Abstract
How should undergraduate science students’ writing be understood when it does not meet the conventions of scientific writing? Studies have shown that the writing that students produce in their course work on tasks that imitate authentic scientific writing practices often do not match the tone, vocabulary and grammatical choices made by professional scientists. However, from the perspective of looking at the students’ word and grammar choices alone, it is not easy to understand why students make their particular and varied word and grammar choices and how those choices can be related to their understanding of the goals and discourses that are typical of science practices. Studying the writing of four first year earth and geographical sciences students on a science faculty’s alternative access program, from an assignment in a course that introduced them to the research article, it seems that the students persist with the social purposes of their various school writing practices in attempting their new university writing tasks. It is this variety in the social purposes of the writing that the students continue to draw on in university that can explain some of the ways in which student writing does not meet even the broadest writing conventions of the discourses of science. Yet it seems that some of the social purposes and the related writing practices of some students can help them transition their writing more easily into a form that has the usual characteristics of a typical science genre. Therefore, understanding the social purposes that students bring with them can be crucial to successfully introducing them to the discourses of science and showing them how the social purposes of scientific practice can be served in a genre such as the research article.
Highlights
To begin to address this gap, this study looks at student writing in the genre of the research article in the natural sciences and tries to identify the experiences and discourses that are particular to each student’s writing as they tried to emulate a science discourse in writing
How can we understand these four students’ writing both in the context of the genre of the research article as it is used by practicing scientists and in the context of the students’ learning experiences? what has been observed in the students’ use of grammatical metaphors and hedging in their assignment supports the observation made by Parkinson that the lexico-grammatical resources of non-traditional students need to be developed through teaching with authentic texts before their writing can match that of practicing scientists (2011: 174), it seems that there is more to it than that
Studying the students’ writing and talking to them about their writing and school experiences, it appears that, like Paxton’s economics students writing an essay (2007), these students applied the various writing practices and conventions they learnt at school and elsewhere to their science writing assignment in a university course
Summary
How do undergraduate science students learn to imitate the language of science, in reading and writing research articles, and what should be understood when they do not get this right? Given that the technical language of the research article is a resource that scientists use to persuade the scientific community of the validity of their knowledge claims (Myers, 1985, 1989; Latour and Woolgar, 1986; Martin and Veel, 1998), what are science lecturers and academic literacy specialists to make of students’ writing when it does not conform to the conventions of this genre?. The assignment (see Kelly-Laubscher and Van der Merwe, 2014; Inglis et al, 2007, for similar teaching interventions) was designed to introduce the students to the genre of the research article (following this format: Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion or IMRD) and it required the students to write a research article about data and related readings that they were provided with. The writing that these four students produced for this assignment showed some interesting differences between them which contrasted with the conventions and the broad discourse rules of the science research article genre. Understanding student purpose can help lecturers to teach science writing more effectively by making the students aware of the purposes that are served by scientists when they publish research articles and thereby enabling students to adapt their own writing
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