University E nglish is no-one’s first language: Learning the genres of postgraduate writing

1. University English is no-one’s first language: Learning the genres of postgraduate writing Nigel Caplan nacaplan@udel.edu University of Delaware Christine Feak cfeak@umich.edu University of Michigan Handouts: http://nigelteacher.wordpress.com/eataw2013

3. What do you read and write?

4. “You cannot not mean genres” (Martin, 1999)

5. Agenda • Approaches to genre-based pedagogy • Identifying and analyzing genres • Building a mini-corpus • Collaborative writing • Q&A; classroom applications

6. Genre (1): English for Academic Purposes • EAP is concerned with • identifying the academic communication needs of students and others in academia • understanding academic genres • disciplinary context and variation • communicative purpose • fluidity and complexity • networks or chains • the process of knowledge construction • fitting our understanding of genres with the communication needs of students to create course or workshop content • supporting students’ development of genre awareness and their transfer of learning from the EAP classroom to their own communication contexts

7. Genre (2): The “Sydney School” • Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1994) • Social semiotic (Martin, 2009) • Genres & stages (Rose & Martin, 2012) Psst …. these slides & a bibliography are online at http://nigelteacher.wordpress.com

8. What do they have in common? “ Genre pedagogies insist that instead of addressing grammar at the end of the writing process as an extemporized solution to learners’ writing difficulties, teachers should ensure that students possess this central resource for constructing meanings from the outset. Students should have clear guidelines for how to construct the different kinds of texts they have to write.” (Hyland, 2004, p. 21)

9. From Process to Genre Process Writing Genre-Based Pedagogy Meaning is socially constructed Starts with the target language and genre Scaffolded instruction towards mastery (Rose, 2012) • Meaning is already in the writer • Starts with learner’s current knowledge • Write then fix model (remediation) “University French [or, English] has never been anyone’s mother tongue” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, p. 116).

10. Teaching/Learning Cycle Martin, 2009; adapted from Rothery, 1996

11. Identifying Genres

12. What graduate students really need Swales & Feak, 2011

13. As postgraduate education becomes more broadly accessible, the need for effective strategies for teaching the language and genres of scholarly writing to masters and PhD students in their first and/or second languages has become more urgent (Cooper & Bikowski, 2007). This workshop leads participants through a toolbox of activities which they will be encouraged to adapt to their own teaching in any language. The guiding principle is genre-based pedagogy, which sees writing as embedded in contexts. Non-mainstream students need to identify, analyze, and produce the powerful genres of their discipline, defined by their purpose, staging, and lexicogrammar. After an overview of genre-based pedagogy, drawing on English for Academic Purposes (Swales, 1990) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Rose & Martin, 2012), the presenters will guide participants through these activities: 1. Identifying genres: Powerful yet accessible techniques for […] 2. [etc] The presenters hope to start a dialogue between North American/Australian genre traditions and European scholarship and praxis. Scholarly writing is always a second language, and access to the linguistic and cultural capital of the academy is critical for postgraduate success (Bourdieu, 1986).

14. Establish urgency Overview As postgraduate education becomes more broadly accessible, the need for effective strategies for teaching the language and genres of scholarly writing to masters and PhD students in their first and/or second languages has become more urgent (Cooper & Bikowski, 2007). This workshop leads participants through a toolbox of activities which they will be encouraged to adapt to their own teaching in any language. The guiding principle is genre-based pedagogy, which sees writing as embedded in contexts. Non-mainstream students need to identify, analyze, and produce the powerful genres of their discipline, defined by their purpose, staging, and lexicogrammar. After an overview of genre-based pedagogy, drawing on English for Academic Purposes (Swales, 1990) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Rose & Martin, 2012), the presenters will guide participants through these activities: 1. Identifying genres: Powerful yet accessible techniques for […] 2. [etc] The presenters hope to start a dialogue between North American/Australian genre traditions and European scholarship and praxis. Scholarly writing is always a second language, and access to the linguistic and cultural capital of the academy is critical for postgraduate success (Bourdieu, 1986). Sequence of activities Connection to conference (justification) Gratuitous mention of French philosophy

15. As postgraduate education becomes more broadly accessible, the need for effective strategies for teaching the language and genres of scholarly writing to masters and PhD students in their first and/or second languageshas become more urgent (Cooper & Bikowski, 2007). This workshop leads participants through a toolbox of activities which they will be encouraged to adapt to their own teaching in any language. The guiding principle is genre-based pedagogy, which sees writing as embedded in contexts. Non-mainstream students need to identify, analyze, and produce the powerful genres of their discipline, defined by their purpose, staging, and lexicogrammar. After an overview of genre-based pedagogy, drawing on English for Academic Purposes (Swales, 1990) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Rose & Martin, 2012), the presenters will guide participants through these activities: 1. Identifying genres: Powerful yet accessible techniques for […] 2. [etc] The presenters hope to start a dialogue between North American/Australian genre traditions and European scholarship and praxis. Scholarly writing is always a second language, and access to the linguistic and cultural capital of the academy is critical for postgraduate success (Bourdieu, 1986).

16. What graduate students really need In our opinion a student may need • a basic introduction to academic grammar, vocabulary, and writing But all students may need • familiarity with the writing of a proposal, a book review, or a systematic literature review (etc.)

17. EAP for all! “Academic writing, or academic literacy, is not part of the native speaker’s inheritance: it is acquired rather through lengthy formal education and is far from a universal skill.” (Ferguson et al. 2011)

18. What graduate students really need Students may also need to • reconcile what they have learned about writing in the past with what they are expected to do to be successful writers • unlearn “rules” and abandon strategies that do not serve them well (“genre baggage,” Amy Devitt) Students have a lot of interference or noise from the past.

19. What graduate students really need Should an introduction grab the reader’s attention in order for a paper to be successful? Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan and T.M. Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Population share similar views on what drives individuals, yet they have very different visions of how the state should be organized. This essay will first examine the assumptions of both men on the innate characteristics of individuals and the ideal organization of the state. It will then explore the ways in which Hobbes and Malthus are similar and different in their assumptions, and will conclude with a discussion of why two individuals with such similar micro-ontological assumptions came to such different conclusions about the organization of the state.

20. What graduate students really need In recent years, there has been an emerging demand for robust face recognition algorithms that are able to deal with real-world face images. This is largely due to two factors . . . Gang Hua, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Erik Learned-Miller, Yi Ma, Matthew Turk, David J. Kriegman, Thomas S. Huang, "Introduction to the Special Section on Real-World Face Recognition," IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 33, no. 10, pp. 1921-1924, October, 2011

21. What graduate students really need(Cooper & Bikowski, 2007)

22. What graduate students really need • Do we target the students’ needs in terms of proficiency? • Or in terms of genre? • How can we do both?

23. Building a mini corpus TASK Put together a small .txt reference collection (i.e. a corpus) of 5-15 examples of introductions from one or more journals in your area. Be sure that you collect research articles for this assignment (i.e. no book reviews, review papers, case reports or editorials). This corpus will allow you to compare data and texts we present in this volume with those that are most relevant to you. The more texts you compile, the better.

24. Compleat Lexical Tutor www.lextutor.ca

27. Using a Mini-Corpus: Student Analysis When we look at both lists we can see that there are some similarities among them, but they serve a very different purpose. From the FREQUENCY list we can get the idea of what all this papers are about. We can pick up terms like “men”, “prostate”, “patients”, “urinary” and “symptoms” that allows us to clearly see that this set of publications are probably about prostate health and urinary problems in men. However, when we look at the KEYWORDS list we don’t get such a clear idea. When we look a the terms in this list, although we can pick up words like “prostate” and “dysfunction”, the actual topic of these papers together is not very clear. The terms are too technical for a narrow approximation of their topics. In comparison to my own writing, my writing leans more towards the “FREQUENCY” list. This is because I have decided to use terms that are not very technical, except in the case where there use is inevitable. Such examples of these inevitable technical words are “hypertrophy” and “hyperplasia”, because there are no synonyms for these terms. By comparing my writing to these lists I would conclude that my writing is targeting an audience with a general health knowledge, but that it’s not necessarily technically involved with health-related research.

29. Using online corpora: COCA • Mark Davies • www.americancorpus.org • Academic / news / magazines / fiction / spoken English • Take the tour! • Frequencies • Register • Collocations

30. [VERB] a conference [ACAD] • Be • Attend • Hold • Present • Organize • Convene

31. Genre and Corpus – Using AntConc • Can we use “we” in a conference abstract?

32. How do you start an abstract? • One basic skill of academic writers is • This study resultsfrom • Especially for Second Language Writers (L2-writers) it is necessary to • EAP has become an expanding discipline • Much research has been done into • If acculturation means what Horner/Canagarajah's recent work urges • Global scientific communication is dominated by • First-semester students studying English as a Foreign Language are often overwhelmed when they are expected to follow traditional rhetorical Anglo-Saxon writing conventions a

33. What happens next? • One basic skill of academic writers is to be able to locate their claims within a disciplinary framework.

34. What happens next? • One basic skill of academic writers is to be able to locate their claims within a disciplinary framework. However, EAP students find it difficult to … X is important/good/useful …. but it doesn’t work for Y • The genre model of academic writing succeeds admirably in teaching NNES researchers to […]. _______________ • Much research has been done into source use in academic writing, ______________________________

35. What happens next? • One basic skill of academic writers is to be able to locate their claims within a disciplinary framework. However, EAP students find it difficult to … X is important/good/useful …. but it doesn’t work for Y • The genre model of academic writing succeeds admirably in teaching NNES researchers to […]. However, the model is not as good at teaching NNES graduate students to… • Much research has been done into source use in academic writing, but this has often focused on […] to the exclusion of ….

36. Opening Sentence: Pattern 2 • Academic writing is a field not sufficiently explored nor investigated in Romania to date.

37. Opening Sentence: Pattern 2 • Academic writing is a field not sufficiently explored nor investigated in Romania to date. The Academic Writing Team from […] successfully developed X is important but not done well. So, we did Y. • Creating a supportive learning environment is crucial for ensuring students’ improvement of academic skills._______________________________________

38. Opening Sentence: Pattern 2 • Academic writing is a field not sufficiently explored nor investigated in Romania to date. The Academic Writing Team from […] successfully developed X is important but not done well. So, we did Y. • Creating a supportive learning environment is crucial for ensuring students’ improvement of academic skills. Addressing this need, the Writing Center at […] endeavors to make

39. Opening Sentence: Pattern 3 • Most writing development professionals view academic writing […] as central to teaching and learning at university.

40. Opening Sentence: Pattern 3 • Most writing development professionals view academic writing […] as central to teaching and learning at university. It is therefore important for academic literacy specialists to understand X is important. So we need to do (or we did) Y. • EAP has become an expanding discipline at higher education institutions worldwide. _________________

41. Opening Sentence: Pattern 3 • Most writing development professionals view academic writing […] as central to teaching and learning at university. It is therefore important for academic literacy specialists to understand X is important. So we need to do (or we did) Y. • EAP has become an expanding discipline at higher education institutions worldwide. Teaching critical thinking skills in EAP [….] is vital to academic success.

42. In this presentation . During the presentation, first, the mo etc. In this presentation we will focus o ocess. This presentation reports on a ically, the presentation reports on one ocess. The presentation outlines impli subject. This presentation will consist nt. Lastly, the presentation will provid divide. The presentation will start with

43. What about “workshop”? In this interactive workshop a teacher of academic writing roblematic; this workshop will offer a comparative framew presenters. This workshop will introduce participants to r ikowski, 2007). This workshop leads participants through issue. In this workshop, the participants will look at curre jah, 2013). This workshop explores the benefits of creatin t the end of the workshop, participants will understand t education. This workshop aims to respond directly to tha me directors, this workshop explores with participants str

44. And “this paper …”? The aim of this paper is to expand this analysis to th uirements. This paper reports research that identifi language. This paper will present our methodology

45. Collaborative Writing Martin, 2009; adapted from Rothery, 1996

47. Write a proposal for the next EATAW • Structure of the genre: • Establish urgency (different patterns) • Overview of the session • Sequence of activities • Justification/relevance • Restate importance • Lexico-grammar: • This paper/presentation/workshop • We?

49. To Wrap Up This is how we (think you should) teach: • Identify the genres • Analyze the genres • Focus on the language of the genres • Practice the genres • Connect the genres

50. Towards Control and Critical Orientation • Genres are “cultural capital”/«capital culturel» (Bourdieu, 1986) • School success/failure is an effect of human capital rather than (purely) aptitude (Bourdieu, 1979) • “l’accumulationinitiale du capital culturel […] ne commence dèsl’origine, sans retard, sans perte de temps que pour les members des famillesdotées d’un fort capital culturel” (Bourdieu, 1979) • The initial accumulation of cultural capital only begins from day one without delay or timewasting for those in families that already possess strong cultural capital.