Academic writing

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Teaching academic writing

“Although models have been a mainstay of academic writing pedagogy for centuries, a recurrent critique has been that they control or limit student writing and misrepresent the affairs they claim to model. These insufficiencies notwithstanding, models are ubiquitous in the ordinary, practical world, and their usefulness to novices can easily go unnoticed by experts.” (MacBeth, 2009:1).

“Model texts, skeletal or otherwise, do offer the promise that if one follows them an ideal outcome will result. Leki (1995) found in her case studies of university-level English language learners that looking for such models and examples was a common coping strategy used by the students to survive the writing demands of their disciplinary courses [...] The shortcoming of such models or sample texts may well be their strongest recommendation to novices. They offer formal, generic representations of social practices that are far from generic or formally structured. They convey these practices not only as formal and structured, but stable, reliable, and vividly so. Yet other tasks and occasions will defeat the model's assurances, as the students later discover. These “false provisions” have something to do with the familiar critique of models as a curricular design. The criticisms are longstanding and foreshorten our interest in and appreciation for the work models do. In light of the materials presented here, we can see how the model text achieved what a pedagogy for novices must achieve: it must be vivid, evident, stable, and show its “parts.” But it achieves this accessibility for novices through the false representation of the social practices and conventions it represents.” (MacBeth, 2009:13).

Bibliography

Belcher,D. and A. Hirvela, (Eds) Academic writing in a second language: Essays on research and pedagogy, Ablex, Norwood, NJ.

• Brodkey, 1987 L. Brodkey, Academic writing as social practice, Temple University Press, Philadelphia (1987).

• Karen P. Macbeth, Deliberate false provisions: The use and usefulness of models in learning academic writing, Journal of Second Language Writing, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 15 October 2009, ISSN 1060-3743, DOI: 10.1016/j.jslw.2009.08.002

• Hyland, K. (2004) Disciplinary discourses: Social interactions in academic writing, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor (2004).

• Leki, I. (2007) Undergraduates in a second language: Challenges and complexities of academic literacy development, Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ (2007).

• Robert M. Dores, Ian W. Henderson, Autoplagiarism, citation rating, and skulduggery, General and Comparative Endocrinology, Volume 140, Issue 2, 15 January 2005, Page 85, ISSN 0016-6480, [http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ygcen.2004.12.001 DOI: 10.1016/j.ygcen.2004.12.001

• Macbeth, K. (2006). Diverse, unforeseen, and quaint difficulties: The sensible responses of novices learning to follow instructions in academic writing, Research in the Teaching of English 41 (2006), pp. 180–197.

• Shih, M. (1986). Content-based approaches to teaching academic writing, TESOL Quarterly 20 (1986), pp. 617–648. PDF

• Swales, J. and C. Feak, (2004). Academic writing for graduate students: Essential tasks and skills (2nd Ed.), University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor (2004).