
Sharon MccullochCentral European University | CEU · Centre for Academic Writing
Sharon Mcculloch
PhD Linguistics
About
57
Publications
16,000
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
291
Citations
Introduction
Sharon McCulloch currently works at Centre for Academic Writing at Central European University in Vienna.
Additional affiliations
March 2015 - February 2017
Publications
Publications (57)
This volume has been written specifically with TESOL teacher educators, practitioners, and classrooms in mind. It is divided into three sections: cognitive aspects of language learning, individual differences, and language learning difficulties and challenging behaviours. Structured in this way, it enables TESOL teacher educators and practitioners...
This chapter sets the stage for the entire volume. Its purpose is to ensure that TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) practitioners are cognizant that education and psychology are impossible to separate. Education aims to change human behaviour, whereas psychology aims to study human behaviour. Therefore, there is a pressing need...
As discussed in this volume, several cognitive and affective factors influence language learning. Cognitive factors such as attention and working memory determine how learners process language. While some affective factors such as anxiety negatively influence the psychological wellbeing of learners, others such as metacognition and multiple intelli...
This collection brings together perspectives from early-career LGBTQ+ scholars as they navigate the scholarly publishing landscape, highlighting their experiences and challenges in providing greater representation within the academic community and existing scholarship.
The volume reflects on the ways in which scholarly output is intricately linked...
Novice scholars tend to learn about scholarly publication mainly through informal networks of friends, mentors, and research supervisors (McCulloch, Tusting & Hamilton, 2017), but academics in newer UK universities (those established after 1992) may face particular challenges accessing such networks. For example, relationships with former PhD super...
Mind the gap(s): exploring university teaching staff's perceptions of IELTS writing versus university writing requirements This study investigated the level of awareness among academic staff with the role of admissions tutor regarding what IELTS writing scores actually represent in practice, namely what can be expected of international students in...
This study investigates staff and students' conceptual understanding of plagiarism in higher education in four South Asian countries in which English is the primary medium of instruction in many disciplines: Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The study aimed to establish the extent to which avoidance of plagiarism was perceived as importan...
This report provides an overview of how English language teaching, learning and assessment are currently situated within school-level education in Sri Lanka. The report provides up-to-date contextual information, exploring policies and practices. The authors draw on policy documentation, research studies and a small number of interviews and focus g...
This edited volume aims to address the topic of LGBTQ early-career scholars’ experiences of scholarly publication. This volume will draw on the perspectives and experiences of LGBTQ doctoral students and early-career researchers across a range of academic disciplines. It is hoped that this volume will help to paint a richer and more nuanced picture...
McCulloch describes a scholarly publication trajectory over a six-year period from the final stages of doctoral study to becoming a senior lecturer. The chapter takes a literacy studies perspective on scholarly publishing and analyses the socio-political factors that influenced the author’s own path towards establishing a scholarly publication reco...
This study investigates understandings and practices around English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in higher education (HE) in four South Asian countries in which English is the primary medium of instruction in HE: Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The study aimed to establish the extent to which critical thinking, the use of source materials...
Two main groups of staff currently provide writing support to students in British universities. These staff typically enter their roles from a range of professional backgrounds and, consequently, may hold different professional identities and understandings of what academic writing is. Although there is a body of research on teacher identity and on...
This paper highlights the importance, when researching writing across the lifespan, of addressing a range of aspects of social context which change over time, particularly focusing on tools, values, relationships and identities. It illustrates this argument by drawing on a range of empirical studies exploring different aspects of writing in univers...
Almost every aspect of an academic’s role involves specialised forms of writing, and the range of digital platforms used to produce this has increased. Core genres such as the journal article and monograph remain central, but the ways they are now commonly produced via file-sharing software and online submission systems are changing them. Digital m...
This paper explores academics' writing practices, focusing on the ways in which they use digital platforms in their processes of collaborative learning. It draws on interview data from a research project that has involved working closely with academics across different disciplines and institutions to explore their writing practices, understanding a...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of research evaluation policies and their interpretation on academics’ writing practices in three different higher education institutions and across three different disciplines. Specifically, the paper discusses how England’s national research excellence framework (REF) and institutional...
Academics’ everyday professional writing practices are very extensively mediated through email. In our recently completed ESRC-funded research project, The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation, email was by far the most commonly mentioned digital platform for writing across our 75 interviewees. As one of them told us, “Everything is done by email now.” G...
Academics’ sense of scholarly identity is closely linked to the writing they do. However, the range of audiences academics are expected to write for and the types of texts they have to produce are changing. For example, management concern for transparency and accountability in higher education means that academics are often asked to write documents...
Writing is crucial to an academic’s role of producing, shaping and distributing knowledge. However, academic writing itself is increasingly being shaped by the contemporary university’s managerial practices and evaluation frameworks. Sharon McCulloch describes how her research on academics’ writing practices has revealed tensions around the ways in...
Writing that counts or writing that is counted? Almost every aspect of an academic's work is mediated by writing, both in terms of the day-today tasks that consume their time and in terms of their scholarship over of the course of their career. This writing and the practices around it are changing in response to broader changes in higher education,...
Invited lecture at ’Opening the Black Box of Quality: Reflecting on Scholarly Practice in the Social Sciences and Humanities’: International Doctoral Summer School at Klagenfurt University
This paper reports on the first phase of an ESRC-funded research project aimed at exploring how knowledge is produced and distributed through the writing practices of academics, and how these are shaped by the contemporary context of higher education, including managerialism, and research assessment.
As part of the Research Excellence Framework (...
This presentation discusses findings from an ERSC-funded research project investigating the writing practices of academics at three English universities. The data drawn on in this paper relate specifically to the ways in which digital technologies around writing bring issues of academic identity into sharp focus.
Academics have always participate...
This paper reports on findings from project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK, on the dynamics of knowledge creation. Taking a social practice approach to literacy (Barton, Hamilton & Ivanič, 2000), the project ethnographically investigates the writing practices of academics at three English universities. The data present...
This paper explores academics' writing practices, focusing on the importance of digital platforms in their processes of collaborative learning. It draws on interview data from the first phase of a research project working closely with academics across different disciplines and institutions to explore their writing practices. The project is framed w...
Invited talk at Stockholm University 'When you became a professor, you could profess something': Academics' writing practices in three disciplines The creation of knowledge through writing of various types is central to the role of an academic. This includes scholarly, pedagogic and administrative writing, as well as emerging genres relating to pub...
Existing studies of source use in academic student writing tend to i), focus more on the writing than the reading end of the reading-to-write continuum and ii), involve the use of insufficiently ‘naturalistic’ writing tasks. Thus, in order to explore the potential of an alternative approach, this paper describes an exploratory case study concerning...
Although much of the research into source use by international students has tended to focus on issues of plagiarism, there has recently been recognition that their difficulties in this respect may be more pedagogical than moral. However, much remains to be known about the nature of such students? source use. In order to throw light on the ways in w...
Although coherence is an essential quality of academic writing, it is not always clearly defined and can therefore, be challenging both to teach and to learn. One aspect of coherence that is often taught in EAP courses is the use of logical connectors: “words and phrases whose function it is to show some logical relationship between two or more bas...