School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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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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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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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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ItemThe myth of job readiness? Written communication, employability, and the 'skills gap' in higher education(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2017)
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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)