Long post! Delete now if overburdened with EATAW mails.
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Mirja asks about contents of a basic academic writing course. I fear
there may not be much consensus on this so long as we are not clear
whether this is a course for writing in the mother tongue or in a
foreign language, whether it is embedded one type of degree course and
education system or another, and what it might be leading on to. What we
know about the teaching of writing in secondary school might also impact
upon the syllabus. In short, we could say the following:
A+B =C
where A represents the typical or common entry level knowledge of the
students, C represents the exit level - what we want them to be prepared
towards, and B is the content of the course that gets them from A to C.
The picture may be more complicated than that, but let's avoid those
unnecessary complications.
I would suggest to Mirja:
1. Assess what it is that the institution expects of the students at
the end of the basic academic writing course. What are the outcomes?
What will they need to be able to do, and to what level of competence?
If we talk in genre terms, what types of text will they need to write?
Critiques, persuasive essays? policy briefs? reports of one type or
another? research papers? If other courses they take involve them in
writing a phenomenal range of highly complex papers, it may indicate a
need for the syllabus in other courses to change. When I taught in
Germany years ago, there was a very nice basic course in writing in the
second year that taught students how to write simple persuasive essays.
Unfortunately, from the first year, they already had to write full
length research papers for content courses. The result was that the
research papers were a mess and the writing course was considered
irrelevant. Students just muddled through and the teachers graded the
bad papers leniently rather than fail 60% of their students.
2. Assess what the students can or cannot do - what they need to learn
to bridge the gap. Be optimistic here. If you pitch the course slightly
too high, many students will pull themselves up. If you pitch it too
low, no-one will reach point C and you will be left grumbling about
excessive expectations, without the sympathy of administrators most of
the time. If the gap cannot be bridged in 2-3 ECTS (quite likely), that
implies that more than one course will be needed. Are funds available?
If yes, celebrate and start dividing the material up into 2-3 courses.
If no, start campaigning for recognition of those needs by pointing out
how teachers/lecturers are dissatisfied with the writing they get.
3. In the interim, if 2-3 ECTS is all you have to teach semi-literates
to become polished PhD standard research writers (maybe in a foreign
language to boot), I would do the following.
Pick one or two simple genres (eg. critiques and essays) and teach
using assignments with those genres as a product to teach more general
writing skills. Structure your syllabus around awareness raising, teach
concepts of genre and process so that students are equipped to apply
those across from the critique, say, to the research proposal (ie. in
the same way they analyses the structure of a critique in class, they
can analyse the structure of a proposal on their own; as they process
wrote a policy brief, so they can process write a research paper).
Others can fill in the details here of this broad-brush picture, but the
thing is to equip them to understand how writing works and how they can
improve their own writing by understanding the nature of texts,
discourse communities and their expectations. Use specifics to draw out
generalities - the critique serves little value in itself unless it
helps you to see what readers are looking for when they ask you to write
something, how the critique is an example of a genre. In this regard, I
would aim to tackle more than one genre and compare and discuss the
differences. Using your 3 ECTS to perfect a single genre would be doing
the students a disservice unless they will only (or mainly) need to
write that genre.
Just a few thoughts,
John
>>> Mirja Hamalainen <[log in to unmask]> 19/2/10 12:19 >>>
Hello all,
I am a lecturer in English at the University of Tampere Language
Centre, Finland. I would be interested to know what you all as
academic writing experts would consider to be the main contents of a
(2 -3 ECTS) university course on the basics of academic writing. I
wonder if there could be some common consensus on this.
Best regards,
Mirja Hämäläinen
***********************************************************************
Mirja Hämäläinen
Lecturer
University of Tampere
Language Centre
FIN-33014 UNIVERSITY OF TAMPERE
FINLAND
Tel. +358 3 3551 6468
Mobile +358 50-5743012
E-mail [log in to unmask]
http://www.uta.fi/~kkmiha/english.html
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