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Journal of Academic Writing
Vol. 3 No. 1 Summer 2013, pages 30-41
Writing in Postgraduate Health Science Education 30
Attention to Student Writing in Postgraduate
Health Science Education: Whose Task is It – or
Rather, How?
Brenda Leibowitz
Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Abstract
This article reports on an action research study designed to stimulate the metacognitive
awareness of the writing of assignments in English of a group of students from diverse
language and educational backgrounds, studying health science education at masters level.
In the study, students were required to give and receive feedback on a marked written
assignment to a peer, and receive feedback from a consultant working at the Writing Lab.
They were then required to submit a reflective report, which constitutes the key data source
for this study. An analysis of the reflective reports revealed that the students claimed that they
learnt about their writing habits, about good academic writing, and about the experience of
giving and receiving feedback. The study suggests that although an intervention making
extensive use of a variety of sources of feedback appears to be able to stimulate students’
metacognitive functioning in relation to their writing of assignments, a number of issues
require concerted attention. These issues include: power relations and emotion, perceptions
of legitimate authority, and the central role of the lecturer as disciplinary expert and guide.
The article concludes with a recommendation for enhanced attention to intersubjective
relations of power, language and identity in relation to feedback on writing, especially when
peer feedback is involved.
Introduction
If we assume that language, and by extension academic literacy as discourse, is ubiquitous
and seemingly invisible in the academy and only “marked when it is perceived as being faulty”
(Turner 2011: 6), then how do we propose to support students’ acquisition of the disciplinary
academic discourse? Two immediate and interrelated problems come to mind: the first is that
many academics are either not willing to respond to the issue of language, in depth and
meaningfully, or do not feel competent to do so; and the second is where, precisely, does one
draw the line between language and academic literacy, on the one hand, and ‘content’ or
disciplinary knowledge, on the other? Turner (2011) maintains that these should not be seen
in terms of the ‘content v. form’ dichotomy. The first problem pertains to issues of role and
function: whose function is it to attend the language and academic literacy development of
students? Barwell (2005: 145) asks this question in an illustrative manner:
How, for example, can a language specialist work effectively with a mathematics
teacher, when the mathematics teacher has little familiarity with theories of language
learning and development and the language specialist is not familiar with the
practices of mathematics?
A related question is, can one separate language from the context in which it is deployed? On
this matter Barwell writes, ‘[w]hilst there is broad consensus around the participatory view of
language and subject learning, there is much work to be done to explore and unravel the
Journal of Academic Writing
Vol. 3 No. 1 Summer 2013, pages 30-41
Writing in Postgraduate Health Science Education 31
subtleties of how they interact’ (2005: 146). Barwell is referring to the complexities of the
interaction between language and content. It is perhaps when one looks at the messy realities
of classroom interaction - realities of student learning, or of how academics approach their
responsibilities - that it becomes evident how complex matters really are. The realities involve
a far larger number of issues than just language and content. They include matters of identity,
power relations, emotion and intersubjectivity, supporting the position of writers who
emphasise the political and socio-cultural dimensions of language learning in contexts of
diversity (Burgess and Ivanič 2010, Janks 2010 and Turner 2011).
The article begins with the setting for the study: a postgraduate programme on health science
education in South Africa. This is followed by a description of the action research adopted,
after which the findings in relation to the innovation are presented. These findings are used to
problematize questions of content and language-integrated learning in the postgraduate
health science education context, with a specific focus on feedback to written assignments.
Research Setting: Postgraduate Health Science Education
This study is based on an action research intervention implemented within an MPhil
Programme on Health Science Education at a South African university. Five years ago the
Programme Committee minuted the perception that the students’ writing of assignments in
English requires attention. This perception is related to a broader set of challenges facing
postgraduate education, which is receiving much attention in South Africa of late (see for
example Fataar 2012) and internationally (see Aitchison et al. 2012, and McAlpine et al.
2012). This attention is due to a variety of trends: the pressure to increase numbers of
postgraduate students, and the transition to postgraduate study that students experience. The
transition is acute when it involves students moving to a new institution, a different country or
studying in an additional language. A further aspect of transition is when students are
required to undertake a cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary course, and are required to learn
a new disciplinary language. Most of the students on the programme featured in this study
would have completed a four-to-six or seven-year degree, generally in the health sciences.
Those who have taken the directly medical programme route have had limited or no exposure
to social theory. They are familiar with medical discourses, which transpose more easily to a
positivist approach to research on education than to an interpretivist approach. Adendorff
(2011) has shown how moving from discipline-based research to educational research can be
extremely challenging for teachers. Her research deals with three aspects of the transition:
lack of community of practice around teaching and research on teaching in the home
department; lack of recognition of the value of research on teaching; and most significantly,
the challenge posed by the jargon and writing practices that are associated with education as
a discipline. A further complicating factor influencing transition, is that unequal provision of
education exists in South Africa not only at the general school level, but at universities as well
(Leibowitz 2012, Badat 2012, and Bozalek and Boughey 2012).
Students on the MPhil for Health Science Education have experienced all of these challenges
of transition. The MPhil programme typically draws its students from the town in which the
programme is located, Cape Town, with a significant further number of students from the rest
of the country, and a significant minority from the rest of Africa and Asia. This means that the
students speak a variety of home languages and in any given year a minority of students on
the programme would have English as a home language. The students have varied
disciplinary influences. They might have studied directly medical degrees or the allied health
programmes such as physiotherapy, nursing or speech therapy.
The MPhil on Health Science Education has been offered for the last six years. Examples of
the topics covered in the programme are: assessment, facilitating learning, professional
development, e-learning, and educational research. The discourses in the programme
comprise typically essayist literacy practices such as class discussions, the writing of
assignments in the form of long essays, some more fluid reflective pieces (about the students’
own learning habits, for example) and online tutorials. The final piece of work to be handed in
is a dissertation, which constitutes 37% of the final mark. Students are expected to be able to
Journal of Academic Writing
Vol. 3 No. 1 Summer 2013, pages 30-41
Writing in Postgraduate Health Science Education 32
read, talk and write about theory on learning and teaching, to apply this to their own teaching
and learning contexts as well as to the empirical research that they conduct.
The group on which the study is based was a smaller cohort than in most other years: nine
students, of whom eight live in South Africa, and one in Namibia. Two work at the university
where the course is offered, and others work elsewhere in Cape Town and South Africa. Five
are at universities and four conduct training in the private healthcare sector. The group had
five white and four black students, eight female and one male. Biographical variables should
not be read off in an essentialising and predictive manner, but they do serve to inform the
degree of diversity in a group and the levels of inequality along socio-economic, and more
specifically educational lines, that might exist.
Action Research Intervention
As an action research intervention, this study was a response to a problem, namely that the
writing of assignments in English by the students on the two-year programme did not seem to
improve over the two years, despite the fact that many of the lecturers gave students
significant feedback and advice on how to improve their assignments. The aims of the action
research intervention were, firstly, to stimulate the students’ metacognitive functioning with
regard to academic writing and to make them aware of their own writing strategies, strengths
and challenges; secondly, to encourage them to think more deeply about feedback on written
assignments in general; thirdly, to encourage them to be more supportive towards each other;
and finally, since this was a research based project, to use the data to generate scholarly
debate about academic writing in the Programme Committee.
In brief, the intervention involved the following: during an orientation session at the beginning
of the academic year the University’s Writing Lab gave the students two short sessions on
academic writing and on giving and receiving feedback. The students were instructed to take
the first academic assignment they produced on the programme, which was marked by one of
two lecturers facilitating the first section of the programme, to the Writing Lab, where they
would engage in discussion with a Writing Lab consultant. This discussion was either face to
face, or if the student lived outside the town, conducted via Skype, and as a last resort, as
written correspondence via email. They were also instructed to discuss their assignments with
one other student, in pairs, where they would give each other feedback. Due to the odd
number of students on the programme, one student ended up giving and receiving feedback
from two students. Finally, the students were instructed to write a short reflective report on
this experience of receiving feedback from various sources and of giving feedback. They were
allotted a score for this reflective report, which was then marked by a different lecturer on the
programme, namely the writer of this article, who has specialized in academic literacy in
higher education. The instructions for the reflective report are reflected below (Figure 1):
Assignment Two: Feedback to Assignment on Contextualising HSE
Instructions
Arrange to visit the Writing Lab or to have a Skype or email session on the basis of your marked
assignment on Contextualising Health Science Education.
Have a discussion with your MPhil partner about the same essay.
Write a reflective report in which you
a) describe the two discussions;
b) describe what you learnt from each one;
c) describe what you would do differently with regard to your writing in the future (or do the same).
Figure 1. ERC Assignment Two on Feedback
This intervention was conducted with three cohorts of students on the programme, each time
with small refinements. For the third year a formal research proposal was written up, given the
Journal of Academic Writing
Vol. 3 No. 1 Summer 2013, pages 30-41
Writing in Postgraduate Health Science Education 33
green light by the Programme Committee and approved by the Faculty Research Ethics
Committee. The third iteration forms the basis of this article.
The educational principles informing the intervention are in keeping with the setting of the
programme as a part-time, postgraduate module undertaken by adult learners from a variety
of locations. The first principle, influenced by ideas on work-based and situated learning,
(Gherardi 2012 and Wenger 1998) is that the learners should practise the core activities and
principles they engage with formally, thus that there is an experiential component. This is
especially relevant in a module which encourages reflection on and in action amongst
educators (Schön 1983). The experiential component involves the students practising giving,
receiving and reflecting on feedback to a written assignment. It was perhaps unusual that
students were instructed to use their marked assignments as the basis for the feedback
sessions. This would lead to their giving and receiving ‘feed back’ as opposed to ‘feed
forward’, that is, feedback that is not oriented to improving a subsequent draft or assignment.
This is often seen as less effective (see for example Dysthe 2011). However, the students
were under a lot of pressure, and would be unlikely to use feedback to redraft, and in addition,
there was a hope that using a marked assignment would stimulate reflection more deeply. It
would help students to think through how to respond analytically to the assessor’s comments,
which they often struggle to do (Poverjuc 2011 and Paxton 1993). There was also a hope that
this experience would stimulate the students to actively solicit feedback from peers or the
Writing Lab in preparation of writing assignments in the future.
A second and related principle is that reflection on writing enhances one’s understanding of
the writing process and one’s sense of identity as a writer (Fernsten and Reda 2011). The
third principle, stemming from constructivist approaches to learning, is that learning is both
individual and social, with mediation as well as input from a more expert other (Vygotsky
1978). In this intervention the students received feedback from the lecturer who marked their
assignment (the disciplinary expert), a Writing Lab consultant (the writing expert), and a peer.
The adoption of the idea that learners can and should learn from each other, and support
each other in a community of practice (Wenger 1998) was an elaboration of the idea of
collaborative learning, and was important in a module where students come from various
geographical locations, as indicated above, and where there are many stresses and
challenges associated with learning away from home – as experienced by some of the
students. A final and most important principle is that interventions designed to foster the
acquisition of academic literacy occur most effectively when integrated with disciplinary
learning. Despite the widespread acceptance of this latter principle in the international
literature on ICL (indeed, its very rationale) and on academic literacy (see for example Turner,
2011, Ivanič et al. 2009 and Lea and Street 1998), as well as in South African ICL and
academic literacy literature (for example, Leibowitz 2011 and Jacobs 2007) curiously and
sadly in many university settings in South Africa this idea has not found widespread
acceptance, amongst disciplinary experts and language in education experts alike.
Data sources
The key source of data for this study was the reflective reports on the experiences of giving
and receiving feedback, which comprised nine reports of two to three pages each. These
were accompanied by the actual written assignments that served as the basis for the
feedback. Some students included the feedback that they received from peers, when this was
provided via email. A further source of data was the email correspondence the students
engaged in around the feedback process (twelve emails of varying length).
Data analysis
The reflective reports were analysed according to a set of codes generated from the data, and
benchmarked with other texts on feedback, for example that of Dysthe (2011) and Hattie and
Timperley (2007). The data was first analysed in relation to pre-determined questions,
namely:
1. What was the experience of the process of receiving feedback from: marker,
peer, Writing Lab consultant?
Journal of Academic Writing
Vol. 3 No. 1 Summer 2013, pages 30-41
Writing in Postgraduate Health Science Education 34
2. What was learnt from feedback (from marker, peer, Writing Lab consultant)
about:
Own writing product and style (content, rhetorical strategy, language),
Own writing drafting practice,
Sense of agency and intentionality,
Feedback in general.
A deeper and inductive reading of the data led to a further set of codes linked to the themes
of form versus content and intersubjectivity. These themes are dealt with below.
Findings
What students learnt about writing and feedback
An analysis of the data according to the preset questions revealed that each student learnt
from the various processes. Each student found the process of giving and receiving feedback
from a peer, and of having a consultation at the Writing Lab beneficial, although they did not
all mention learning the same lessons. Students learnt about the following issues about
feedback to writing: the value of receiving feedback; the value of obtaining feedback from
multiple sources; the value of reading and giving feedback to a peer; the emotional disposition
necessary in order to receive feedback productively; and more specific guidance about their
own academic writing in general, as well as how they could have improved their first
assignment. In addition to cognitive gains they mentioned, they referred to affective or
emotional gains, in that they were being motivated to consider their writing more carefully. A
summative comment in one of the reports provides a sense of the range of benefits the
students mentioned:
It was a good idea to solicit feedback from two diverse sources, namely a writing
expert and a fellow student in the field of higher education, i.e. sharing the same work
environment as myself. From both I have gained new insights on where I did well but
also where I can improve my writing, which I am eager to do. This exercise has
taught me how to dissociate myself from my written work in order to view my writing
style critically and objectively (as far as that is possible). In future I will make sure that
I put my written work away overnight and then return the next day to read it over
(aloud) from the viewpoint of a stranger, imagining how an HSE scholar somewhere
in cyberspace will read and perceive my essay.
The responses from the students confirmed the impression gained in the previous years of
teaching the class, that students in postgraduate health science education would perceive the
value of the feedback and use of the Writing Lab consultations. An emblematic response of
the intention to use what was learnt through this experience is demonstrated in a comment
made by one of the students in email correspondence to me after the reflective reports were
marked:
I have already attempted the change in 2 subsequent assignments (one was this very
one) and look forward to evaluating the impact this will have on my performance.
It is not possible to assess precisely the extent to which the metacognitive gains from this
exercise would be evident in later writing pieces. Many of the findings are based on self-
reporting by the students, and there are multiple factors influencing the utilization of
knowledge and understanding gained in one exercise, in other writing activities (Archer 2011,
and Leibowitz and Parkerson 2011).
A deeper reading of the data provided a valuable glimpse into the complex manner in which
issues of language, academic writing and form, on the one hand, and matters of disciplinary
content, on the other hand, intersect, such that they cannot be neatly delineated, and such
that the responsibility for attending to either form or content, cannot be assigned automatically
to one role player or another.
Journal of Academic Writing
Vol. 3 No. 1 Summer 2013, pages 30-41
Writing in Postgraduate Health Science Education 35
Form vs. content
Whilst many academics as disciplinary experts might by unwilling to engage in matters of
form or language, others do so readily. An example from the summative comments by one of
the two lecturers who marked the assignment is provided below (Figure 2). The sections in
bold imply comment on content/disciplinary understanding in a general sense. The sections
not in bold refer to form and language.
You demonstrated that you studied the work in the module and that you
have some understanding of the relevant Acts, policies and trends. You
also indicated how studying this module, has assisted in understanding
where you fit into this framework. You also stayed within the page length
guidelines.
Your work however does not succeed in demonstrating that you have
internalized the theory and are also able to apply it to your educational
practice.
The main problem is with your writing style in that you make lofty
statements that are difficult to translate into its particular meaning to you
and your practice. You also list several trends without demonstrating that
you really understand what they mean.
I suggest you contact the Writing lab sooner rather than later to help you with the
above, including the following:
- Inappropriate use of capital letters
- Incorrect referencing
- Long unstructured paragraphs without headings
- Use of commas, semi-colons and brackets
- Simple formatting mistakes such as spaces, commas
- Lack of page numbers
This will be an investment in your future performance in this course.
Figure 2. Example of Summative Comment by a Lecturer
The feedback from peers, similarly, covered the range of issues dealing with content or
disciplinary matters as well as matters of form, as the following example from a reflective
report about feedback from a peer demonstrates:
I was made aware of how to improve the lay-out of my work, focus it better to
address the question on hand and to go to greater depth in reflecting on the
personal impact of the learning.
In contrast, the students reported that discussions at the Writing Lab did not focus on the
content and topic of the assignment at all, but rather on the structure and style as well as the
writerly habits of the student. An example of a focus on the functions of various sections of an
essay is provided in a student’s description of her visit to the Writing Lab:
[The Writing Lab consultant] started off by discussing the criteria for writing an
introduction, mentioning that an introduction consists of three parts, namely (1) the
broad context of the subject matter, (2) an outline of the aims and objectives or the
hypothesis of the essay, and (3) the layout of the content of the essay, i.e. what
topics will be addressed. He then let me analyse my own introduction in terms of
these criteria. My finding was that it contained items (2) and (3) but lacked item (1),
meaning that I did not commence my essay by stating the broad content of my
subject matter.
Journal of Academic Writing
Vol. 3 No. 1 Summer 2013, pages 30-41
Writing in Postgraduate Health Science Education 36
It would thus seem that lecturers and the students feel free to stray into the domains of
content as well as form, but that the Writing Lab consultants see their roles as more
constrained.
Roles
There is a suggestion in several of the reports that the role divisions between lecturer, peer
and Writing Lab consultant do not converge necessarily or solely along the lines of form
versus content. They might also converge along lines of authority versus support agent or
therapist. For instance, as arbiters of the quality of the assignments, the lecturers are also
figures of authority and judges. The lecturer as marker and judge gave the final score and a
series of comments that could either foster understanding on the part of the student, or simply
justify the score allocated. The difficulty associated with the marginal as well as summative
comments provided by the lecturers who marked the assignment was that several of the
students did not gain sufficient understanding of what this feedback meant in practice, and
how it could be used to improve the writing of this or any other assignment in the future. In the
literature on feedback the difficulty with making sense of feedback is said to be especially
pronounced amongst speakers of English as an additional language (Poverjuc 2011). In the
South African setting Deyi (2011) and Paxton (1993) show how when students do not have an
adequate mastery of academic discourse, they lack the means to unpack and work with
feedback. The power of explication of feedback by the lecturer/marker is possibly higher than
that of a peer or Writing Lab consultant, either because the lecturer is the ultimate judge and
authority, or because he or she has the expertise to show the student in depth, what is
required. This power is well described in the response of one of the students to a follow-up
question from the researcher about the three sources of feedback. She had questioned the
lecturer who marked her work, as to why she received a mark that was lower than she had
hoped for:
I experienced the marker’s feedback to be more educative. The reason being it was a
face-to-face session, [X] encouraged me to look carefully at the suggestions and to
put these into practice. He was precise about his expectations and where I can
improve and this motivated me to excel in my performance. After this session I had
more self-confidence. [During the Writing Lab consultation] the tips were more
general and covered scientific writing specifically. It was still difficult to apply these
tips in the following assignment, whereas I could make use of the marker's
suggestions. […] The peer session was conducted with less trust in each other as we
are still both novices in our scientific writing skills.
If a lecturer does not have the opportunity, for whatever reason, to sit and unpack the
feedback with a student, it might well be the case that a peer, tutor or writing consultant can
be made available to discuss the feedback with a student. In this study there were only nine
students, but the issue of lecturer time remains a pertinent constraining feature in relation to
the provision of feedback generally, especially in large classes, or as in this case, when some
of the students work full-time and work far from the teaching environment.
In this study the role of the peer appeared to be a sounding board to discuss or share ideas or
an additional source for clarification and understanding. It is interesting that the peers were
willing to judge each other’s work and to make concrete suggestions as to how to make
improvements to the writing, often being more directive than either the lecturer/marker or the
Writing Lab consultant. For example, a student wrote about his discussion with a peer:
She criticised the focus on [X] University as too narrow and questioned how
‘meaningful’ such an approach was. She suggested that the mention of the TB and
HIV epidemic in the introduction was an important one and felt that I should re-visit
this in my conclusion to close the circle.
The role of the Writing Lab consultant is quite different: it is a trained ‘other’ who facilitates the
student’s emerging understanding of themselves as a writer, and who provides the means for
the student to take control over their writerly choices. This is the key role the Writing Lab sees
for itself, according to Underwood and Tregidgo (2006). The students were not told in
Journal of Academic Writing
Vol. 3 No. 1 Summer 2013, pages 30-41
Writing in Postgraduate Health Science Education 37
advance how the Writing Lab consultation would proceed, a weakness that will be remedied
in the future. That this role was unexpected and surprising to the students is reflected in a
comment in one of the reflective reports:
I had no clue as to what would transpire during the session. […] She used open-
ended questions to probe my insight into my problem areas.
One of the students referred to the session bemusedly as like ‘an interview’. The
effectiveness of the facilitative approach in allowing (certainly some of) the students to take
control of the reflective process is evident in the comment of one of the academically more
proficient students in the group, who expressed her own role in the noticing process, whilst at
the same time expressing her own areas to improve as deficiencies:
Analysing the conclusion with the help of [X], I noted that instead of making
concluding remarks I actually addressed new issues (namely what changes can be
made in the courses that I teach), which should rather have been addressed in a
separate paragraph under a separate heading before the concluding paragraph. This
was my worst structural error. [emphasis added]
The question of how each role player might play a slightly different role pertains to relations
between people. This is dealt with in the next section.
Intersubjectivity
The third issue which emerged from the data was a broad ranging set of issues to do with
relationality and intersubjectivity. These comprise the intersecting relations of language,
identity, role, authority and privilege. The issues of expertise and authority have already been
referred to in the section on roles, where the lecturer may be perceived as having more
authority, the peers seen as novice and the Writing Lab consultants as having expertise in the
area of structure, process and language.
One aspect of intersubjectivity, discourse and positioning of people, is the messages that are
generated in the comments to students, from whatever source. An example is from one of the
lecturers who marked the first assignment, who suggested the student visit the Writing Lab to
address her language ‘deficiencies’. The student seemed to assimilate this concept and
developed it into an extended metaphor of the autopsy in her description of her visit to the
Writing Lab:
At this stage it was clear that the consultant was performing an autopsy of the format,
words and sentences used in the essay.
There is no indication in the rest of the report that the student felt undermined or insulted by
the recommendation from the lecturer. The discourse does, however, summon up issues of
power and privilege. Another set of comments pertaining to peer feedback bring to the fore
similar issues of power in relation to language more overtly. An English first language student
wrote, about her encounter with her peer:
I did not enjoy this part of the assignment. I find conflict situations very hard to deal
with, and I worried that my feedback would antagonise my colleague, even though I
tried to be diplomatic. I have been very lucky in my schooling, and in the fact that I am
innately good at both spoken and written English.
The idea of power relations and privilege could suggest that individuals consciously might
want to put others down. But this is not so, as issues of power are inherent in the academy
(Mann 2008), most notably in relation to language and academic literacy which are pervasive
in all teaching and learning situations (Janks 2010). Interactions around writing and language
question students’ sense of competence, their sense of self, and thus provoke strongly
emotional reactions as Rai (2012) points out. The comment in a reflective report by a student
who sees herself as a competent lecturer and academic, but who received a low mark for her
Journal of Academic Writing
Vol. 3 No. 1 Summer 2013, pages 30-41
Writing in Postgraduate Health Science Education 38
first assignment, is honest and perceptive about how her encounter with her peer affected
her:
I had given little attention to who my partners were as I did not think it had any
bearing on the process. There was virtually no anxiety as I felt fairly confident I would
do well and also that feedback would in no way be a judgment on my person. This
perspective changed considerably when I received the marked assignment with a
performance far below what I expected. I was surprised at having misjudged my
capability and became self-conscious about making anyone else privy to it. I
wondered how my partners’ view of me would change in the light of my performance.
It was a new experience, rarely in the past having been other than consistently an
above average to excellent student. It gave me a glimpse of what it meant to have
one’s sense of self-worth wrapped around one’s doing rather than in one’s being and
where the intersection and or separation between the two lay.
These words echo the views of social realist Margaret Archer (2000), who describes the role
of emotions in providing a commentary on our concerns. Significant concerns which provide a
spur to our actions, especially amongst professionals, are self worth and performative
achievement. It is in pursuing our concerns that we exercise agency, according to Archer.
Burgess and Ivanič (2010: 242) draw our attention to the manner in which what they call
‘socially available possibilities for selfhood’ help shape a writer’s identity. These comprise
elements of a writer’s biography as well as their current interaction. The writer draws on these
resources to act, in order to develop as a writer (van Rensburg 2011). This implies that the
interaction around writing, including the overt and covert messages about the writer’s ability
and value, will influence the steps the writer takes to develop.
Conclusion
This action research study provides an exploratory foray into the issue of ICL as it pertains to
post graduate students studying health science education research. In this instance the
provision of feedback on students’ academic writing in English from a variety of sources was
found to be beneficial by the students. Although the students reported learning about
feedback in general and about their own writing style, there is no guarantee that they will
indeed apply what they learnt in the future, especially if prevailing conditions in the
programme or their professional lives militate against this. One cannot control for a student’s
working or home life, but this does suggest attention to what is within the purview of the team:
thus a programme-wide approach to the fostering of students’ language and writing ability. An
interesting development arising out of this action research study in relation to the aim that it
should encourage scholarly debate about academic literacy in the Programme Committee, is
that the researcher on this project gave a presentation on an earlier draft of this article to the
Committee. This led to a workshop on feedback and academic literacy for the Committee, and
a decision in principle that attention to academic literacy is the responsibility of all the
lecturers on the programme. It also lends credence to the importance of a scholarly, research-
based approach as a means of effecting ICL in the classroom.
The study further demonstrates that integrating language matters into the mainstream
curriculum, is messy and complex. The study has shed light on the interrelatedness of issues
of form and function, where language and form are not the sole purview of the lecturer as
disciplinary specialist, the peer or the Writing Lab consultant, although the latter appears to
focus on language more extensively. Perhaps, as Turner (2011) writes, the very concept of
‘generic v. discipline-specific’ is not a useful one. The study suggests that a more useful
distinction might be to do with not who, but how the lecturer, peer and consultant support the
student’s language development, what interactional strategies they might use and how much
time they might deploy for this purpose. The study points to the need to sensitise all role
players: students, lecturers as disciplinary experts and language specialists, about the roles
they are most suited to play in advancing students’ academic writing; and to sensitise
students about what to expect from their lecturers and Writing Lab consultants. Aspects of
this training that require attention would include what kind of messages and what forms of
Journal of Academic Writing
Vol. 3 No. 1 Summer 2013, pages 30-41
Writing in Postgraduate Health Science Education 39
interaction encourage an agentic writerly identity amongst students? It might also be useful to
consider how best to take into account the power and privilege that interact with language in
an academic setting, and how to advance the needs of all students without trampling on the
identities of some.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the MPhil Group of 2012, who participated in this study. Sharifa Daniels and Rose
Richards from the Stellenbosch University Writing Lab provided perceptive comments on the
process.
Journal of Academic Writing
Vol. 3 No. 1 Summer 2013, pages 30-41
Writing in Postgraduate Health Science Education 40
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