scott & Kelly Coate
THE (IM)POSSIBILITIES IN TEACHING UNIVERSITY WRITING 101
IN THE ANGLO-AMERICAN TRADITION WHEN DEALING WITH
CONTINENTAL STUDENT WRITERS
Lotte Rienecker & Peter Stray Jörgensen
HELPING DOCTORAL STUDENTS TO FINISH THEIR THESES 113
Kirsti Lonka
IV
PART TWO: TEACHING ACADEMIC WRITING IN CONTEXT
CENTRES FOR WRITING & READING – BRIDGING THE GAP 135
BETWEEN UNIVERSITY AND SCHOOL EDUCATION
Gerd Bräuer
WRITING AT NORWEGIAN UNIVERSITIES IN AN 151
INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
Olga Dysthe
CONTACTS – CONFLICTS – COOPERATION 165
Andrea Frank, Stefanie Haacke & Christina Tente
AN ANALYSIS OF THE DISCOURSE OF STUDY SUPPORT AT 175
THE LONDON INSTITUTE
Susan Orr & Margo Blythman
CREATING A BASIS FOR A FACULTY-ORIENTED WRITING 185
PROGRAMME
Femke Kramer, Jacqueline van Kruiningen & Henrike Padmos
IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES FOR STUDY SUPPORT 195
Margo Blythman, Joan Mullin, Jane Milton & Susan Orr
REFERENCES 209
AUTHOR INDEX 223
SUBJECT INDEX 227
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 231
PREFACE
DAVID R. RUSSELL
English Department of Iowa State University, U.S.A.
I was fortunate to attend, as a visitor from the U.S., the first European Association
for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW) conference in 2001 at Groningen.
I was struck by the similarities in the challenges higher education faces on both sides
of the Atlantic in terms of developing students’ academic writing, and students’
learning through writing. It is indeed an international ‘problem.’ But I was equally
struck by the profound differences in responding to these challenges – among na-
tions, institutions, disciplines, and even within disciplines. The essays in this ex-
traordinary volume address a growing demand for help with academic writing, on
the part of students and academic staff alike. And they do so in ways that bring fresh
approaches, not only to Europeans, who have only recently begun to study academic
writing, but also to researchers and academic staff in the U.S., where we have a cen-
tury-old tradition of attention to the problem – but are much in need of these fresh
approaches.
Academic writing has become a ‘problem’ in higher education – all around the
world – because higher education sits smack between two contradictory pressures.
On one end, far more students (and far more diverse students) come streaming into
higher education – bringing in a far greater diversity of linguistic resources (often
interpreted as ‘standards are falling,’ as Frank, Haacke & Tente point out). On the
other end, students are leaving higher education to enter far more specialised work-
places. As the kinds of organisations and the jobs in them that students will enter
have become far more specialised, the writing has become more specialised as well.
Students need a greater diversity of linguistic resources to successfully enter profes-
sions and institutions. And they will have to have a greater linguistic and rhetorical
flexibility to transform those professions and institutions as the pace of change in-
creases – and with it the specialisation of writing. In the centre, often unacknow-
ledged, sits writing – an immensely greater diversity of writing, the myriad genres of
communication that disciplines and professions and institutions create to organise
their work. So in the reports of various ministries and commissions, higher educa-
tion is increasingly charged with developing students’ writing.
Yet our understanding of writing has not caught up with these changes, in large
part because academic writing has rarely been treated as an intellectually interesting
VI DAVID RUSSELL
object of study, much less teaching. In the institutional environments where we aca-
demic staff live and work, and in the wider political environments where ministers
and commissions and the public at large live, writing is too-often assumed to be a
single, easily-generalisable set of skills learned once and for all, usually at an early
age – like riding a bicycle.
This is one aspect of what Brian Street has called the autonomous view of liter-
acy. That one set of writing skills fits all, regardless of the discipline, the profession,
and the genre. There do seem to be some commonalities in academic writing across
the curriculum, and in the challenges students face in developing their writing (as
this volume shows). Yet a growing body of research suggests that writing is not a
single generalisable set of skills, but a very complex, developing accomplishment,
central to the specialised work of the myriad disciplines of higher education, and to
the professions and institutions students will enter and eventually transform. Each
new specialised genre a student or new employee encounters means learning new
strategies – strategies that have become second nature to academic staff, and are
therefore merely expected, uninteresting.
Our ways of talking about writing development in academic culture at large have
for so long centred on surface features (poor spelling and so on) or on broad gener-
alisations (students should write more clearly and coherently) that we do not have a
widely shared vocabulary in higher education for talking about writing development
in higher education. We tend to be like the blind men and the elephant in John Jeffry
Saxe’s poem. One blind man had hold of the tail and thought the elephant like a
spear, another the leg and thought the elephant like a tree, and so on. Each of us
thinks he or she is describing the same thing when we talk about writing, or the es-
say, or an argument, or clarity. We do not realise how different our expectations are.
As Lea and Street from the U.K. have found (as well as researchers in North Amer-
ica) when one asks academic staff to point to features in students’ writing that make
it ‘poor’, there is very little agreement in what they point to. Thus an important
theme in this volume is creating an intellectually interesting discussion of writing
and learning – and serious research on it.
For this reason, it is refreshing to see many of these essays take very seriously
the question of what academic writing is, its varied forms and functions within par-
ticular disciplines, institutions, and education systems (unlike many popular U.S.
approaches). Analyses of genres, text types, and discipline-specific argument help us
understand the difficulties students have in writing, difficulties that are too often
invisible to academic staff – and of course students.
Academic writing, in this view, is not invisible, something that students should
have learned elsewhere, but rather intellectually interesting – something partnerships
across the curriculum can form around. The ‘bad’ writing of many students becomes
not merely a deficit to be remedied, but a necessary stage in students’ understanding
and entering powerful institutions and professions. Focusing on writing becomes a
way of focusing on the methods, practices, and social-psychological processes of
intellectual inquiry, of innovation, and of learning. The study of academic writing is
thus part of deep higher education reform.
Many of the essays in this volume offer new ways of addressing this central prob-
lem: How to simultaneously raise the awareness of students, specialised academic
PREFACE VII
staff, and policy makers to writing’s powerful and varied role in learning, teaching,
work, and citizenship, while at the same time integrating efforts to develop writing
into the specialised studies and activities writing serves – instead of holding aca-
demic writing development on the invisible margins of academic work.
Raising consciousness of writing through co-operation among academic staff is cru-
cial, whether through student support units working with academic staff in the disci-
plines, or through courses in academic writing that are designed with a close eye to
the demands of writing in the disciplines. In this way it is possible to reveal tacit
knowledge, develop a shared vocabulary for discussing writing, and contribute
widespread reform of higher education at a much more profound level than the min-
istries and commissions can ever achieve with top-down structural reforms.
Many of the essays here speak to the difficulties of this slow, bottom-up educa-
tional renewal. Each department or faculty, each institution, each national system
will have to evolve its own ways of approaching academic writing development.
And in this volume are many ideas for constructing useful cross-curricular dialogue
and collaborative pedagogical projects.
In that regard, this volume also shows the value of cross-national comparisons
and dialogue for building collaborations. All of these studies have been influenced
(more or less, positively or negatively) by North American research traditions. But
each also grows out of its own institutional, regional, and national roots. It is crucial
for researchers and program developers in academic writing to sometimes see with
others’ eyes the problems they confront. As I found in co-editing, with David Foster,
Writing and Learning in Cross-National Perspective: Transitions from Secondary to
Higher Education (NCTE Press, 2002), cross-national dialogue is most valuable not
in providing solutions but in ‘making the familiar strange’ (as Clifford Geertz says),
helping researchers and program developers to adapt not adopt practices.
For example, for over a century now we in the U.S. have mainly tried to deal
with the problem of student writing by requiring students to take a general writing
course during their first year – with very mixed success. This volume shows that the
debate over general versus discipline-based writing development is very much alive
in Europe, which has no tradition of ‘first-year composition.’ But even where writ-
ing is taught special, separatecourses in Europe, in large classes, it is done so with a
much greater attention to the demands of writing in the disciplines than is usually
the case in the U.S. We in the U.S. have much to learn from European research and
pedagogical innovations, borne out of very different educational systems. Similarly,
the U.S. efforts over the last 20 years to research and teach writing in the disciplines
through co-operating with academic staff (called in the U.S. Writing Across the Cur-
riculum) have influenced much European research and program development. And I
look forward very much to a fruitful transatlantic dialogue as we in the U.S. learn
from European research and pedagogical innovations.
This volume will bring to light – for Europeans as well as North Americans and
others world wide – the interest and importance of academic writing. And it intro-
duces the young but strong national research traditions that make writing visible,
and offer new prospects for higher education reform world-wide. I look forward