No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Chapter 2. What is (and could be) thick description in academic writing research?
Abstract
This book illustrates the use of ethnography as an analytical approach to investigate academic writing, and provides critical insights into how academic writing research can benefit from the use of ethnographic methods. Throughout its six theoretical and practice-oriented studies, together with the introductory chapter, foreword and afterword, ethnography-related concepts like thick description, deep theorizing, participatory research, research reflexivity or ethics are discussed against the affordances of ethnography for the study of academic writing. The book is key reading for scholars, researchers and instructors in the areas of applied linguistics, academic writing, academic literacies and genre studies. It will also be useful to those lecturers and postgraduate students working in English for Academic Purposes and disciplinary writing. The volume provides ethnographically-oriented researchers with clear pointers about how to incorporate the telling of the inside story into their traditional main role as observers.
Winner of the 9th edition of the AELFE's Enrique Alcaraz Research Award
... Thick description, or the "elaborate venture" and the "intellectual effort" (Geertz 1973: 312) that goes into ethnographic description, even at its most elemental level, is a key concept in ethnographic literature. Because ethnography describes human behaviour and relies heavily on participant observation, thick description can be achieved only if ethnographers use multiple data sources, spend significant periods of time with participants, and move from mere descriptions to provide a greater depth of understanding (De Costa, Kessler, and Gajasinghe 2022;Paltridge, Starfield, and Tardy 2016;Tardy 2021). It is precisely the need to achieve a very deep level of theorizing and understanding as well as to narrow the gap between text and context that has been defined by Lillis (2008) as "deep theorizing". ...
... Pure or true ethnographic research is rare (Blommaert and Jie 2020;De Costa, Kessler, and Gajasinghe 2022;Leeds-Hurwitz 2004;Tardy 2021) and the combination of research methodologies, methods, and tools is frequent in ethnographic studies. It is also the case that even though qualitative research and ethnography are two distinctive terms and have their own definitions, they are often conflated and used synonymously in the literature (Leeds-Hurwitz 2004;Paltridge, Starfield, and Tardy 2016). ...
... After analysing 85 qualitative-oriented studies in the field of English for specific purposes, Dressen-Hammouda (2013) reported that even though researchers had claimed the adoption of ethnography-inspired methods, most studies lacked the use of multiple data sources and the expected sustained engagement in the research. These findings concur with Tardy (2021), who analysed 21 research articles in the field of academic writing and found that rather than ethnographic research in the purest form, researchers conducted "ethnographically oriented" research -or, following Swales (2019), "ethnographically tinged" research. ...
This chapter provides an overview of ethnography as an emerging method that researchers can employ to examine specific cultural practices of social groups in specialized communication settings. Section 2 discusses core concepts and issues in ethnographic research. Section 3 explores the different approaches to ethnography that prevail in extant literature. Section 4 reviews a selection of specialized communication studies to showcase the opportunities in the field. The chapter concludes with some pointers for further action.
... Techniques like triangulation or member checks were preferred over thick description, prolonged engagement, peer debriefing, and reflexivity in our study as well. This finding, especially the limited use of thick description, is in line with that of Tardy's (2021) finding in writing studies more broadly. One of the underlying causes for this finding can be reflected in sources used by L2 writing researchers to establish trustworthiness. ...
a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Research methodology Qualitative research L2 writing Trustworthiness Quality and rigor in research a b s t r a c t Researchers in applied linguistics have long been concerned with issues of quality and rigor. Because of various paradigmatic tensions, many qualitative researchers have sought to move away from the entrenched concepts of reliability, validity , and objectivity traditionally associated with quantitative research methodologies. Given the significance of quality in research methodology and the wide variation in evaluative nomenclature, we set out to investigate how "trustworthi-ness " is addressed by L2 writing researchers in their published articles in the Journal of Second Language Writing. We first identified all empirical articles in the JSLW since its inception (June 1992) up to volume 56 (June 2022), assigning them to one of three research approaches: quantitative , qualitative, or mixed methods. We found 389 articles that used primary data for analysis. From this pool, 152 (39%) were coded as qualitative in terms of their data and methods. Using AntConc (Anthony, 2014), 43 articles were found to have used quality-related terms or techniques. We then developed a coding and annotation scheme to code and annotate all 43 articles. Findings show that although researchers addressed research quality in different ways, there is a widespread lack of systematic attention to quality criteria in L2 writing qualitative studies. We hope the study findings and discussion of this review advance Applied Linguistics qualitative research and understandings of trustworthiness. In particular, we hope both early career and experienced researchers will find the insights generated by this study useful when designing, conducting, and publishing qualitative research.
Practice architectures provide a framework for understanding how educators transform theory into action. In a case study based in British Columbia, Canada, participant K-12 educators identified motivations for engaging in food systems education and how these influenced both the content and approaches used in their classrooms. Our study indicates a growing concern among educators for students to understand how food is implicated in a sustainable future and how it connects with an array of environmental, economic, and social issues. Findings from our case study suggest that teachers engage with practice architectures based on specific intentions that shape food systems education.
Assessors’ perspectives on their evaluative practices remain relatively under-researched. Given evidence that higher education assessment and feedback continue to be problematic, this paper proposes a specific methodological innovation with potential to contribute both to research and practice in this area. It explores the potential of a micro-analysis of textual engagement, nested within an ethnographic approach, to defamiliarize the often taken-for-granted practice of marking. The study on which the paper is based used screen capture combined with audio-recorded, concurrent talk-around-text to throw light on the processes, strategies and perspectives of eight teachers within one university as they assessed undergraduates’ work. This close-up focus was nested within broader ethnographic data generation incorporating interviews, marked assignments and other assessment-related texts. The paper presents selected ‘moments of engagement’ to show how this methodology can offer a renewed understanding of evaluative literacies as complex, ‘messy’ and shot through with influences invisible in the final assessed text but which may nevertheless be highly consequential. The paper concludes by reflecting on the potential for this type of data and analysis to contribute to assessor development and inform debate about the future of higher education assessment.
Dressen-Hammouda describes how Protocol-Assisted Modeling, a technique adapted from industrial performance testing (Schriver, Teaching writers to anticipate readers’ needs: A classroom-evaluated pedagogy. Written Communication, 9, 179–208, 1992), can increase student writers’ audience awareness by helping them build more accurate mental models of how readers think and react to information. Reporting on preliminary results from an ongoing study mapping the emergence of situated work-based literacy in French L1 technical communication Masters students, Dressen-Hammouda describes what happens when students are presented with a series of poorly designed documents: after predicting potential problems for readers, they revise their evaluation using a think-aloud protocol transcript showing how actual users reacted. She argues that the approach is effective in helping learners across disciplines and professions form deeper and more intuitive mental representations of the wide range of audiences students will be writing for.
The study takes a situated and material approach to texts and writing practices and examines writing ethnographically as it transpires and displayed in museums. The ethnography highlights the richness and sociality embodied in writing practices as well as the ideological, communal, and ritualistic functions that writing and texts serve in cultural institutions.
Specifically, I offer a comparative study of visitor books and similar writing platforms in two Jewish heritage museums in the United States. Extended ethnographic observations of visitors’ writing activities are augmented by analysis of visitors’ texts, which, following Bakhtin, are understood in terms of their addressivity structures or whom they are addressed to. The study shows how visitors’ texts amount to collective contributions that are part of museums’ heritage display, and that visitors become rhetors when their mode of heritage consumption is the production of texts.
Investigates the possible link between a classroom teacher’s implementation of alternative literacy assessment and her classroom instruction. Illuminates the role that alternative literacy assessments can play in the classroom in terms of reflecting literacy task performance, presenting information on students’ strengths and weaknesses, and improving the quality of instruction provided to all students.
At a recent conference on discourse, one of the keynote speakers remarked during her presentation that the reviewer of a paper she had submitted for publication in an academic journal had asked for “more reflexivity.” What could this throwaway comment have meant? This entry aims to help readers think about what researcher reflexivity might mean and what the reviewer might have had in mind.
A student’s emerging genre mastery is a complex process which involves learning not only relevant discoursal forms, but also a wide range of specialist knowledge frames. Recent research suggests that these knowledge frames are acquired during the development of a student’s disciplinary identity. Although disciplinary identity clearly contributes to expert genre production, the relationship between the two has to date been relatively underexplored by EAP and ESP scholars. This paper presents a framework that describes how disciplinary identity may be structurally related to the specialist genres students must learn. A case study then examines how one geology student’s developing disciplinary identity allowed him to gradually produce a key written genre in geology with increasing expertise. The study suggests that the specialist frames he embodied within his disciplinary identity enabled him to make increasing reference to geology’s central concerns and practices, via a typified set of implicit textual cues. Expert writers use these implicit cues to situate themselves and their level of expertise with respect to their community of practice. In conclusion, it is argued that genre-based courses should also include instruction about both the target discipline’s specialist knowledge frames as well as the implicit cues that help readers and writers reconstruct them.
This article critically explores the value of ethnography for enhancing context-sensitive approaches to the study of academic writing. Drawing on data from two longitudinal studies, student writing in the United Kingdom and professional academic writing in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal, the author illustrates the different contributions ethnography can make to researching academic writing, depending on the level at which it is construed, as method, methodology, or "deep theorizing." In discussing the third level of ethnography, the author draws on recent debates around linguistic ethnography to explore how ethnography as deep theorizing can contribute to refining social practice accounts of academic writing through the specific notions of indexicality and orientation. By working through three levels of ethnography, her aim is to signal the ontological gap between text and context in academic writing research and to open up debate about how this gap can be narrowed.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Scholars around the world are under increasing pressure to publish their research in the medium of English. However, little empirical research has explored how the global premium of English influences the academic text production of scholars working outside of English-speaking countries. This article draws on a longitudinal text-oriented ethnographic study of psychology scholars in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain and Portugal to follow the trajectories of texts from local research and writing contexts to English-medium publications. Our findings indicate that a significant number of mediators, ‘literacy brokers’, who are involved in the production of such texts, influence the texts in different and important ways. We illustrate in broad terms the nature and extent of literacy brokering in English-medium publications and characterize and exemplify brokers’ different orientations. We explore what kind of brokering is evident in the production of a specific group of English-medium publications- articles written and published in English medium inyternational journals-by focising on three text histories. We conclude by discussing what a focus on brokering can tell us can tell us about practices surrounding academic knowledge production.
This article examines how multilingual scholars who work outside English-speaking countries negotiate the demand to publish in English alongside their broader academic and publishing interests. Based on our ethnographic study of the academic writing and publishing practices of 16 psychology scholars in Hungary, Slovakia and Spain, we characterize the range of communities for whom the scholars are writing, drawing on notions of discourse community, community of practice and speech community. We discuss the differential value attached to publications for different communities and how such value is sustained through the rewards systems in which scholars work. We offer brief profiles of three scholars from the study to illustrate how they negotiate academic and professional interests. We explain implications of the findings to TESOL, particularly for curriculum and pedagogy in English for academic purposes.
Thick description describes a primary characteristic of good ethnography: a sufficiently complex description to permit a reader (or occasionally, viewer) to move beyond the presentation of individual details to true understanding. It is typically opposed to “thin” description, which limits the amount of detail, providing superficial knowledge or a summary only, also called “mere” or “quick” description. Given that ethnography is intended to be the result of long-term participant observation, it makes sense that the published results should convey rich meaning, far beyond what any brief stop by a tourist could reveal. Thick description typically takes a semiotic approach, emphasizing how people construct and convey meaning through signs and symbols, both for themselves and others. Clearly any word or behavior conveys more to long-term community members than to outsiders. Taking the goal of providing thick description implies that an ethnographer will bridge that gap, providing sufficient insight that even strangers can at least begin to understand what locals say and do.
In this article I use a double theoretical lens of Bourdieuian (1985, 1991) and Bakhtinian (1981, 1986) perspectives on social space and the dialogism of everyday literacy events to analyze and discuss a classroom literacy event. In this event, which takes place in a diversely populated classroom with a social justice language arts curriculum, four boys read aloud intertextual stories while managing the shifting power dynamics of their social hierarchies. At stake in this analysis are the following two understandings: first, of the ways the boys' texts reflected and produced their ideological positioning in relation to issues of gender, race, and class; and second, of the ways that these positionings were linked to their struggles for the symbolic "right" to speak in literacy events. Findings highlight the usefulness of such a combined theoretical framework for understanding the ways children's social hierarchy maintenance might reproduce social inequalities and might also allow them to struggle against hierarchies and claim new identities for themselves.
Utilizing a collaborative autoethnographic methodology (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2016), this study investigates the mentoring activities of two transnational women, the advisor (Lisya) and the advise (Cristina) and Cristina's transdisciplinary becoming during her dissertation writing process. Drawing on the principles of feminist rhetorics and politics of gender, this study seeks to answer two research questions: (i) How does gender play out in dissertation mentoring and doctoral writing? (ii)What identity intersections contribute to (or prevents from) constructing theoretical positioning in doctoral writing? The data come from Cristina's dissertation journal, feedback provided for her dissertation proposal and the first two dissertation chapters, and finally, a discourse-based interview we conducted with one another. Through a thematic analysis of the data collected for 10 months, the findings illustrate three themes emerging from our mentoring relationship: 1) Our shared identity as multilingual and transnational women scholars help guide the mentoring experience in complex and unique ways; 2) Theoretical positioning and citation practices are complex academic literacy activities that involve gendered discoursal consciousness; and 3) Transdisciplinary becoming is a feminist issue, which is interconnected with different spheres of life.
Few studies have examined how second language (L2) students build new genre knowledge in the process of participating in L2 rhetorical situations during study abroad. The current study examines how L2 students utilize their prior genre knowledge and construct new L2 genre knowledge during study abroad. This study adopted the Rhetorical Genre Studies perspective, which argues that recurrent social situations influence people in carrying out rhetorical actions. The participants were four South Korean students enrolled in a US university as exchange students. Data included twelve semi-structured individual interview transcripts and participants' assignments written during study abroad. Findings indicated that during study abroad, participants utilized their prior process genre knowledge and discipline-specific content genre knowledge acquired at their home universities for completing L2 writing assignments. Participants’ comments also pointed to the building of new L2 genre knowledge by being exposed to new yet somewhat familiar rhetorical situations and producing various academic genres, such as research reports, in the L2 during study abroad. This study highlights that L2 study abroad students should be considered as boundary crossers across languages and across writing tasks, that is, students who actively repurpose prior genre knowledge and build new genre knowledge in negotiating L2 rhetorical situations.
In this paper I revisit some of the basic premises of applied linguistics research, with particular reference to the emergent field of professional discourse studies. Beginning with an overall orientation towards different paradigms of applied research, I outline the main facets of an applied linguistic mentality as a basis for developing what I call an 'Applied Linguistics of Professions'. I then go on to offer an overview of the communicative turn in medical education and practice in the UK. I draw upon my own work in recent years in a number of healthcare sites to engage with some of the challenges facing applied linguists in an interdisciplinarily crowded space, in terms of both analytic practice and uptake of research output. With regard to the conditions of analytic practice, I focus on how categorisation and interpretation are central to all professional activity, to the extent that within applied linguistics and discourse studies, these are both the object of study and the process through which we study the professional habitus. With regard to the consequences of our research, I offer a set of observations that can be seen as a way of opening a dialogue among communication researchers and professional practitioners around issues of 'discovery/usefulness' and 'discriminatory expertise', if our research is to attain practical relevance.
This article reconsiders theoretical claims of identity fluidity, stability, and agency through a longitudinal case study investigating one adolescent’s writing over time and across spaces. Qualitative data spanning her four years of high school were collected and analyzed using a grounded theory approach with literacy-and-identity theory providing sensitizing concepts. Findings uncovered how she laminated identity positions of perfectionism, expertise, risk taking, and learning as she enacted her passionate writer identity in personal creative writing, English classrooms, an online fanfiction community, and theater contexts. Using “identity cube” as a theoretical construct, the authors examine enduring elements of a writer’s identity and the contextual positioning that occurs when youth write for different audiences and purposes. Findings suggest that adolescents approach writing with a durable core identity while flexibly laminating multiple sides of their identity cube, a reframing of identity that has implications for literacy-and-identity research.
This study examines the composing process and authorial agency of a college ESL writer as she remediated an argumentative essay into a multimodal digital video. Employing principles of sociosemiotic ethnography, and drawing on the concepts of resemiotization and recontextualization, the study investigated multiple types of data, including an argumentative paper, video transcript, multimedia video, interview transcripts, and observation notes. Data analysis shows that her choice and orchestration of modal resources were shaped by her textual identity construction work, efforts to accommodate perceived audiences, and previous experience with the medium. Remediation with multimedia offered the student more semiotic resources to expand authorship, but the contextual forces of audience and medium bounded her authorial expression. The student’s multimodal writing illustrated discursive processes of negotiating and performing authorial positions for rhetorical goals with awareness of the linguistic, social, and cultural contexts of text production. This investigation ultimately aims to expand aspects of multimodal writing and literacy practice by examining the discursive nature of the design process in linguistically and culturally diverse contexts.
I spent over 6 months in two 3rd and 4th grade multi-age classrooms gathering data to explore the question, How are gender, identity, and literacy entangled and mutually constitutive? I audiotaped literature group discussions, collected student writing, audiotaped discussions while students were writing, and audiotaped interviews about their discussion transcripts, their writing, and their talk and teasing. I used a hybrid of lenses (poststructural feminist theories, interactional sociolinguistic frame and positioning theories, and reader response stance theories)for understanding and analyzing the data, I found that the children used a variety of literacy strategies for representing themselves and others as gendered persons: naming and renaming practices, intertextual references, bodycasts, and verbal interactions. The data show the ways that children use literacy practices to do the social identity work of gender, I argue that while educators and policy makers are concerned with the development of literacy skills, children are using literacies for social and cultural purposes, including the representation and constitution of ender identities. I also argue that while power is salient and can denote gender dominance and difference, neither dominance nor difference can fully represent the range and complexity of children's literacy and gender practices, Gender, as socially constituted identity, is not monolithic, immutable, or always patriarchal. Social experience, desire, proximate others, and the ways in which children can draw upon these in the classroom are aspects of the situated condition that deserve more prominence in literacy and identity research.
While peer review is a common practice in college composition courses, there is little consistency in approach and effectiveness within the field, owing in part to the dearth of empirical research that investigates peer-review processes. This study is designed to shed light on what a peer reviewer actually reads and attends to while providing peer-review feedback. Fifteen participants peer reviewed a student's essay that had both holistic and surface-level errors. Using eye-tracking technology, we collected detailed and informative data about which parts of the text the peer reviewer looked at, how long the peer reviewer looked there, and where the peer reviewer looked next. These data were analyzed according to eye-movement research methodologies and juxta-posed with each peer reviewer's comments and suggestions about the essay being reviewed during a typical peer-review exercise. Findings include an unexpected mismatch between what peer reviewers focus on, spend time on, and examine multiple times when reading and peer reviewing an essay and what they choose to give feedback about during the peer-review session. Implications of this study include a rethinking of the composition field's widespread use of a global-to-local progression during peer-review activities.
As the number of periphery scholars who pursue graduate studies in the U.S. increases, there is an urgent need to understand how these multilingual writers build knowledge on academic writing in their second language (L2) and join the academic dialogs of their disciplinary communities. Drawing on theories of translingualism (e.g., Horner, Lu, Royster, & Trimbur, 2011) and cultural-historical activity (e.g., Prior, 1998), this textographic study reports on a multilingual graduate student's knowledge construction during the process of thesis writing. The central research questions of this study include: (i) What are some of the rhetorical enactments and literacy practices this multilingual writer developed around his thesis writing? (ii) What writerly identities are constructed in art oriented, new humanities thesis/dissertation writing? As results illustrate, navigation of academic writing with multiple modalities and languages during thesis writing help multilingual writers carve a creative space for theory construction which eventually contributes to the writer's scholarly identity growth. Examining some of the key translingual academic practices in their engagement with multiple texts around thesis writing, this paper reveals how an experienced multilingual writer utilized his cultural and symbolic capital as he constructed his identity both as an art historian and an emerging scholar.
One of the most common and vital areas of coverage in second language (L2) writing instruction is writing from sources, that is, the process of reading source text material and transferring content from that reading to writing. Research as well as everyday practice in the classroom has long shown that working with source texts is one of the most challenging of all academic literacy activities for L2 writers. This is particularly true in the domain of paraphrasing, an important and yet complicated device for the treatment of source text material. While the procedures involved in paraphrasing source text material may appear simple, the enactment of those procedures is a complex and often elusive experience for L2 writers. In this article we discuss a study of two mainland Chinese students' engagement with paraphrasing in an undergraduate academic writing course, with a particular focus on their understanding of the purposes and functions of paraphrasing and how such understanding influenced their paraphrasing practices. Our results reveal a multilayered relationship between the students and paraphrasing and contribute to the paraphrasing literature by drawing greater attention to paraphrasing from students' perspectives.
In this paper I revisit some of the basic premises of applied linguistics research, with particular reference to the emergent field of professional discourse studies. Beginning with an overall orientation towards different paradigms of applied research, I outline the main facets of an applied linguistic mentality as a basis for developing what I call an ‘Applied Linguistics of Professions’. I then go on to offer an overview of the communicative turn in medical education and practice in the UK. I draw upon my own work in recent years in a number of healthcare sites to engage with some of the challenges facing applied linguists in an interdisciplinarily crowded space, in terms of both analytic practice and uptake of research output. With regard to the conditions of analytic practice, I focus on how categorisation and interpretation are central to all professional activity, to the extent that within applied linguistics and discourse studies, these are both the object of study and the process through which we study the professional habitus. With regard to the consequences of our research, I offer a set of observations that can be seen as a way of opening a dialogue among communication researchers and professional practitioners around issues of ‘discovery/usefulness’ and discriminatory expertise’, if our research is to attain practical relevance.
This article reports on the types of scientific writing found in two primary grade classrooms. These results are part of a larger two-year study whose purpose was to examine the development of informational writing of second- and third-grade students as they participated in integrated science-literacy instruction. The primary purpose of the present article is to report on the “genre set” (Bazerman, 2004) established in this community around science instruction. Using Halliday’s (1993) Systemic Functional Linguistics approach and Hasan’s (1985, 1994) Generic Structure Potential, I describe the genres of scientific writing and drawing activities in which these children regularly participated. Findings indicate that children participated in several distinct scientific genres, some of which were flexible, and some of which were highly constrained by the teachers. Each of the genres represented a distinct purpose, structure, and linguistic nature of scientific discourse. The influence of this particular genre set on children’s appropriation of scientific discourse is discussed.
This article enters an ongoing discussion about the usefulness of different theories and different research designs in the analysis of classroom writing. Starting with questions about how students interpret the norms of writing and their own selves in school writing, it demonstrates the relevance of an ecological theory of writing, methodologically connected to in-depth case studies—double histories—of the dialogical relationship of student and teacher positionings over time. The related concepts of discourse roles and positionings are discussed in the context of the theories of Bakhtin and Mead. The writing double histories of two students and their teacher over 2 years in a Norwegian upper secondary school are presented. Analysis shows informants positioning themselves dialogically in relation to their ideas about self and the other, the social meaning of their written utterances in various school genres, and their changing interpretations of the social rules of school writing.
Although Toulmin models of argumentation are pervasive in composition textbooks, research on the model's use in writing classrooms has been scarce'typically limited to evaluating how students' essays align with the model's elements (claim, data, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal, backing) construed as objective standards. That approach discounts Toulmin's emphasis on context. In contrast, this study of a major university's summer composition program for high school students employs Wenger's notion of communities of practice and Bakhtin's notion of response to trace how classroom contexts mediate students' and teachers' understandings of a Toulmin model. The article presents a case study of a controversy that emerged when participants attempted to identify the main claim in one student's essay. The controversy arose, the analysis suggests, as participants positioned competing tacit and explicit representations of claims with/against other rhetorical terms (for example, thesis), variously interpreted the assigned tasks, and negotiated over tasks and texts.
One broad goal for English for Academic Purposes students is to learn to write effectively so they can succeed in their chosen academic studies. The teaching of academic writing sensitive to context and texts has benefited from disciplinary based writing studies, allowing EAP teachers and their students to become better informed about the valued writing practices of various disciplines. A further development in this area can be gained by investigating from a linguistic perspective the role of writing for learning in those disciplines.This paper reports on a longitudinal study which mapped from a lexicogrammatical perspective how L1 education students' writing developed as their disciplinary knowledge increased. Systemic functional linguistics provided the theoretical framework for the study and the analytical tools. Reasoning and explaining, reporting and engaging with knowledge claims, and engaging with the discipline as a future practitioner were intrinsic to the learner discourse of education in this study. The contextualised descriptions of the lexicogrammatical choices the students made in their writing provide authentic disciplinary examples for EAP writing teachers. These resources will allow EAP teachers and their students to examine writing not only from the perspective of learning to write, but from the perspective of writing to learn in the discipline.
In response to Terry Santos' (1992) “Ideology in Composition: L1 and ESL,” I argue that second language/English às a Second Language (L2/ESL) pedagogy is as politically charged as first language (L1) pedagogy, but its ideological implications need to be openly articulated and discussed—the purpose of this article. As classrooms become more multicultural and ESL students become more difficult to distinguish from non-ESL students, L1 and L2 pedagogies will begin to converge, possibly causing L2/ESL pedagogy to become more expressly political, but also causing L1 pedagogy to become more pragmatic. To demonstrate the political implications of L2/ESL pedagogy and to make connections with L1 pedagogy, I offer a continuum of responses to second language and second dialect writing, based on teachers' political stances on linguistic and cultural assimilation. The three response stances, related to those from ethnic studies, sociolinguistics, and L1 composition, are the separatist, accommodationist, and assimilationist. This response continuum is then used to analyze actual and hypothetical responses to the writing of (a) an ESL international student, (b) an ESL bicultural student, and (c) a Standard English as a Second Dialect (SESD) student.
Teachers of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and academic language and learning advisors have long recognised the importance of developing students' academic vocabulary for successful writing and learning at university. There is little, however, in the EAP literature on the place of teaching and learning discipline specific vocabulary, despite the growing attention paid to differences in disciplinary discourses in the EAP field. This paper aims to raise awareness of the role of the specialist language of academic disciplines in learning disciplinary knowledge. It identifies the nature of specialist language in a learner discourse of one academic discipline as well as examines how students incorporate this specialist language in their writing as their disciplinary knowledge increases. The data are drawn from a longitudinal study of undergraduate Education students' writing. The students' incorporation of specialist language in their writing is explored through the concepts of technicality and abstraction as they have been developed within systemic functional linguistics.The findings from this study show that learning specialist knowledge in pre-service teacher education involves adopting technical terms as well as coming to terms with the abstract dimension of the discourse. This paper also provides an analytical tool which can be adapted for examining the ways in which language represents experience in academic discourses. This analytical tool can assist academic language researchers and teachers to investigate variation in disciplinary discourses beyond the level of text organization and purpose so as to inform the teaching of specialist language.
The author revisits her earlier qualitative research on ESL children’s emergence into literacy, which she conducted with 5- and 6-year olds at a multilingual K-12 school in Casablanca, Morocco. Through further reflection and study, she arrives at the notion of “synchronicity” — a dynamic oneness between teacher and child — as the distinguishing feature of three classrooms where children’s literacy development was taking place at an extraordinary pace. This work presents readers with new insights into the affective complexities of child–teacher interaction and its role in literacy development.
This paper describes aspects of a research project which used linguistic and intertextual analysis of student writing to investigate the relationship between the academic curriculum and student voice in a first year economics course at a South African university. I argue that the discourses and practices of first year university economics textbooks provide a model of literacy practices which contradict many of the literacy practices of the discipline of economics. The first year economics textbook in particular, rather than exposing students to a variety of arguments and encouraging the development of critical reading skills appropriate for academic contexts, tends to be single voiced. This gives the impression of consensus in the discipline and it may encourage rote learning and plagiarism. This argument is supported with data from a research project.
Ethnography in Social Science Practice explores ethnography's increasing use across the social sciences, beyond its traditional bases in social anthropology and sociology. It explores the disciplinary roots of ethnographic research within social anthropology, and contextualizes it within both field and disciplinary settings. The book is of two parts: Part one places ethnography as a methodology in its historical, ethical and disciplinary context, and also discusses the increasing popularity of ethnography across the social sciences. Part two explores the stages of ethnographic research via a selection of multidisciplinary case studies. A number of key questions are explored: What exactly is ethnographic research and what makes it different from other qualitative approaches?. Why did ethnography emerge within one social science discipline and not others?. Why did its adoption across the social sciences prove problematic?. What are the methodological advantages and disadvantages of doing ethnographic research?. Why are ethnographers so concerned by issues of ethics, politics, representation and power?. What does ethnography look like within different social science disciplines?. The book is aimed at social science students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level and each chapter has pedagogic features, including reflective activities and suggested further readings for students.
In this paper, we discuss central concepts and issues regarding ethnographic research in education, particularly as they pertain to studies of L2 writing. After some necessary preliminaries we consider Watson-Geteo's (1988) six principles of ethnographic research, and then propose our own 'prototype' definition. Following a discussion of some key concepts in our definition, we then review three recent studies of L2 writing which are ethnographic in nature. Next, we discuss the vexing issue of 'generalizability', and consider two further studies of L2 writing in that regard. We end by introducing a series of issues which are critical to recent ethnographic concerns in anthropology and sociology, but which have had little influence so far on ethnographically oriented L2 writing research