DRAFTWrite Like An Academic: Designing an Online Advanced Writing Course forPostgraduate Students and Researchers2009-09-12Nilgun Hancio

luJohn EldridgeSteve Neufeld

Preamble

This is an article in draft.

Please don't cite or reference this web page. If you are interested in citing any part of this draft, please contact us at lexitronics@gmail.com In this short article, we describe how theWrite Like an Academic online coursewasdesigned.

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The detailed research that is the foundation of the course was the subject of Nilgun Hancioglu’sPhD Thesisat the Eastern Mediterranean University,Famagusta, Cyprus.

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Further information is also available at theWrite Like an Academic Blogand at the Lexitronics home page:http://lexitronics.edublogs.org/

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The course itself can be accessed at:http://lexitronics.org

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The corpus-based research described was an integral part of the Lexitronicssubmission that was shortlisted in the 2009 British Council ELTONS awards for innovation in ELT.

Introduction

As the overall trend in many domains, including education and academic scientificresearch, is toward globalization, “more and more nonnative speakers are seeking topublish in international journals devoted to English language teaching, appliedlinguistics, and related areas” (Flowerdew, 2001, p. 121). Further, while thepercentage of articles written in English in the 1977 Science Citation Index was 83%(Krashen, 2003), by 1997, this number had increased to 95% and of this, only half came from authors in English-speaking countries (Graddol, 1997). It is clear,therefore, that non-native speakers write ‘a considerable number’ of research articleseven in the “most prestigious journals in science” (Wood, 2001, p. 80).Such statistics clearly indicate that non-native speakers of English are underincreasing pressure to both follow the latest research, and probably even more so, tohave their own research published. Non-native speakers of English “risk beingunaware of- and overlooked by- mainstream international research unless they learnto read, write, and publish in English” (Garfield & Welljams-Dorof, 1990). Hence,non-native speaker researchers and academics would seem to have little choice, but tocontinue to try and master the prevailing conventions of academic English.

2Writing, therefore, has become a central element of university courses, as well asprofessional development programs, which necessitated the understanding of “whatthese discourses of the academy are, and what counts as ‘good writing’” (Hyland,2004a, p. x). These courses have often tended to focus on the general needs of students involved in academic studies, and catered more for university students atundergraduate level, who are not expected to carry out or publish research. However,post-graduate candidates who are engaged in conducting and disseminating researchhave more sophisticated needs in terms of language knowledge and related skills, themost important of which is producing cohesive and coherent written text.Written text is “the product of a series of complicated mental operations” (Clark andClark 1977, cited in Richards, 1990, p. 101), and is not easy to construct. Afterdeciding on a meaning to be conveyed, writers must consider the genre, the style theyare going to employ, the purpose they want to achieve and the amount of detailrequired to achieve it (Richards, 1990, p. 101-102). Nunan agrees that “producing acoherent, fluent, extended piece of writing is probably the most difficult thing there isto do in language” and “it is something most native speakers never master”. He alsoacknowledges the enormity of this challenge for second language learners,“particularly for those who go on to a university and study in a language that is nottheir own” (1999, p. 271).The fact that language use is closely related to the social context naturally leads to theconcept of ‘genre’. Hyland characterizes genres as “socially recognized ways of usinglanguage” (Johns et al., 2006, p. 3). For Swales, a genre is “a class of communicativeevents, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes” (1990, p.58), and this purpose determines generic structure. This structure is in turn achievedthrough units of purpose, called ‘moves’ (Swales, 1990) or ‘move structures’(Flowerdew, 2000) which are fulfilled by lexico-grammar (Henry, 2007, p. 1-2). Keylexical phrases represent the move structures of a genre (Flowerdew, 2000, p. 374).Moves, in turn, are realized through different ‘strategies’ or ‘tactics’ (Henry 2007),which are tactical selections of the writer in accomplishing the purpose (Bhatia, 1993,p. 19). These tactics or strategies similarly necessitate the exploitation of lexico-grammar. Therefore, it can be concluded that lexico-grammar has a major function inthe fulfillment of strategies or tactics leading to moves, which in turn form the genericstructure of a genre, and thereby reflect its communicative purpose.The major role lexico-grammar plays in text creation requires a thorough analysis of lexico-grammatical features employed to fulfill different communicative purposes intexts, and this comprehensive analysis is nowadays viable through the use of a corpus,“a collection of naturally-occurring language text, chosen to characterize a state or avariety of a language” (Sinclair, 1991, p. 171). Thanks to the recent developments incomputer technology, it is now possible for anyone to store large amounts of languagedata on a computer for analysis. Unsurprisingly, like many other scholars andresearchers, Hunston holds that “corpora, and the study of corpora, haverevolutionized the study of language and the applications of language” (Hunston,2002, p. 1).

The Evolution of the Write Like an Academic Course

The Write Like an Academic course was first designed to focus on the commonlanguage functions and lexis in academic writing prior to thesis writing. Gradually itevolved into a classroom-based thesis writing course with a language focus.Although the participants were given guidance and support in terms of the movesmaking up the generic structure of the thesis in accordance with the genre-basedapproaches, the quality of most of their work revealed a gap between actual and targetperformance levels in producing coherent text. The main problem hindering theproduction of coherent and appropriate texts seemed to be the participants’insufficient knowledge of the lexico-grammatical resources necessary for meaningcreation. It was a problem that seemed to demand serious in-depth research.The research employed a corpus-informed approach (McCarthy, 2001) whereby theapplied linguist can “mediate the corpus, design it from the very outset and build itwith applied linguistic questions in mind, ask of it the questions applied linguists wantanswers to, and filter its output, use it as a guide or tool for what you, the teacher,want to achieve” (p. 129). The main aim was to construct a pedagogic corpus. Thekey component of the pedagogic corpus was a bank of lexico-grammatical patterns tofulfill generic moves. The pedagogic corpus also included tasks for teacher-directeddata-driven in-class work, and a complementary web-based interactive platform(MOODLE) to provide access to the authentic data, the corpora, and to promotelearner-led exploratory work. The complementary platform was a virtual classroom,with all the features of a traditional classroom and more, which was expected toincrease the participants’ learning opportunities and decrease the gap between thecurrent and the target performance levels. Through the authentic corpus data and thedata-driven tasks, the students were expected to observe the use of languagethemselves, and become language researchers, or ‘language detectives’ (Johns, 1997).The two corpora incorporated into the pedagogic corpus were constructed from thesisabstracts. One of the reasons for this choice is that abstracts do not normally includequotations and paraphrases, and the language is expected to be the writers’ own. Thesecond reason is that abstracts are miniature forms of research studies. The scientificresearch article has a particular type of rhetorical pattern which is reflected throughthe Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion (IMRD) format (Swales, 1990).Although there may be variations across different disciplines, Wood (2001) holds thatthese rhetorical conventions “are so accepted and so standard that they are often givenin journal guidelines to contributors” (p. 74). In the same vein, according to Swales,the abstract, like other genres reporting research, also seems to have an IMRD(Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion) structure (1990, p.181). This structurereflects the main chapters of the thesis: Introduction, Methodology, Analysis, andConclusion. Therefore, it was anticipated that the analysis of abstracts in the studywould reveal language data relevant to the thesis as a whole.For the study, two corpora were compiled: a learner corpus of abstracts of about 100non-native participants who had taken the advanced thesis writing course at theEastern Mediterranean University, Cyprus (LAC: Learner Abstract Corpus), and aspecialized target corpus built from a sample of 600 abstracts from universities incountries where English is the native language (TAC: Target Abstract Corpus). Bothcorpora were analyzed through computer-based tools: RANGE(http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation/nation.aspx

) for range and frequency,