Write Like An Academic: Designing An Online Advanced Writing Course For Postgraduate Students And Researchers

DRAFT Write Like An Academic: Designing an Online Advanced Writing Course for Postgraduate Students and Researchers 2009-09-12 Nilgun Hancioğlu John Eldridge Steve 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 [email protected]

In this short article, we describe how the Write Like an Academic online course was designed. • The detailed research that is the foundation of the course was the subject of Nilgun Hancioglu’s PhD Thesis at the Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, Cyprus. • Further information is also available at the Write Like an Academic Blog and at the Lexitronics home page: http://lexitronics.edublogs.org/ • The course itself can be accessed at: http://lexitronics.org • The corpus-based research described was an integral part of the Lexitronics submission 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 scientific research, is toward globalization, “more and more nonnative speakers are seeking to publish in international journals devoted to English language teaching, applied linguistics, and related areas” (Flowerdew, 2001, p. 121). Further, while the percentage 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 articles even in the “most prestigious journals in science” (Wood, 2001, p. 80). Such statistics clearly indicate that non-native speakers of English are under increasing pressure to both follow the latest research, and probably even more so, to have their own research published. Non-native speakers of English “risk being unaware of- and overlooked by- mainstream international research unless they learn to read, write, and publish in English” (Garfield & Welljams-Dorof, 1990). Hence, non-native speaker researchers and academics would seem to have little choice, but to continue to try and master the prevailing conventions of academic English.

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Writing, therefore, has become a central element of university courses, as well as professional development programs, which necessitated the understanding of “what these 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 at undergraduate level, who are not expected to carry out or publish research. However, post-graduate candidates who are engaged in conducting and disseminating research have more sophisticated needs in terms of language knowledge and related skills, the most important of which is producing cohesive and coherent written text. Written text is “the product of a series of complicated mental operations” (Clark and Clark 1977, cited in Richards, 1990, p. 101), and is not easy to construct. After deciding on a meaning to be conveyed, writers must consider the genre, the style they are going to employ, the purpose they want to achieve and the amount of detail required to achieve it (Richards, 1990, p. 101-102). Nunan agrees that “producing a coherent, fluent, extended piece of writing is probably the most difficult thing there is to do in language” and “it is something most native speakers never master”. He also acknowledges 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 not their own” (1999, p. 271). The fact that language use is closely related to the social context naturally leads to the concept of ‘genre’. Hyland characterizes genres as “socially recognized ways of using language” (Johns et al., 2006, p. 3). For Swales, a genre is “a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes” (1990, p. 58), and this purpose determines generic structure. This structure is in turn achieved through units of purpose, called ‘moves’ (Swales, 1990) or ‘move structures’ (Flowerdew, 2000) which are fulfilled by lexico-grammar (Henry, 2007, p. 1-2). Key lexical 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 lexicogrammar. Therefore, it can be concluded that lexico-grammar has a major function in the fulfillment of strategies or tactics leading to moves, which in turn form the generic structure 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 in texts, 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 a variety of a language” (Sinclair, 1991, p. 171). Thanks to the recent developments in computer technology, it is now possible for anyone to store large amounts of language data on a computer for analysis. Unsurprisingly, like many other scholars and researchers, Hunston holds that “corpora, and the study of corpora, have revolutionized the study of language and the applications of language” (Hunston, 2002, p. 1).

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The Evolution of the Write Like an Academic Course The Write Like an Academic course was first designed to focus on the common language functions and lexis in academic writing prior to thesis writing. Gradually it evolved into a classroom-based thesis writing course with a language focus. Although the participants were given guidance and support in terms of the moves making up the generic structure of the thesis in accordance with the genre-based approaches, the quality of most of their work revealed a gap between actual and target performance levels in producing coherent text. The main problem hindering the production of coherent and appropriate texts seemed to be the participants’ insufficient knowledge of the lexico-grammatical resources necessary for meaning creation. It was a problem that seemed to demand serious in-depth research. The research employed a corpus-informed approach (McCarthy, 2001) whereby the applied linguist can “mediate the corpus, design it from the very outset and build it with applied linguistic questions in mind, ask of it the questions applied linguists want answers 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. The key component of the pedagogic corpus was a bank of lexico-grammatical patterns to fulfill generic moves. The pedagogic corpus also included tasks for teacher-directed data-driven in-class work, and a complementary web-based interactive platform (MOODLE) to provide access to the authentic data, the corpora, and to promote learner-led exploratory work. The complementary platform was a virtual classroom, with all the features of a traditional classroom and more, which was expected to increase the participants’ learning opportunities and decrease the gap between the current and the target performance levels. Through the authentic corpus data and the data-driven tasks, the students were expected to observe the use of language themselves, and become language researchers, or ‘language detectives’ (Johns, 1997). The two corpora incorporated into the pedagogic corpus were constructed from thesis abstracts. One of the reasons for this choice is that abstracts do not normally include quotations and paraphrases, and the language is expected to be the writers’ own. The second reason is that abstracts are miniature forms of research studies. The scientific research article has a particular type of rhetorical pattern which is reflected through the Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion (IMRD) format (Swales, 1990). Although there may be variations across different disciplines, Wood (2001) holds that these rhetorical conventions “are so accepted and so standard that they are often given in 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 structure reflects the main chapters of the thesis: Introduction, Methodology, Analysis, and Conclusion. Therefore, it was anticipated that the analysis of abstracts in the study would reveal language data relevant to the thesis as a whole. For the study, two corpora were compiled: a learner corpus of abstracts of about 100 non-native participants who had taken the advanced thesis writing course at the Eastern Mediterranean University, Cyprus (LAC: Learner Abstract Corpus), and a specialized target corpus built from a sample of 600 abstracts from universities in countries where English is the native language (TAC: Target Abstract Corpus). Both corpora were analyzed through computer-based tools: RANGE (http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation/nation.aspx) for range and frequency, 3

Concordance (http://www.concordancesoftware.co.uk/) and AntConc (http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software/README_antconc3.2.1.txt) to explore the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations of words. The learner abstract corpus (LAC) was analyzed to identify the most common lexico-grammatical problems in the academic work produced by the post-graduate candidates enrolled in the advanced thesis writing course. Then the target abstract corpus (TAC) was analyzed to extract the targeted lexico-grammar used for fulfilling the strategies and moves within the generic structure of a thesis, and compose a bank of moves and sub-moves. The data was integrated into the pedagogic corpus through both teacher-directed data-driven and learner-led discovery work. Through various task-based activities, the participants were then provided with the opportunity to enrich their lexico-grammatical knowledge, and produce coherent and appropriate academic text. The positive feedback from learners to the approach led to a further round of questioning, not least because a key factor in the success of the course was its use of an e-learning platform. This platform, MOODLE (http://MOODLE.org/), which is based on strong underlying pedagogical principles, provides an environment where new knowledge is created through the individual’s interaction with the environment, as well as through individuals constructing things for one another (http://docs.moodle.org/en/Philosophy). The use of MOODLE was clearly benefitting learners in terms of exposure to the target language, and the target genre. This now raised another possibility, given the flexibility of the MOODLE platform. Could the course now be converted to a fully online mode that would benefit the extremely large community of students and researchers needing to and often struggling to publish in English both institutionally and internationally?

Design Considerations The original classroom course supported by MOODLE had been a hybrid course, with classroom activity interacting with the online platform. In choosing to design a fully online course of this scope the classroom dependencies of the original course had to be removed. Furthermore the structure of the course needed to be clarified and incourse commentary made more explicit. Most importantly, the fundamental objectives of the course needed to be restated in terms of the wider audience the new course would be aimed at. In particular, given the nature of the problems identified and the potentially enormous spectrum of participants engaged in differing types of academic work and research, it was clear that such a course should primarily aim to help participants become fully self-sustaining and independent writers with the language awareness, skills, and resources to hand to enable them to solve their own writing problems both in the short and long term. The advantage of an online programme to achieve this as opposed to a traditional course would clearly be that participants would be able to work in their own space and at their own pace, free of the suffocating constraints of time that are an inevitable constituent of more traditional modes of delivery.

Course Methodology Two important considerations underpinned the approach to the design of the course. Firstly, although the product of academic writing is linear, the process is cyclical. Somehow the course needed to reflect this. Secondly, the journey towards autonomy required a carefully staged progression that would gradually promote independence

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rather than try and impose it de facto. The basic principles of use of the new course were thus that learners should treat the course as a cycle, and go round the course in a loop rather than necessarily progress through it in a traditionally linear fashion. Furthermore, they should be encouraged to ‘hop’ between different course units according to need. Having said this, the units were still carefully designed as a sequence that when followed would offer maximum support and guidance at the outset, and then progressively reduce the formal input and support, to the point where by the end of the course, the participants would effectively have become their own teachers. The key to this was to develop language awareness to the maximum degree possible, so that participants would effectively become language researchers in their own specific subject fields. Hence, building in differentiation was another prime consideration. The number of machine-marked classical one-size-fits-all tasks often found in online sites, such as cloze, matching and so on was reduced, and the emphasis put rather on developing a cycle of activities in which participants would: i) ii) iii) iv)

Familiarise themselves with the organisational structure of academic text. Study the lexico-structural patterns needed to realise those structures. Further investigate organisation and lexico-structural patterning within the context of their own subject-specific fields. Draft their own work.

Since MOODLE is an interactive platform, the provision of open forum discussions would also enable participants to share ideas, resources and problems as they proceeded - in tune with the social constructivist philosophy of the platform.

Corpus Informed Methodology Language corpora provide enormous insight into the lexico-structural patterning of language, and through the use of concordancing software this information can be readily accessed and exploited. The corpus revolution has stimulated an extraordinary volume of research, and the progressive development of open corpora and easy-to-use software applications has increasingly put these tools in the hands of practitioners to make free use of in course design and lesson delivery. In the case of the Write Like an Academic course, use was made of two corpora compiled as part of the research: The Learner Abstract Corpus of work produced by learners at the Eastern Mediterranean University in Cyprus and the Target Abstract Corpus comprising abstracts taken from different fields published by students in English-speaking countries. The Target Abstract Corpus was integrated into the MOODLE, as a prime resource for students to investigate academic language. Further, by investigating frequency patterns across the TAC, a new word list of 165 highly frequent words that were used across the different fields in the corpus was produced. This new wordlist – the WLA165 – was then also integrated into the MOODLE as a glossary from which direct links were provided to the TAC, and to other resources such as dictionaries and thesauruses. The automated linking facility provided by MOODLE, enabled these words to be highlighted on each page as they appeared and linked into the glossary from which the words could be studied more fully.

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The TAC also provided the source from which the basic IMRD (Introduction – Methods – Results – Discussion) structure could be investigated further. The result was the development of four banks, one for each move, each providing important submoves and exemplifying common lexico-structural patterns used to fulfil them. These banks were integrated into the course units as ‘move posters’ which participants could open up and explore as appropriate in the learning and writing process. This corpus-informed approach was intended to provide participants with the resources they needed to study language in detail independently and to then use it for their own purposes. However, as already noted, non-native academic writers work in numerous different fields and contexts, and, naturally enough, at different levels of English language proficiency. Hence, the provision of corpus data of this type as a guide, whilst fundamental to the approach, needed further supplementing, particularly in the light of the intention to help participants to be self-sustaining writers by the end of the course. In this regard one aspect of corpus-informed methodology that has been rather less exploited to date has been the integration into the learning process of learnerdeveloped corpuses. However, now that freely available concordancing software is available on the worldwide web, an obvious strategy was for participants to start compiling corpora of both their own work, and work specifically related to their own field, and for them to analyse that work in terms of specific frequency, moves, and lexico-structural patterns. In short, the goal was to turn participants into practising ‘language detectives’, able themselves to acquire data, store it, and analyse it to identify the lexis and patterns they needed in order to produce cohesive and coherent text. Thus as their familiarity with corpus tools developed, participants were also provided guidance in using these tools for themselves. Thus the corpus-informed methodology was also the foundation for learner autonomy.

Course Contents The finalised version of the online course was divided into ten units: 1. Making the most of WLA 2. Academic Ethics and Plagiarism 3. Writing Research and Thesis Proposals 4. Writing Introductions 5. Writing a Literature Review 6. Writing up your Methodology 7. Writing up your Data Analysis 8. Writing your Conclusion 9. Writing your Abstract 10. Acknowledgements and Feedback The heart of the course is devoted to the ‘classic’ chapters that are very often used in thesis and dissertation writing, and which also tend to be the formula from which academic articles are constructed. Given the online medium of instruction however, the first unit takes the form of an orientation, and the second deals with the issue of plagiarism, which is highly problematic in many parts of the world, and compounded for many non-native speakers by the lack of confidence they have in their own writing abilities. The unit on abstracts is placed at the end, partly because the abstract is rarely 6

completed until the work is finalised, but also because it serves as a central rather concluding unit for participants following the suggested cyclical route through the course. In each of the main units meanwhile, participants are guided through the purpose and structure of particular thesis chapters (or article sections) and asked to explore the language typically used in each chapter. As already discussed, they are then trained to use vocabulary profiling tools to build their own more specialised corpora for their own individual use, and in the process, plan and draft each relevant section or chapter of their work. Further help is given as they proceed in terms of other relevant issues such as referencing and proof-reading.

Conclusion Write Like an Academic is the culmination of nearly a decade of teaching postgraduate learners and an exhaustive PhD Research project. The material is tried and tested in a flexible learning environment and suggests that the corpus-informed approach to writing development has the potential for extremely wide application in language learning and teaching more generally. Perhaps indeed in the next phase of the corpus revolution, we will see the ownership of corpus work pass more and more to one of the major audiences for whom it has been produced – the language learners themselves. A further interesting though not entirely surprising outcome from the work evolved from the long process of turning a supplementary online platform into a fully selfaccess course. For once such a course is designed with the student-user rather than the teacher-provider in mind, the process of adapting such that course back to a flexible or even traditional classroom mode of delivery is not in any way problematic. Hyland and Tse (2007) recommend that in EAP classes, “teachers help students develop a more restricted, discipline-based lexical repertoire” (p. 235). “As teachers”, they say, “we have to recognize that students in different fields will require different ways of using language and so we cannot depend on a list of academic vocabulary” (Hyland and Tse, 2007, p. 249). The conclusions drawn from our own research are not entirely consistent with these claims (Hancioglu et al, 2008). Academic texts from different fields certainly do exhibit linguistic variation, but on the other hand, genres cut across subject fields, and moves and many of their lexico-structural realizations are defined not only by the specific subject matter (e.g. architecture), but by the conventions of the given genre (e.g. abstracts), which inevitably lead to the use of lexico-structural patterns that are extremely similar in widely different fields. Hunston indeed goes so far as to suggest that “for many writers who are expert in their own field, … it is not the technical terminology, but what might be called the terminology of rhetoric that causes problems” (2002, p. 135). In this ongoing debate, we would hope that the Write Like an Academic Course has gone at least some way to squaring the circle, and addressing the practicalities of more specialised approaches as well their theoretical desirability. The solution proposed has so far proved to be quite simple. The course input is primarily interdisciplinary, but by integrating student input into the course through individualised corpus development and analysis, single disciplinary output evolves from the students’ own autonomous research. 7

References and Resources Anthony, L. (n.d.) AntConc. [Computer software]. (http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software/README_antconc3.2.1.txt) Bhatia, V. K. (1993). Analysing Genre: Language use in professional settings. Essex: Longman. Cobb, T. (n.d.). The compleat lexical tutor for data-driven learning on the web [Computer software]. http://132.208.224.131 Flowerdew, L. (2000). Using a genre-based framework to teach organizational structure in academic writing. ELT Journal, Volume 54/4, pp. 369-378. Flowerdew, J. (2001). Attitudes of Journal Editors to Nonnative Speaker Contributions. TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 121-149. Garfield, E & Welljams-Dorof, A. (1990). Language Use in International Research: A Citation Analysis. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 511, Foreign Language in the Workplace, 10-24. Graddol, D. (1997). The Future of English?. The British Council. Retrieved on 200710-14 from the World Wide Web. http://www.britishcouncil.org/de/learningelt-future.pdf Hancioğlu, N., Neufeld, S. & Eldridge, J. (2008). Through the looking glass and into the land of lexico-grammar. English for Specific Purposes, Volume 27, Issue 4, 459-479. Hancioğlu, N. (2009). Incorporating corpus data into an advanced academic thesis writing course. Unpublished Phd thesis, Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, Cyprus. Henry, A. (2007). Evaluating language learners’ response to web-based, data-driven, genre teaching materials. English for Specific Purposes, Volume 26, Issue 4, pp. 462-484. Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: CUP. Hyland, K. (2004). Genre and Second Language Writing. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press. Hyland, K. & Tse, P. (2007). Is There an “Academic Vocabulary”? TESOL Quarterly. Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 235-253.

Johns, A. M., Bawarashi, A., Coe, R. M., Hyland, K., Paltridge, B., Reiff, M. J., Tardy, C. (2006). Crossing the boundaries of genre studies: Commentaries by experts. Journal of Second Language Writing, Volume 15, Issue 3, pp. 234249.

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Johns, T. (1997). Contexts: The background, development, and trialling of a concordance-based CALL program. In A. Wichmann, S. Fligelstone, T. McEnery, & G. Knowles (eds.), Teaching and Language Corpora (pp. 100115). New York: Addison Wesley Longman. Krashen, S. (2003). Dealing with English Fever. In Selected Papers from the Twelfth International Symposium on English Teaching. English Teachers' Association/ROC, Taipei: Crane Publishing Company. pp. 100-108. McCarthy, M. (2001). Issues in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: CUP. Monash University. (2008). Learning Support for Higher Degree Research Students. Retrieved on 2008-12-9 from the World Wide Web. http://www.monash.edu.au/lls/hdr/write/5.6.html MOODLE Course Management System. (2008) Retrieved January 16, 2009 from the World Wide Web. http://docs.moodle.org/en/Philosophy Nation, P. (n.d.). RANGE. [Computer software]. (http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation/nation.aspx) Nunan, D. (1999). Second Language Teaching & Learning. Boston: Heinle & Heinle. Richards, J. C. (1990). The Language Teaching Matrix. Cambridge: CUP. Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus Concordance Collocation. Oxford: OUP. Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre Analysis. Cambridge: CUP. Watt, R. (2004). (http://www.concordancesoftware.co.uk/) Concordance Software Wood, A. (2001). International Scientific English: The language of research scientists around the world. In Flowerdew, J. & Peacock, M. (eds.), Research Perspectives on English for Academic Purposes. Cambridge: CUP.

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