Setting the stage(s) for English for Research and Publication Purposes: Authors, audiences, and learning the craft

Abstract

The stage is an apt metaphor for how the ERPP community has come to understand research-based writing: research writing is of course a textual practice, but it is also inherently social, with both cognitive and affective dimensions. The aim of our paper (based on a talk given at NFEAP in 2021) is to bring new insights to our understanding of these stages by presenting a few data examples derived from a task completed by a group of doctoral students in the sciences. The task was designed to foreground primarily social facets of writing: writing as genre performance on a specific stage, for a specific audience and as a form of situated, purposeful communication against the backdrop of the current knowledge within a field. Further, the task foregrounded writing as a form of development towards a self-directed, agentive and possibly creative adaptation of one’s authorial choices. We present three main arguments: first, we show that a straightforward disciplinary framing of research-based writing may not be reflective of the hybridised, fluid and multidisciplinary audiences that our students write for; second, we argue that students need support in recognising this complexity and in developing rhetorical adroitness in order to write effectively; and third, we call for deeper engagement with well-established theories of learning such as self-regulation and metacognition to design tasks that investigate and promote student learning, and that encompass the social, cognitive and affective dimensions of genre performance.