Ann Hewings

• PhD
• Head of Department at The Open University

In this chapter we locate English Language Studies (ELS) in relation to other areas of the subject ‘English’, but significantly we also argue for the study of the English language as a highly effective socio-cultural and political lens on global and local issues relevant to education in the twenty-first century. From globalisation and superdiversit...

English Studies, the term we use to cover English language, literature and creative writing, is a capacious subject that, over the years, has meant a variety of different things to different people, depending on cultural tradition and geographical context. Although generally perceived as a modern subject that only entered in the academy in the late...

This paper explores the ways in which module and curriculum development in the context of a distance education (DE) programme play an important role in ‘constructing’ a discipline’s object of study, thus contributing to the ways in which knowledge is understood in society. The paper examines how the process of module production both reflects and sh...

Developments in technology are opening up new channels for written academic discourse, using electronic devices to supplement paper-based media. These interactive technologies become part of evolving academic literacy practices and affect both what writers and readers expect and is expected of them in high-stakes genres like essays and reports. The...

Citation is a key means by which authors signal their affiliation to their disciplinary community and the place of their work within it. Choices made regarding what work to cite is a crucial aspect of the interpersonal dimension of academic texts, with the act of citing making visible a network of scholarly relations. Citation choices indicate, amo...

To explore how the global status of English influences knowledge production and circulation, this paper focuses on citations in English-medium national and English-medium international journal articles. Drawing on text, ethnographic, and corpus data from a longitudinal study in four national contexts, we argue that citation practices vary significa...

A selection of recent work by experts in academic written discourse illustrates how corpus linguistics and discourse analysis can work as complementary approaches.

Computer conferencing provides a new site for students to develop and rehearse argumentation skills, but much remains to be learnt about how to encourage and support students in this environment. Asynchronous text-based discussion differs in significant ways from face-to-face discussion, creating a need for specially designed schemes for analysis....

The dominance of English as the global language of scholarly publishing in almost every academic field is well documented. More than 90% of the social science journals indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information (Thompson Corp., 2008) and 80% of the 59,591 scholarly periodicals indexed by Ulrich’s Periodical Directory (2007) are published i...

The increasing use of computers to enable or replace face-to-face tutorial discussion groups in higher education is creating a new form of academic writing. This small-scale study of 43 students and three tutors identifies ways in which students present their opinions in a forum which allows greater time for reflection, but also creates a permanent...

About the book: Learning English focuses on young children's acquisition of spoken and written English in monolingual and bilingual contexts and explores the debates surrounding English in schools and colleges, and the often controversial nature of the English curriculum in different parts of the world. English is learned in most parts of the world...

How to provide appropriate feedback to students on their writing has long been an area of central significance to teachers and educators. Feedback in Second Language Writing: Context and Issues provides scholarly articles on the topic by leading researchers, who explore topics such as the socio-cultural assumptions that participants bring to the wr...

This paper focuses on the use of computer mediated communication (cmc), specifically text-based asynchronous conferencing. It reports on two small scale studies which investigated its use as a medium for developing students' argumentation skills. The first study focused on a postgraduate distance program in Applied Linguistics whilst the second stu...

About the book: How to provide appropriate feedback to students on their writing has long been an area of central significance to teachers and educators. Feedback in Second Language Writing: Context and Issues provides scholarly articles on the topic by leading researchers, who explore topics such as the socio-cultural assumptions that participants...

About the book: This volume examines the relationship between language and literacy from a systemic functional perspective. The book starts with a retrospective view on the development of language education practices, written by eminent linguistics Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, and then shows how this approach is implemented today. The second...

Argumentation can be defined at different levels and serve different purposes, but its role in knowledge understanding and construction has given it a central place in education, particularly at tertiary level. The advent of computer-supported text-based conferences has created new sites where such educational dialogues can take place, but the qual...

Guest editorial - article outline 1. Why is language significant? 2. Research settings 2.1. School age students: (i) text-based conferencing (ii) multimodal writing 2.2. University students: (i) text-based conferencing (ii) web-based literacy support 2.3. Informal adult learning: web-based reading 3. Methodologies for exploring language and learnin...

The study reported on here explores the claim that computer conferencing is a valuable environment for students to rehearse academic debates and arguments which can then be drawn on in their written assignments. In order to carry out the exploration, the functional linguistic concept of ENGAGEMENT was employed. ENGAGEMENT comprises six sets of dist...

This paper draws on systemic functional linguistic genre analysis to illuminate the way in which postgraduate applied linguistics students structure their argumentation within a multi party asynchronous computer mediated conference. Two conference discussions within the same postgraduate course are compared in order to reveal the way in which compu...

The balance struck in this volume between discussion of theory and reports on and suggestions for practice make it an invaluable collection for all those engaged in researching and teaching academic writing. Most of the contributions present work influenced by systemic functional linguistics, but the collection will also be of interest to those ado...

This paper draws on systemic functional linguistic genre analysis to illuminate the way in which post graduate applied linguistics students structure their argumentation within a multi party asynchronous computer mediated conference. Two conference discussions within the same postgraduate course are compared in order to reveal the way in which comp...

This edited collection is about the application of English grammar and specializes in "functional" and "corpus" approaches, approaches which are increasingly recognized as providing significant insights into English language in action. It aims to stimulate interest and understanding of grammar as an applied tool not just for grammarians or language...

This edited collection is about the application of English grammar and specialises in 'functional' and'corpus' approaches, approaches which are increasingly recognised as providing significant insights into English language in action. It aims to stimulate interest and understanding of grammar as an applied tool not just for grammarians or language...

About the book: The balance struck in this volume between discussion of theory and reports on and suggestions for practice make it an invaluable collection for all those engaged in researching and teaching academic writing. Most of the contributions present work influenced by systemic functional linguistics, but the collection will also be of inter...

About the book: This edited collection is about the application of English grammar and specialises in 'functional' and'corpus' approaches, approaches which are increasingly recognised as providing significant insights into English language in action. It aims to stimulate interest and understanding of grammar as an applied tool not just for grammari...

This paper describes a qualitative study of asynchronous electronic conferencing by three tutorial groups on the same postgraduate course (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages Worldwide), forming part of an MA in Applied Linguistics (via Distance Education) at the Open University, UK. The groups varied in the degree to which the tutor pa...

Student academic writing is at the heart of teaching and learning in higher education. Students are assessed largely by what they write, and need to learn both general academic conventions as well as disciplinary writing requirements in order to be successful in higher education. Teaching Academic Writing is a 'toolkit' designed to help higher educ...

About the book: Student academic writing is at the heart of teaching and learning in higher education. Students are assessed largely by what they write, and need to learn both general academic conventions as well as disciplinary writing requirements in order to be successful in higher education. Teaching Academic Writing is a 'toolkit' designed to...

The study of metadiscoursal components of academic texts, through which writers organise, interpret and evaluate content matter, provides one means of examining the relationship between writer and reader. This paper explores one grammatical feature of metadiscourse, clauses with an anticipatory it and extraposed subject (as in ‘It is interesting to...

About the book: An exploration of the most important themes in researching and teaching the use of the English language in academic writing. The contributors are all influential scholars in the area of academic literacy, working in Britain, western Europe, Asia, Africa and the United States. * The social and cultural context of academic writing * D...

This is actually an entire BOOK, not a chapter. It's available for purchase.

1. Introduction 2. Professional Discourse: Towards a Multidimensional Approach and Shared Practice 3. On Models in Applied Discourse Analysis 4. Rhetorical Research for Reflective Practice: A Multi-layered Narrative 5. Discourse Practitioners as a Community of Interprofessional Practice: Some Insights from Health Communication Research 6. Towards a...

This study focuses on the essays produced by students in two different disciplines, geography and history of science, to examine how far their writing may be affected by the nature of their previous disciplinary study. In particular, it considers the students' use of Theme, as a feature that is susceptible to discipline-specific variation. The pape...

This volume brings together a set of ten IELTS-related research studies - four on Speaking and six on Writing - conducted between 1995 and 2001. The ten studies were funded under the auspices of the British Council/IELTS Australia Joint-funded Research Program which promotes research activity among IELTS test stakeholders around the world. Findings...

Executive Summary Background This research grows out of work on the importance of argumentation in developingstudents’ critical abilities. It focuses attention on how students argue in computer mediated conferences as opposed to traditionalwritten assignments, investigating the way in which argumentation is realised within the relatively new contex...

Grammar and Context: -considers how grammatical choices influence and are influenced by the context in which communication takes place -examines the interaction of a wide variety of contexts – including socio-cultural, situational and global influences -includes a range of different types of grammar – functional, pedagogic, descriptive and prescrip...

About the book: Student academic writing is at the heart of teaching and learning in higher education. Students are assessed largely by what they write, and need to learn both general academic conventions as well as disciplinary writing requirements in order to be successful in higher education. Teaching Academic Writing is a 'toolkit' designed to...

Using English provides an invaluable introduction to the study of English for students of language and linguistics. It examines the way in which the English language is used today in different contexts and in many parts of the world, by both native and non-native speakers. Issues of language use in speech and writing, in work and play, and in persu...

About the book: The Routledge Companion to English Language Studies is an accessible guide to the major topics, debates and issues in English Language Studies. The collection includes entries written by a team of well-known language specialists from a diverse range of backgrounds who clearly examine and explain established knowledge and recent deve...