School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemMultiple perspectives on group work in a multilingual context(John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2022)Abstract: Group assignments are widely used in higher education for a range of educational reasons. Although there is a large body of research on the merits of group work and factors that may contribute to successful group work, less is known about students’ and teachers’ perspectives, particularly when groups are composed of students from diverse linguistic backgrounds. The current qualitative study investigated students’ and teachers’ perspectives on group assignments in a Master of Applied Linguistics program offered by a leading research university in Australia. The program has predominantly English as an additional language (EAL) students. Teachers and students in four graduate subjects that involved group assignments were interviewed for their views and reflections. Analysis of the interview data revealed similarities and differences in perspectives in five main areas – group work benefits and challenges, group formation and assessment, and the need for pre-implementation training. The findings highlight the need for teachers to promote open discussion about the purposes and merits of group work, both pedagogical and social.
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Item'Adjacent worlds': An analysis of a genre at the intersection of academic and professional communities(ELSEVIER, 2016-06)Two concepts - genre and discourse community - have been at the core of discussions about language and learning within the disciplines since John Swales integrated the two into ESP pedagogy. While in his earlier work, Swales (1990) proposed a relationship of genres 'belonging' to discourse communities, he later (e.g. 1998) understood discourse communities as sometimes cohering around genres, suggesting a more open-ended relationship between the concepts. This paper takes up the issue of this relationship, and reports on a recurrent event in architecture education. The data is drawn from a project on postgraduate design studio pedagogy at a major Australian university. The focus was the weekly activities in a studio taught by a senior academic. Working primarily within a rhetorical genre framework, this paper explores the desk-crit genre from two angles - its evolution over time and its performance in a contemporary studio session. The paper shows how a 'situated genre analysis' contributes to an understanding of the interconnections, tensions, different discourses of the academic and professional architecture communities, characterized in this paper as 'adjacent worlds'. The paper concludes that this type of analysis helps us understand genre as a space in which multiple discourse communities interact.
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ItemCommunities of practice in higher education: A challenge from the discipline of architecture(Elsevier, 2012-03-01)Uncritically applying a community of practice model has become rather prevalent in higher education settings (Lea, 2005). This paper attempts to return to the spirit of Lave and Wenger's earlier (1991) work and to use a community of practice perspective as a heuristic to analyse participation patterns in a final year design studio in the discipline of architecture. The data consisted of videotapes, transcriptions, and interviews with participants, and showed that students' opportunities to rehearse expert roles relevant to the profession were somewhat limited. Instead of an extended community of participants engaged collaboratively in joint activities, patterns of interaction between the instructor and the students were typically hierarchical. Despite this, the students felt that their participation in this class was a legitimate part of their trajectories towards membership in the professional community of practice, underlining the complexity of higher education contexts. The paper suggests that the usefulness of the concept of community of practice to higher education lies primarily in treating classes as one of many overlapping more or less formal communities students may be involved in.
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ItemSelling Your Design: Oral Communication Pedagogy in Design Education(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2005-01)Good design skills are the main focus of assessment practices in design education and are evaluated primarily by drawings and models. In some settings, design studio pedagogy tends to reflect only these content-oriented assessment priorities, with minimal attention paid to the development of oral communication skills. Yet, in many professional contexts, architects need both sets of skills: design competence and the ability to articulate designs for an audience. This paper explores two approaches to oral communication pedagogy in design education - a public speaking approach and a genre-based linguistic approach - and then applies one particular linguistic approach to novice design studio presentations. Based on the findings of this study, we argue that the linguistic, genre-based approach can best offer language-based, discipline-specific description of performance strategies, rhetorical structures, and the linguistic realizations of such structures. Such information can contribute to improved pedagogical practice in the design studio.
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ItemThe integration of images into architecture presentations: A semiotic analysis(Intellect, 2006)In the discipline of architecture, images are central in the development of ideas and the communication of designs. This article focuses on the role of visual communication in a spoken academic genre – the architecture presentation. A set of analytical techniques drawn from linguistics (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996) was used to investigate ten first-year architecture presentations in an attempt to understand first, the role of images and second, how novice students cope with the demands of a multimodal semiosis, namely the integrating of images, words and actions into a unified speech. The analysis was focused on three areas: the conventions and rhetorical effects of individual images; the composition of simultaneously displayed images; and the interaction between speakers and their images. The third stage was pivotal in distinguishing successful from unsuccessful presentations. It is argued that a semiotic analysis of architectural presentations can contribute to improved pedagogical practice in the architecture studio, and has broader implications for an understanding of visual-oriented discourses.
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ItemChristine M. Tardy. Beyond convention: Genre innovation in academic writing(John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2018-12-31)
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ItemConstructing knowledge and identity in a professionally-oriented discipline What's at stake in genre variation?(JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING CO, 2018)Abstract Central to rhetorical genre theory is the notion of ‘rhetorical situation’ (Bitzer, 1968), which emphasizes context as sociohistorically situated. In the analysis of academic genres, this notion helps us to think of the contexts that genres respond to as dynamic, varying across time and space, rather than as stable and unified disciplinary discourse communities. From this social perspective, academic disciplines are theorized as including a great number and range of rhetorical situations (Paré, 2014), and the idea of genre variation becomes of increasing scholarly interest. In this study, rhetorical genre theory and the concept of ‘rhetorical situation’ provide a framing for the analysis of a recurrent discursive event. The event is the design studio ‘crit’, a weekly presentation and review of students’ in-progress design ideas and artifacts, through which the teaching and learning of architectural design is enacted in the academy. In a professionally-oriented discipline such as architecture, curriculum genres often need to negotiate tensions between the academy and the profession. Applied to such settings, a rhetorical genre approach invites us to think about whose values and knowledge dominate, and who has the authority to adapt the genre to suit its changing needs. This paper reports on interviews with five design teachers (one senior academic and four professional practitioners). The interviews reveal how the teachers take up the crit genre in diverse ways, including what counts as knowledge and competence in the design studio and how this knowledge is best taught, learnt and assessed. The paper concludes that students would benefit from a genre pedagogy that focuses on genre variation, its sources and its consequences, as well as genre conventionality.
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ItemYou can't be Shakespearean talking about the institutionalisation of sex offenders: Creativity and creative practices of multilingual doctoral writers(PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2019-03)The enigma of creativity is rarely discussed in doctoral education, yet it nestles snugly against the term originality, a key criterion for thesis assessment. This article engages with this occluded topic through an investigation of how four L2/multilingual PhD candidates studying in the Faculty of Arts in an Australian university perceive the presence of creativity in their doctoral writing. It also explores how and when these writers feel they can be creative in their writing practices. Methodological approaches included a workshop program designed around the concept of creativity for Arts doctoral students, followed by individual and group interviews. The findings indicate that while each doctoral writer actively engaged with the idea of creativity they also encountered social, cultural, political and other environmental barriers. These constraints often led to a lack of writer agency which, in turn, led to self-censorship. Nevertheless, several enablers to their creativity were uncovered with participants recognising the usefulness of learning specific writing practices and other strategies to allow creativity to emerge in their work. The article also offers a model of creativity that may provide a useful starting point for others to use in understanding the highly complex role creativity holds for doctoral writing.
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ItemDeveloping an authorial voice in PhD multilingual student writing: The reader's perspective(PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2019-03)Most scholars agree about the importance of an authorial voice in academic writing. There is also a growing body of research on how voice is manifested in texts at a word and phrase level, but relatively little that investigates readers’ perceptions of authorial voice (the effect on the reader) or the development of voice over time. In our study, we explored these issues by eliciting the views of five supervisors as they read and evaluated authorial voice, in the texts of three PhD students, writing in English as an additional language (EAL). We used two sets of comparable texts written by the students relatively early and near the end of their PhD to address the issue of voice development. A thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews revealed what constituted evidence of authorial voice for the five expert readers. All were adamant that an authorial voice is crucial in the writing of PhD students, but found the task of defining and locating voice in the students’ texts, and in discerning progress in students’ abilities to articulate a convincing authorial voice very challenging. Of interest was the finding that the supervisors’ language backgrounds, disciplinary specialities, personal histories, and preferences shaped their impressions of voice. These differences in perceptions of what voice entails held by supervisors from the same broad discipline raise questions about how we approach the teaching and assessment of voice.
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ItemReview of Corcoran, Englander & Muresan (2019): Pedagogies and Policies for Publishing Research in English: Local initiatives supporting international scholars(John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2021-08-02)