1. Annual one-day seminar Research, scholarship and practice
in the area of Academic Literacies
Friday 30 June 2006
University of Westminster
The Centre for Higher Education Research,
the Educational Initiative Centre,
Polylang EAP and the Academic Writing Centre

2. An Investigation of Genres of Assessed Writing
in British Higher Education
RES
Warwick - Reading - Oxford Brookes
This is an ESRC funded project for , so we’re over half way through and happy to have this opportunity to share what we’re doing and get some feedback at this stage.

3. Current Researchers
Hilary Nesi, Sheena Gardner, Jasper Holmes, Sian Alsop, Laura Powell,
CELTE, Warwick
Paul Thompson, Alois Heuboeck
SLALS, Reading
Paul Wickens, Signe Ebeling, Maria Leedham
ICELS, Oxford Brookes
Educational linguist…
From an academic literacies perspective, at university my first degree at St Andrews was in Linguistics & logic & metaphysics, with some French, German, and Maths in there too.
I then went to the States and contextualised this with psycolinguistic, soicolinguistic, and anthropological linguistics.
My doctorate was in theoretical, functional linguistics, but when linguistics departments were axed in the UK, I moved into EAP, taught EAP to biochemists, medical students, and science in general in Scotland and then Sudan.
Moved to Canada and worked with all aspects of ESL from admissions, to programs for refugees, to teacher education for ESL in the schools.
Set up a writing programme with several initial modules followed by writing across the disciplines – involved working with professors across disciplines.
And am now at Warwick coordinating our BA programme and MA in ESP.
So I have worked in different capacities across the disciplines.
Laura is a second year undergraduate student of English literature. She is one of 24 undergraduate research scholars at Warwick doing a project which is linked to a staff research project. So she’s coming from one of the disciplines with which I have little first hand experience.

4. Develop a Corpus of British Academic Written English (BAWE)
Project Aims
Develop a Corpus of British Academic Written English (BAWE)
Characterise proficient student writing across disciplines and years
The corpus will be a corpus of assessed student writing – we are interested in student assignments.
We will include only ‘good’ student writing
And only assignments that are mostly writing.

5. BAWE Corpus Grid 1 2 3 4 Arts & Humanities Life Sciences
Physical Sciences
Social Sciences
By 4 ‘years’ - roughly 1st, 2nd and 3rd yr undergraduate and taught masters coursework.
4 disciplinary groupings

6. The probable 28 disciplines
Arts and Humanities
Applied Linguistics, Archaeology, Classics, Comparative American Studies, English Studies, History, Philosophy
Life Sciences
Agriculture, Biochemistry, Food Science and Technology, Health and Social Care, Medical Science, Plant Biosciences, Psychology
Physical Sciences
Architecture, Chemistry, Computer Science, Cybernetics & Electronic Engineering, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics
Social Sciences
Anthropology, Business, Economics, Hospitality, Leisure and Tourism Management, Law, Publishing, Sociology
A 60-page pdf document on JACS can be found via the UCAS website:
CodeDisciplinary GroupingJACS letters
AH Arts & Humanities Q, R, T, V, W, (X?)
ML Medicine & Life Sciences A, B, C, D
PS Physical Sciences & Engineering F, G, H, J, K
SS Social Studies L, M, N, P, (X?)

7. of 4 different assignments = 3000+ assignments,
Planned Corpus Size
from 28 disciplines
from each of 4 ‘years’
6-8 instances
of 4 different assignments
= assignments,
An estimated 10 million words

8. Four Research Strands Corpus development
Discourse community perspectives
Multidimensional analysis of register
SFL analysis of genres
I’ll outline what each of these involves, so that you undestand the scope of the project, then Laura and I will report on findings from tutor and student interviews, and then we’ll open the floor for discussion.

9. 1. Corpus Development Collect assignments
Tag files and prepare for submission to Oxford Text Archive
Develop interfaces for end users
First collect the assignments – not as easy as it sounds.. And we have devised many diverse strategies for this -
Then mark up the files - Eberling and Heuboeck (2006) describes the process and some of the issues involved.
Ideas for interfaces and access to the corpus at present are: (see next slide)

10. Access to the Corpus
?Full texts available from the Oxford Text Archive
?On-line search engine to allow for concordancing with limited co-text
?Shared portal with BASE, MICASE, MICUSP
?Full texts available as pdf files from the Oxford Text Archive
Probably to named researchers – you’d have to register/ specifically request, and state what uses you wanted to make of the files etc.
?On-line search engine to allow for concordancing with limited co-text
Currently exploring Sketchengine for BASE, but there will be a widely available facility to search the corpus in this way.
Hilary has been talking with Michigan about developing at least a shared portal with the parallel American English corpora, and possibly more. No firm decisions here yet.
So that’s on the Corpus Development strand

11. 2. Discourse Community a. Departmental documentation
b. Tutor interviews
c. Student interviews
d. Assignment submission forms
The aim in this second strand of the research is to characterise the genres of assessed writing from emic perspectives, from the perspectives of those in the discourse communities, by looking at departmental documentation, and interviewing tutors and students.
I shall talk more about tutor interviews in a minute, and then Laura will talk about student interviews.
Before that, just an outline of the other two research strands

12. 3. Multidimensional Register Analysis
Biber’s dimensions; lexico-grammatical features
Feature analysis of the academic corpus
search for clusters of distinctive features by
<level, <disc, <discGroup and <type
Biber’s dimensions differentiated, for instance, conversational English, newspaper English and academic written English along dimensions such as narrative; orality; contextualisation etc. By looking at the lexico-grammatical features that cluster in such registers.
e.g. Stance dimension – pick out all the stance nouns, verbs, adverbs, etc. and chart how much evaluation or stance there is by year, discipine, etc.
1.  Modal and semi-modal verbs    (See LGSWE, pp. 483ff.) 2.  Stance adverbs   (See LGSWE, pp ; ) Epistemic: 
Certainty:  actually, always, certainly, definitely, indeed, inevitably,              Likelihood:  apparently, evidently, kind of, most cases, Attitude:  amazingly, astonishingly, conveniently, curiously, disturbingly,
Style:   accordingly, according to, confidentially, figuratively, frankly, 3.  Complement clauses controlled by stance verbs, adjectives, or nouns

13. 4. Systemic Functional Genres
School history genres
Analytical exposition:
(Background)^ Thesis^ Arguments^ Thesis Reinforcement
Analytical discussion:
(Background)^ Issue^ Arguments^ Position
Challenge:
(Background)^ Arguments^ Anti-Thesis
In this strand we plan a detailed analysis of certain genres, based on the Australian genre work, which looks for generic stages, and their purpose, together with the moves and lexico-grammatical features that typify them.
This is from work by Coffin, e.g. Veel and Coffin, Unsworth, …
So for school history, for instance, Coffin identified 3 argumentative genres: which are differentiated by purpose – to challenge or discuss for instance – and by stages.
So that’s a project overview.
I’d now like to turn to the tutor interviews. Unless you’d like five minutes of questions now on this part?

14. Tutor Interviews
What role does assignment writing play in your department?
What different types of written assignment do you set your students?
What are the main differences between these types?
In what ways does student writing progress?
What do you value / dislike in student writing?
We conducted semi-structured interviews so far with 55 academics from Warwick and Brookes, usually starting with a director of studies who could give us an overview of assignments in their department, then moving to tutors of at least one core module, and of another module we were collecting from.
The findings will probably not surprise many of you here:

15. Essays All assign essays ‘Essay’ has many meanings….
All tutors we interviewed said their department regularly assigned essays, all except Physics, who stopped assigning essays last year.
Some of their characterisations of essays are:

16. Essays have a basic structure
Introduction, body, conclusion
(Biological Sciences)
Introduction, logical sequence of argument, conclusion (Medicine)
Argument, counter-argument, conclusion (Hospitality & Tourism)
They have a basic structure, but this structure differs across assignments and disciplines.

17. Compared to other assignment types
The structure of essays is less prescribed (Theatre Studies)
Greater scope .. in terms of what they’re writing about (Engineering)
An essay is generally more ‘rangy’, with a freer structure (Law)
Essays have more flexibility than practical reports, and may address only a subset of the classic RA (Psychology)
More open-ended, less structured investigation (Hospitality)
Notice that for Psychology, an essay may take the shape of a classic Research Article – by which is meant with Introduction – Methods – Results and Discussion. IMRD
Remember these are tutor labels, not ours.

18. Essays involve critical thinking
‘A chance to show .. that you can think deeply about a subject’ (Anthropology)
Give more scope for originality (Psychology)
‘The traditional Law essay would probably take the form of a critical discussion’
‘An essay has got to be an argument of some sort ... not simply reportage or narrative’ (Theatre Studies)
So essays are set in all disciplines where we interviewed, and they are predominant in some – for instance, English, History and Philosophy – where they may vary in length from 800 to 8000 words
In other disciplines, they are set alongside different assignment types
For instance, in Engineering many different types are set which allowed tutors to more easily explain the differences between them.

19. Engineering assignments:
Essays
Laboratory reports
Project reports
Reflective journals
Posters (e.g. for transport museum)
Summaries of analysis + recommendations
Site investigation reports (both factual and interpretative)
Funding proposals
Business plans
Essays and lab reports are written for essentially pedagogic purposes – to demonstrate and extend student learning
Project reports on group projects may involve original research and are written up as academic articles.
Reflective journals on the process of doing the group project are designed to encourage self-awareness and now forms part of the PDP requirements.
Posters are examples of writing for lay audiences – such as children in a transport museum
The remaining assignment types are written as professional genres – in interpreting site investigation details, students have to be aware of the legal aspects of writing any recommendations made to clients. Funding proposals have to be written to persuade funders of the value of the projects, and so on.
Table 2 on the handout gives examples of the spread of assignments by disciplines – using the departmental labels.
As we have seen, these labels can be misleading, and our interviews suggested that assignments could be grouped according to their general pedagogic purpose, the extent to which they imitate research academic articles, and the extent to which they imitate professional writing.
So many essays and lab reports would be examples of pedagogic genres written for broadly educational purposes of demonstrating learning and thinking.

20. Published Academic Research
‘Over time, student writing should approximate ever more closely to the writing that academics submit for publication in learned/scientific journals’ (Economics).
student writing should conform to ‘the style you’d expect in a research paper’ - ‘publishable in style, but not in content’ ( Food Sciences)
Biology students are advised to ‘write in the style of current opinion journals’.
Physics expects students ‘to write a scientific paper – as might be published in a scientific journal for an audience of their peers’.
We have already seen that Psychology expects student essays to imitate the classic RA structure,
One tutor said that in Psychology practical reports, project reports and essays are all to be written in the (IMRD) style of the classic research article, and must adhere to the conventions of a publishable scientific paper.
Similar emphasis on moving towards producing publishable academic-research writing are found in other disciplines (read quotes).
This last comment from physics suggests that the aim is not generally for students to publish,
only a minority of undergraduate students reach publication standard (psychology) although
‘many year three essays are of publishable quality’. (Biochemistry)
But rather that published academic research articles are good models for students to approximate.
The third main group we observed are professional.

21. Professional Writing
Publishing project proposals and letters to authors, in the persona of a publisher.
Case reports (patient description + management plan) assess competence to progress as a medical practitioner.
Demonstration and analysis of computer coding (‘preparing students for real life’)
‘problem questions’ apply the law ‘rather as barristers and solicitors have to do’.
We have not included ‘professional academic’ writing here, because the issues raised seemed rather different.
In this professional writing, students are positioned as professionals in their writing. The rhetoric and structure have to be as they would be in professional contexts and they are assessed, at least partially, from professional perspectives – although here too there is variation in the extent to which the content is expected to be at professional standards. As Lea and Stierer (2000:9) point out, there is inherent tension between the discourse requirements of the professional and the academic communities.
Thus the role of theoretical / academic respectability vs practical relevance also becomes an issue. The two extremes are shown here:

22. Disciplinary differences:
‘education is a value in itself, and it’s part of a person’s development of selfhood …… it depresses me when students view it as a kind of grim vocationalism’ (Theatre Studies)
there is ‘little point’ in writing academic essays in some modules, as Publishing is a vocational degree and assignments ‘try to replicate what goes on’.
Not all professional or vocational disciplines follow Publishing, Tutors of Hospitality and Tourism, an ‘emergent’ discipline (Baynham 2000), seemed more concerned to emphasize the academic respectability of their programme, commenting on the need for students to grasp the link between practice and theory.
Perhaps it is concerns of transferable skills, and relevance, or perhaps it is as Evans and Abbott (1998) suggest a consequence of the rise of the staff development industry at universities (since 1991), They point out that innovation has often been promoted without any clear justification – much of the published material on alternative approaches to teaching and learning is not, they claim, based on findings from empirical research (1998:17). In our interviews, there seems to be a growing feeling that essays are not enough and some innovation is needed:

23. For some, the essay is limiting
‘The fact that essays are still used as the only mode by the majority of English literature assessors seems to me very limiting’ (English Studies)
‘We are a traditional department and we still use mainly essays and we’re very conscious that we would like to, and perhaps need to, do something about that’
(Sociology)
Or similarly from Psychology:
‘It has been the convention to use essays. I would like to break away from that’ (Psychology)
We observed four trends in the nature of assignments, from the perspective of the tutors we interviewed:

24. Crime fiction (Sociology)
a) Creative writing
Crime fiction (Sociology)
dramatic dissertation: playscript of the facts or trial of a legal case (Law)
There has not only been a perceived increase in the ‘academic respectability’ of creative writing within English and Theatre Studies, for instance, but we have also found this spreading to other disciplines.
For instance, in Crime and Deviance modules, students may write a short story that should also illustrate their understanding of crime and deviance.
In Law …
This playscript can be accompanied by a video, or can be acted out for fellow students and the tutor. It should also be accompanied by a reflection on the legal aspects of the case. This brings us to the second trend:

25. b) Reflective writing
Students produce original work and then evaluate it (Computing, English Studies, Theatre Studies)
Students write reflectively about their experiences during group work (Engineering, Hospitality & Tourism)
Students write reflectively about the educational value of a practical task (Anthropology)
Students reflect on past personal experiences (Medicine)
I have a feeling that when we come to analyse these assignments, we will find great variety in the nature and assessment of what we have loosely here called reflective writing
Nevertheless, the trend is clear, and has been picked up in the national PDP initiatives.

26. c) Empathy Writing
writing for school children, friends, museums, or newspapers (Physics, Biology, Mathematics and Engineering)
Lea and Street (2000:39) have coined the term ‘empathy writing’ for such new ways of communicating disciplines outside the academic community.
A rationale for such assignments is given by a philosophy tutor:
‘if they can explain the essence of a debate to a fellow student in the hall of residence who is not studying Philosophy, they have understood what they have read’,
Tutors in the sciences also pointed out that this is the kind of writing many physics or mathematics graduates will be doing in their working lives - so again – the eye on preparing for future working lives.

27. d) New Technologies Blogs
Website evaluations (Medicine, Theatre Studies)
Web-page design (Publishing)
Powerpoint presentations (Business and others)
I have mentioned blogs, I think earlier, as one mode of assessed writing.
Assessed writing may also be about multimodal texts – for instance evaluations of websites, which is a development from the book review genre, requiring different criteria.
In terms of producing assingments, tutors in publishing pointed out that Web-page design (Publishing) involves different skills (than traditional essays), and reportedly appeals to students who feel less comfortable with academic essay writing.
So these assignment types may well favour different types of student.
Hilary and I have written up these findings from tutor interviews in the paper listed at ‘forthcoming’ on your handout.
We now turn to the student perspectives. ….

28. Undergraduate Research Project:
Centre for English Language Teacher Education *
Laura Powell

29. Aims Student attitudes towards different genres of academic writing
& Objectives
Student attitudes towards different genres of academic writing
Eg, Essays, Lab Reports, Case Studies, Creative Sketches
How does the student know what is expected?

30. Interview 36 students Physical Sciences Physics Chemistry Engineering
Social Sciences Law Business Sociology
Arts English History Philosophy
Life Sciences Medicine Psychology Biological Sciences

31. What is the most important feature of an academic essay?

32. What is the most important feature of an academic essay?EX CL A CR S PR R B

33. Life Sciences
Social Sciences
Physical Sciences
Arts

34. Trigger Questions Structure Creativity or Originality
Is there a right answer?
How standardised is too standardised?

35. Medicine
Structure: &
Philosophy
“It’s proof, proof, proof. A fixed journey on a regimented path.”
“The more unique, the higher the mark. They don’t agree with set structures. They don’t agree with exams even.”

36. Social Sciences CL EX A R B
Structure

37. Structural Flexibility and Creativity
“Just argue for and against the title to provide as balanced a view as possible and to cover the subject matter in enough depth.”
Law, First Year

38. Structural Flexibility and Creativity
“It’s a means to an end. We have x-points and x-answer. It’s just a case of getting there really.”
Physics, Second Year

40. A-Levels
Feedback
Intuition
How do you know?
Website
Course Handbooks

41. Marker’s Subjectivity
I cater my essays to the first-marker
English Literature 3nd year
It’s easier to know what they want and write to them when you’ve read their papers and interests
Chemistry 4th year

42. Marker’s Subjectivity
“No, it doesn’t vary from marker to
marker. They have to follow a very
specific set of marking guidelines, you
see.”
Law, First Year

43. First Year
&
Finalists

44. Standardisation & “It’s taken a year of trial and error
First Year
&
Standardisation
Second Year
“It’s taken a year of trial and error
and I still don’t have an inkling
of an idea what they want. We need
guidance. It’s insufficient.”
1st year, Philosophy

45. First Year
&
Standardisation
Second Year
“To get beyond a 2:1, individuality is key. ‘This is what I want to say and that’s how I will say it.’ If we curb subjectivity, how would we deserve the marks?”
2nd year, Philosophy

46. Questions?
Your possible use of the corpus?