School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemStudents' Accounts of Their First-Year Undergraduate Academic Writing Experience: Implications for the Use of the CEFR(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2018)This article addresses the suitability of the CEFR as the basis for decisions about the readiness of individuals to engage in academic writing tasks in undergraduate university courses, and as a guide to progress. The CEFR offers potentially relevant general scales and subscales, but also more specific subscales for writing in the academic context. However, recent challenges to traditional views of academic writing have potential implications for assessment frameworks such as the CEFR when they are used to identify readiness for, and progress in, academic study. In this article we explore the views of students on what it means to “do” academic writing. Questionnaires, interviews, and short reflective texts were used to investigate the changing perceptions of first-year undergraduate students at an Australian university. The analysis of student data confirms the reality of the more complex view of academic writing suggested by the recent literature. The article then considers what implications this has for the adequacy of the definitions provided in the CEFR. It suggests that the CEFR descriptors underrepresent the complexity of the challenges of academic writing, particularly its cognitive demands. A new and rather different approach will be required to inform assessments used to manage the admission of students in`to academic writing contexts and the monitoring of their progress.
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ItemBecoming an applied linguist A study of authorial voice in international PhD students' confirmation reports(JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING CO, 2016)The need to establish an authorial identity in academic discourse has been considered to be critical for all doctoral students by academic writing teachers and researchers for some time. For students for whom English is an additional language (EAL) in particular, the challenges are not only how to communicate this identity effectively in English, but also how to develop from a writer who simply ventriloquizes the voices of scholarly others to an author who writes with authority and discipline-specific rhetorical knowledge. In the current project, we explored how three EAL students constructed authorial voices through the use of personal and impersonal forms of self-representation and evaluative stance in the Introduction sections of their written PhD Confirmation Reports. Our findings indicate that students combined a complex range of linguistic and rhetorical resources, such as integral and non-integral attribution of sources and attitudinal markers of stance, in their quest to project credible authorial identities as Applied Linguists. We also discovered the effect of these resources on readers to be cumulative. We recommend further research, including interviews with students, supervisors and examiners from across the disciplines, to explore and extend the scope of the present study.
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ItemBecoming an applied linguist A study of authorial voice in international PhD students' confirmation reports(JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING CO, 2016-01-01)The need to establish an authorial identity in academic discourse has been considered to be critical for all doctoral students by academic writing teachers and researchers for some time. For students for whom English is an additional language (EAL) in particular, the challenges are not only how to communicate this identity effectively in English, but also how to develop from a writer who simply ventriloquizes the voices of scholarly others to an author who writes with authority and discipline-specific rhetorical knowledge. In the current project, we explored how three EAL students constructed authorial voices through the use of personal and impersonal forms of self-representation and evaluative stance in the Introduction sections of their written PhD Confirmation Reports. Our findings indicate that students combined a complex range of linguistic and rhetorical resources, such as integral and non-integral attribution of sources and attitudinal markers of stance, in their quest to project credible authorial identities as Applied Linguists. We also discovered the effect of these resources on readers to be cumulative. We recommend further research, including interviews with students, supervisors and examiners from across the disciplines, to explore and extend the scope of the present study.
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ItemFeedback on writing in the supervision of postgraduate students: Insights from the work of Vygotsky and Bakhtin(ASSOC ACAD LANGUAGE LEARNING, 2014)
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ItemWhat our students tell us: Perceptions of three multilingual students on their academic writing in first year(PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2015-12)