European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing

7th conference: June 27-29, 2013 Budapest, Hungary

University English is No-One’s First Language: Learning the Genres of Postgraduate Writing

(by Nigel A. Caplan with Christine Feak in absentia)

PowerPoint Slides: EATAW University English

Links:

• Bibliography of resources on genre in ESL/(post-)graduate writing
• University of Delaware ELI
• University of Michigan ELI
• MICUSP (Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers)
• Compleat Lexical Tutor
• Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)
• AntConc (concordancing software)
• Nigel’s textbook, Grammar Choices for Graduate and Professional Writers (Michigan, 2012)
• Chris’s many EAP textbooks, including Swales & Feak, Academic Writing for Graduate Students (Michigan, 2012)

Join the Graduate Educators’ Roundtable online discussion group (more details)

Abstract:

As postgraduate education becomes more broadly accessible, the need for effective strategies for teaching the language and genres of scholarly writing to masters and PhD students in their first and/or second languages has become more urgent (Cooper & Bikowski, 2007). This workshop leads participants through a toolbox of activities which they will be encouraged to adapt to their own teaching in any language. The guiding principle is genre-based pedagogy, which sees writing as embedded in contexts. Non-mainstream students need to identify, analyze, and produce the powerful genres of their discipline, defined by their purpose, staging, and lexicogrammar.

After an overview of genre-based pedagogy, drawing on English for Academic Purposes (Swales, 1990) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Rose & Martin, 2012), the presenters will guide participants through these activities:

1. Identifying genres: Powerful yet accessible techniques for individualized needs analysis by recognizing, describing, and deconstructing such genres as research papers, proposals, and discussion board posts.

2. Building and using a mini corpus: Students build individual corpora of writing in their fields, analyze them using freely available software, and compare their writing to the corpora.

3. Collaborative writing: Strategies for pair and group work, from planning to peer review to whole-class joint construction.

4. Discussion: Selecting and implementing these techniques.

The presenters hope to start a dialogue between North American/Australian genre traditions and European scholarship and praxis. Scholarly writing is always a second language, and access to the linguistic and cultural capital of the academy is critical for postgraduate success (Bourdieu, 1986).