Presenting a united front : assessed reflective writing on group experience

Assessed reflective writing is increasingly common in UK higher education. Students writing in this mode are typically required to narrate their experiences, evaluate their performance, investigate associated emotions, and comment on what has been learned. In this paper I focus on assessed reflective writing by students on an MA TESOL course who are required to write individual reflections on a process of working in a group to produce teaching materials. This task places particular demands on the writer. Like other students writing reflectively, they need to manage complex self presentation: to appear honest about relative successes and failures, to show evidence of appropriate reflection, and to indicate desirable learning. Because they are reflecting on a group experience, they also need to differentiate themselves from their work group in their account, and to reflect critically on others as well as on themselves. My focus in this paper is on the ways they manage these additional demands. I first examine the relative frequency with which writers refer to themselves and their work group, and then examine the content of self-referential and group-referential statements. Finally, I examine semantic patterns in the data and draw conclusions regarding possible reasons behind student writers’ choices about how to represent themselves and others

Critical text analysis : linking language and cultural studies

Many UK universities offer degree programmes in English Language specifically for non-native speakers of English. Such programmes typically include not only language development but also development in various areas of content knowledge. A challenge that arises is to design courses in different areas that mutually support each other, thus providing students with a coherent degree programme. In this article, I will discuss a Bachelor of Arts programme involving Cultural Studies and Translation, as well as English Language and Linguistics. I will offer a rationale for a course in critical text analysis, which is offered in the final year of the programme. It is intended to promote language development and cultural awareness as well as skills of linguistic analysis and critical thinking

Epistemological and interpersonal stance in a data description task : findings from a discipline-specific learner corpus

This article examines the stance options used by writers responding to a data description task in the discipline of Statistics. Based on a small learner corpus, it uses inductive qualitative content analysis to explore both the content propositions that students included in their writing, and the ways in which they expressed evaluative stance vis-à-vis such propositions. In the light of an interview with a specialist informant, the article discusses the appropriacy of the content choices and stance options taken by students. It then discusses the potential exploitation of the learner corpus for pedagogic purposes

Social identity and parallel text dynamics in the reporting of educational action research

This paper focuses on textual issues in the reporting of action research. There exists a large body of text-analytical work on research reports from various fields, examining for example the organisation and rhetorical purpose of research articles or sections thereof. However, less has been done on the specific issues of reporting action research, and this paper seeks to fill that gap by an exploration of text dynamics in action research reports. It focuses on three small corpora of educational action research reports: page-length reports intended to share classroom practice, medium-length article reports which situate pedagogic interventions in some detail, and lastly, full length research article reports. The research discussed in this paper indicates possible relationships between text patterns and action research processes, and facilitates examination of the issues involved when attempting to represent a cyclical and often recursive process in textual form. It allows an exploration of the textually articulated relationships between the researcher and other aspects of the research context, be they structures or actors. This is a particularly complex and important issue in action research where groundedness, collaboration, appropriacy and reflexivity are key values. The paper has teacher education implications. Given the role of action research modules on in service teacher education programmes there is a need to facilitate, for new action researchers, an insight into forms of discourse that may assist them to articulate their experiences. To be of maximum benefit, such insights should also be educational in the sense of facilitating the development of discursive literacy

Professional writing : description of the writings of social workers in Botswana

The main purpose of this study is to identify the professional writing needs of undergraduate students studying social work in the University of Botswana. In order to do this, it seeks to analyse the types of texts produced by social workers in their professional setting, to find out what relationship exists between the writing done by professional social workers and the writing taught in the dedicated English Language Support unit at the University of Botswana, and to explore the similarities and differences between the documents written by the students and those produced by professional social workers. It also examines current approaches to teaching writing in the University, with the aim of identifying the writing needs of social work students and exploring how these can be effectively addressed

Reflection in university and the employability agenda : a discourse analysis case study

In UK universities, reflection is promoted not only for its intrinsic value but also for instrumental purposes, for students to gain and demonstrate skills and attributes which are valued by employers. In this paper, I examine reflective writing produced by students seeking an award offered by the careers department of one university. By looking at the evaluative language choices made by the student writers, I shed light on some of their practices regarding self-representation and their articulations of experience. I provide a critical account of what reflective writing looks like in this particular setting, and interpret this in the broader context of the goal to foster reflection among higher education students. I argue that the reflective writing engendered by this particular context and task is different in key respects from the reflection which is commonly advocated as an element of personal, professional or academic development

An ungraded bush track

In mid-2006, Fryer Library received a major new addition to its Herb Wharton Collection. To celebrate the acquisition, Fryer Library commissioned Sue Abbey to interview Herb Wharton about his life and writing

Centre for Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick

The Centre for Applied Linguistics was established in 1983 and has grown from a relatively small teaching unit to a large centre engaged in a wide variety of activities under the broad heading of Applied Linguistics. Our work includes English language teaching, teacher education, undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in applied linguistics, development of teaching and research resources, and small- and large-scale research

Expressing an evaluative stance in English and Malay research article conclusions : international publications versus local publications

This paper constitutes a multidimensional explanation of an integration of genre-based knowledge and evaluative stance in the context of academic arguments employed in the conclusion sections of English and Malay research articles. For this purpose, it draws on an analysis of the features in Appraisal theory (Martin & Rose, 2003) integrated with an analysis of communicative purposes within a genre analysis framework (Swales, 1990, 2004). Among others, the findings include the observation that evaluative and dialogic stances jointly produce rhetorical effects in both English and Malay conclusions. English conclusions contain a subtle balance of assertion and mitigation while Malay conclusions tend to contract dialogic space and thus could be interpreted as less reader-friendly. This suggests that evaluation and the meaning potential of the genre are experienced and valued differently by scholars publishing in these two different scientific communities (international and local). This variation seems to be due to linguistic, contextual, and potential social cultural influences within the two academic discourse communities. The present study has pedagogical implications in the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classroom