Academic Writing: Whose Expectations?

Abstract

The importance of 'critical thinking', along with 'creativity' and 'originality', has long been widely proclaimed in educational circles. In Singapore, many recent government pronouncements have also strongly emphasized the importance of creative and critical thinking in relation to curriculum development. Ironically, however, these calls for the enhancement of 'thinking skills' and 'critical enabling skills' may contain unexamined assumptions, often derived from prevailing managerial expectations. Partly for this reason, any language curriculum that seeks to enhance thinking must be ready to place its own assumptions and educational practices under especially careful scrutiny. An important part of a reflective review of a language curriculum is to ascertain the views and expectations of students and teachers themselves. This paper reports on an investigation into teachers' and students' expectations about the academic writing that students undertake in an English Language curriculum at a Singapore university. Following a brief but critical overview of some issues affecting a writing curriculum, the paper develops a grounded description and comparison of student and teacher expectations, drawing upon a combination of questionnaire responses (88 students and 18 teachers) and detailed interviews (14 students and 14 teachers). Our account of this extensive discourse data characterizes some of the main ways in which research and writing tasks, feedback, guidelines and assessment practices are talked about, valued and procedurally implemented by different participants in the undergraduate curriculum. The closing discussion suggests some general implications for the development and evaluation of knowledge and skills in education.