This book brings together a variety of voices – students and teachers, journal editors and authors, writers from the global north and south – to interrogate the notion of risk as it applies to the production of academic writing. Risk-taking is viewed as a productive force in teaching, learning and writing, and one that can be used to challenge the silences and erasures inherent in academic tradition and convention. Widening participation and the internationalisation of higher education make questions of language, register, agency and identity in postgraduate writing all the more pressing, and this book offers a powerful argument against the further reinforcement of a ‘northern’ Anglophone understanding of knowledge and its production and dissemination. This volume will provide food-for-thought for postgraduate students and their supervisors everywhere.
This book brings together a variety of voices – students and teachers, journal editors and authors, writers from the global north and south – to interrogate the notion of risk as it applies to the production of academic writing. Risk-taking is viewed as a productive force in teaching, learning and writing, and one that can be used to challenge the silences and erasures inherent in academic tradition and convention. Widening participation and the internationalisation of higher education make questions of language, register, agency and identity in postgraduate writing all the more pressing, and this book offers a powerful argument against the further reinforcement of a ‘northern’ Anglophone understanding of knowledge and its production and dissemination. This volume will provide food-for-thought for postgraduate students and their supervisors everywhere.
Elegant data and ideas deserve elegant expression, argues Helen Sword in this lively guide to academic writing. For scholars frustrated with disciplinary conventions, and for specialists who want to write for a larger audience but are unsure where to begin, here are imaginative, practical, witty pointers that show how to make articles and books a pleasure to read—and to write. Dispelling the myth that you cannot get published without writing wordy, impersonal prose, Sword shows how much journal editors and readers welcome work that avoids excessive jargon and abstraction. Sword’s analysis of more than a thousand peer-reviewed articles across a wide range of fields documents a startling gap between how academics typically describe good writing and the turgid prose they regularly produce. Stylish Academic Writing showcases a range of scholars from the sciences, humanities, and social sciences who write with vividness and panache. Individual chapters take up specific elements of style, such as titles and headings, chapter openings, and structure, and close with examples of transferable techniques that any writer can master.
Writing is one of the most demanding tasks that academics and researchers face. In some disciplines we learn some of what we need to know to be productive, successful writers; but in other disciplines there is no training, support or mentoring of any kind.
Student writing has long been viewed as a problem in higher education in the UK. Moreover, the sector has consistently performed poorly in the National Student Survey with regard to assessment and feedback. Academics Engaging with Student Writing tackles these major issues from a new and unique angle, exploring the real-life experiences of academic teachers from different institutions as they set, support, read, respond to and assess assignments undertaken by undergraduate students. Incorporating evidence from post-1992 universities, Oxbridge, members of the Russell Group and others, this book examines working practices around student writing within the context of an increasingly market-oriented mass higher education system. Presenting a wealth of relevant examples from disciplines as diverse as History and Sports Science, Tuck makes extensive use of interviews, observations, texts and audio recordings in order to explore the perspectives of academic teachers who work with student writers and their texts. This book will be of interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of academic literacies, higher education, language and literacy, language in higher education, English for academic purposes and assessment. Furthermore, academic teachers with experience of this crucial aspect of academic labour will welcome Tuck’s pioneering work as an indispensable tool for making sense of their own engagement with student writers.
This book brings together the work of scholars from around the world UK, Pakistan, US, South Africa, Hungary, Korea, Mexico to illustrate and celebrate the many ways in which Roz Ivanic has advanced the academic study of writing. Focusing on writing in different formal contexts of education, from primary through to further and higher education in a range of national contexts, the twenty one original contributions in the book critically engage with theoretical and empirical issues raised in Ivanic's influential body of work. In their exploration of writers' struggles with the demands of dominant literacy the authors significantly extend understandings of writing practices in formal institutions. Organized around three themes central to Ivanic's work creativity and identity; pedagogy; and research methodologies the twelve chapters and nine personal and scholarly reflections reveal the powerful ways in which Ivanic's work has influenced thinking in the field of writing and continues to open up avenues for future questioning and research.
This book provides a comprehensive overview of approaches to academic literacy instruction and their underpinning theories, as well as a synthesis of the debate on academic literacy over the past 20 years. The author argues that the main existing instructional models are inadequate to cater for diverse student populations, and proposes an inclusive practice approach which encourages institutional initiatives that make academic literacy instruction an integrated and accredited part of the curriculum. The book aims to raise awareness of existing innovative literacy pedagogies and argues for the transformation of academic literacy instruction in all universities with diverse student populations.
This book, written by pioneering architects of original social theory in educational/linguistic fields as well as expert practitioners, systematically exposes the sociological commitments of mainstream ideas and theories in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), commitments which are very often not fully examined by the discipline, but nonetheless shape practitioners' ideas and their praxis. The initial chapters outline what social theory is; the normative, critical, descriptive, social and generative purposes it serves; the scope and limits of social theory, and tracing the major historical traditions and recent currents. This mapping of social theory is followed by a detailed argument that makes the case for the centrality of social theory for EAP practitioners and praxis and the need to develop a sociological imagination to enhance knowledge and agency of practitioners. The contributions reveal the sociological foundations and commitments that underpin established theories in EAP, such as genre theories, systemic functional linguistics, and academic literacies. Each of these three major research streams in EAP is subject to critical analysis, linking each of these streams to the sociological commitments that underpin them. Finally, the book explores the social theories and approaches that have yet to make a full or significant impact on EAP research and practice, but would enable practitioners and researchers to understand educational contexts, texts, structures, culture(s), knowledge production and producers, and social agents with greater sociological clarity and sophistication. Topics covered include: social realism, legitimation code theory, critical realism, ethnography, feminism and Bourdieusian concepts for EAP. The overarching aim of this volume is to position social theory much more centrally to frameworks and conceptions of the (unstable and contested) knowledge-base for EAP practitioners and to promote a 'sociological imagination' among and for EAP practitioners.
Writing is the principal means by which doctoral candidature is monitored and measured; this, combined with the growing tendency to use publications as proxy measures of individual and institutional productivity, underlines the centrality of writing in academia. One of the central questions for scholars in higher education, therefore, is ‘How do we make writing happen?’, and it is this question which the book seeks to answer. The book provides detailed illustrations of collaborative writing pedagogies which are powerfully enabling, and through theoretical and conceptual interrogation of these practices, the authors point the way for individuals as well as institutions to establish writing groups that are lively, responsive and context-specific. Key topics include: new pedagogical responses for increased writing productivity and the ‘push to publish’; innovations for supporting academic writing quality, confidence and output; scaffolding the thesis writing process; new theoretical explorations of collaborative writing approaches; writing group formulations and pedagogical approaches; writing groups for non-native speakers of English; writing as women in higher education. A particular strength of this book is that it showcases the potential of writing groups for advanced academic writing by pulling together a unique mix of authors and scholarly approaches, representing a wide range of new theoretical and pedagogical frames from diverse countries. Writing Groups for Doctoral Education and Beyond will be attractive to academics seeking new ways to advance their writing productivity, doctoral students, their supervisors and those who are tasked with the job of supporting them through the completion and dissemination of their research.
Plagiarism has long been regarded with concern by the university community as a serious act of wrongdoing threatening core academic values. There has been a perceived increase in plagiarism over recent years, due in part to issues raised by the new media, a diverse student population and the rise in English as a lingua franca. This book examines plagiarism, the inappropriate relationship between a text and its sources, from a linguistic perspective. Diane Pecorari brings recent linguistic research to bear on plagiarism, including processes of first and second language writers; interplay between reading and writing; writer's identity and voice; and the expectations of the academic discourse community. Using empirical data drawn from a large sample of student writing, compared against written sources, Academic Writing and Plagiarism argues that some plagiarism, in this linguistic context, can be regarded as a failure of pedagogy rather than a deliberate attempt to transgress. The book examines the implications of this gap between the institutions' expectations of the students, student performance and institutional awareness, and suggests pedagogic solutions to be implemented at student, tutor and institutional levels. Academic Writing and Plagiarism is a cutting-edge research monograph which will be essential reading for researchers in applied linguistics.
