Disciplinary Writing Research Articles

Adolescent English Learners’ Awareness of Disciplinary Writing and Academic Language in Science Classrooms: The Affordances of a Register-Functional Perspective

ABSTRACT This article reports findings from a study that investigated English learners’ (ELs’) developing awareness of disciplinary writing and academic language in science courses in a U.S.-based high school. Based on an analysis of writing samples, this case study first introduces the situational and linguistic characteristics of two science writing tasks in forensics and oceanography. The author then explores ELs’ developing understanding of science writing and academic science language via ethnographically oriented interviews. Informed by the Register-Functional perspective and Academic Literacies frameworks, the analyses demonstrate higher EL sensitivity to vocabulary, but not grammatical structures yet. Writing practices in science classes shape ELs’ understanding of disciplinary writing in unexpected directions. The situational analysis of writing and ELs’ perspectives provide a systematic approach for understanding learner needs in writing and integrating language into content instruction. Implications for EL education in science and teacher collaborations are provided.

Advancing Civics-specific Disciplinary Writing in the Elementary Grades issue

Students need support through intentional writing instruction to develop their discipline-specific writing skills outside of Language Arts. Yet, we argue not all writing instruction provides the same opportunities for student learning. In this study, with the support of professional development, teachers engaged students in civic perspective-taking through writing, focusing on locally relevant public issues. Drawing from disciplinary literacy and genre pedagogy, our research team conducted a descriptive study where thematic analysis was applied to examine second and third graders’ civics writing samples. Our findings indicate that students’ engagement with key civic concepts became more complex and purposeful as they practiced argumentative writing. Development continued from second to third grade in both the sophistication of their civic perspective-taking as well as their writing. Additionally, we found that student motivation to engage in argumentative writing increased in all classrooms across both grade levels when engaging with locally relevant public issues. This article provides details about the elementary civics writing curriculum and the students’ writing outcomes as well as includes the two graphic organizers used in the curriculum.

Developing Teacher Candidates’ Multicultural Lenses through Disciplinary Writing Assignments

The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of providing scaffolded disciplinary writing assignments to develop teacher candidates’ multicultural lenses. This study was set in a secondary education program at one mid-Atlantic university. Faculty in this program focused on five dimensions of multicultural education (ME) to better serve teacher candidates within their program through the development of ME-focused disciplinary writing assignments. In required courses within the program, teacher candidates (TCs) completed assignments such as a student shadow experience, infographic, journal, community mapping activity, and practitioner journal article. Qualitative data were collected to explore TCs’ understanding of the ME dimensions through reflections and focus group transcripts and provide insight on TCs’ understanding of multicultural education and pedagogical strategies, as well as their perceptions of the generated disciplinary writing assignments. The researchers found TCs focused on some dimensions of ME more than others, such as content integration and prejudice reduction. We make recommendations for practice based on these findings.

Exploring Narrated Belonging in/through Disciplinary Writing

This study sought to explore how undergraduates in two majors (chemistry and English) at one US public university constructed identities of belonging in academic life stories, and how these stories may be understood as relating to their evaluations of what they identified as personally meaningful disciplinary writing.

“I’m Applying Mathematical Methods to Social Sciences” : Norms in Disciplinary Writing and Methodological Paradigms

“I’m Applying Mathematical Methods to Social Sciences” : Norms in Disciplinary Writing and Methodological Paradigms

Adaptivity of Learning Transfer from Theory to Practice: A Case Study of Second Language Writers

This case study examined the adaptivity of learning transfer from an English for general academic purposes course to different disciplinary writing contexts. Data were collected at the end of one academic semester from 7 students of engineering disciplines enrolled in the writing course. Their EGAP writing course lasted for 16 weeks over which they were taught The St. Martin's Handbook, 6th Edition. The participants’ disciplinary writings together with interview transcripts served as the data sources for the extraction of adaptive transfers and also the processes of realizing the transfers. Adaptive transfers were identified by participants. Findings indicated that learning outcomes can transfer adaptively through a variety of processes to accommodate to the new writing demands. The results showed that the participants could adapt their learning along two broad dimensions of transfer, ‘idea generation’ (IG) and ‘text construction’ (TC) with the former involving ‘explication’ and ‘integration’ of knowledge and the latter achieved at macro and micro level. Within these adaptive transfers, we found a range of writing issues pursued including ‘goals, topics, logics, propositions, integrity, disciplinarity, linearity, paragraphing and linguistic resources’. Furthermore, the findings displayed two broad categories of ‘higher order’ and ‘lower order’ processes employed for the realization of adaptive transfers. While higher order processes operated through ‘transformative and evaluative’ mechanisms, the lower order processes involved two categories of ‘avoidance and affordance’, with the former as an attempt to refrain from going wrong and the latter as an effort to generate adaptivity. The findings for L2 writing are theoretically discussed.

Disciplinary Writing Tutors at Work: A study of the Character of the Feedback Provided on Academic Writing at the BA Programmes at the Humanities Department

New students struggle to develop academic writing skills during transition to university. To meet this challenge, the Humanities department at the University of Southern Denmark implemented a research and development project to increase feedback to student writers. In the project, graduate students were trained as disciplinary writing tutors, and subsequently provided feedback on undergraduates’ assignments. The study presented in this article examines the feedback offered by the disciplinary writing tutors. As researchers, we ask, “What characterises the feedback offered by the disciplinary writing tutors?” The study is positioned in a sociocultural framework that draws on theories of disciplinary and academic literacy. Data was collected in four bachelor’s degree programmes and consists of the feedback given by the tutors and interviews with the tutors conducted at the end of the tutoring. Principal results indicate that the feedback on the students’ texts is distributed at the text layer of content and structure and the text layer of formalities. Feedback at the text layer of sentences is almost absent. Feedback on the writing and learning processes is limited. The discipline-specific feedback occurs as indications in the feedback to the BA students and is made clearer when comparing feedback in different programmes. The feedback the writing tutors provide demonstrates an understanding of academic writing as academic socialisation.

Teaching Disciplinary Writing Using Google Ngrams

Teaching Disciplinary Writing Using Google Ngrams

중등 작문 교수·학습 실태조사 연구 - 교과 글쓰기(disciplinary writing)를 중심으로

중등 작문 교수·학습 실태조사 연구 - 교과 글쓰기(disciplinary writing)를 중심으로

Linguistic Dimensions of TOEFL iBT Essays Compared With Successful Student Disciplinary Writing in the University

Linguistic Dimensions of TOEFL iBT Essays Compared With Successful Student Disciplinary Writing in the University

Academic Cultures and Disciplinary Writing: Specificity in EAP

Academic Cultures and Disciplinary Writing: Specificity in EAP

Graves, R. & Hyland, T. (Eds.). (2017). Writing assignments across university disciplines. Bloomington, IN: Trafford.

For the last three years, I have been part of a team of multi-disciplinary faculty that holds a weeklong workshop each semester for approximately twenty teachers. These teachers, migrating to our cozy space in the library from all corners of campus, have applied—they get paid a modest sum, which is not nothing—to attend our workshop in the hopes of improving their ability to integrate writing assignments into their courses. The workshops are part of a larger initiative, Improving Disciplinary Writing, which was borne out of a needs assessment from our regional assessment body. It is designed to bring together faculty, through workshops and grants, to think collectively about how writing gets taught and ought to be taught differently across and within disciplines. And what we see time and time again is that although each group of twenty teachers is new each semester, and although the ranks consistently vary from adjunct (sessional) to full professor, and although some work in musty chemistry buildings and some in obscure art buildings and some in sleek see-through engineering buildings, the disembodied echoes of frustrations and complaints and discovery and hope and solace from groups past get re-vocalized by groups present. As facilitators, we are not flustered by this fact; rather, we find our own solace in the connection and camaraderie through shared experience happening across disciplines and spaces on campus.

A National Survey of Teachers of the Deaf on Disciplinary Writing

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to investigate how content area teachers of the deaf integrate writing instruction, and factors that impact content area writing practices. Integrating writing into the disciplines is currently emphasized in order to support literacy and content learning. Teachers of the deaf (N = 134) responded to a national survey that included the following categories of questions: content area writing practices; classroom environment and resources; diverse learners; and teachers’ beliefs. Even though the majority of teachers believed writing to be important for success in their disciplines and feasible to integrate into their classrooms, they reported that teaching students with delayed expressive and receptive language, diverse reading levels, and limited knowledge of academic language presented challenges. Content area teachers of the deaf could benefit from professional development focused on the integration of guided writing practices that offer greater language and literacy support for deaf and hard of hearing students.

Using Corpus‐Based Register Analysis to Explore the Authenticity of High‐Stakes Language Exams: A Register Comparison of TOEFL iBT and Disciplinary Writing Tasks

AbstractOne of the central considerations in the validity argument for the TOEFL iBT is the relationship between the language on the exam and the language required for university courses. Corpus linguistics has recently been shown to be an effective way to explore this relationship, which can also be considered as an aspect of authenticity. Applying Multi‐Dimensional Analysis, our study is the first to directly compare the lexico‐grammatical characteristics of texts produced by second language writers on a high‐stakes standardized exam (the TOEFL iBT) to the characteristics of texts produced by the same writers for disciplinary writing tasks required as part of their academic career (e.g., lab reports, argumentative essays). Our findings show that the language of TOEFL iBT tasks have patterns of both similarity and difference from disciplinary tasks with respect to four linguistic dimensions of language use: (a) Compressed Procedural Information versus Stance toward the Work of Others, (b) Personal Stance, (c) Possible versus Completed Events, and (d) Information Density. Integrated iBT tasks show similarities to certain kinds of disciplinary tasks, while independent iBT tasks differ linguistically from almost all disciplinary writing tasks. These general patterns hold regardless of the score levels of test takers. We discuss the implications of these findings for language teaching and assessment.

Developing a Model for Disciplinary Writing Expertise in Postgraduate Teaching English as a Foreign Language Programs

A challenge for many postgraduate students is to move from the state of novice observers to those of professional contributors of a particular discourse community. They need to develop certain skills, practices, and competences, the demonstration of which is mostly through writing, called disciplinary writing expertise (DWE). DWE can be examined from two aspects of nature and development. This study aims at proposing a model of disciplinary writing expertise including both the competencies of DWE and factors developing these components. In-depth interviews with 28 postgraduate students of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) were collected and research papers written by these students were used to collect data. Based on substantive considerations and the results of the content analysis, five subcomponents of DWE were identified including strategic, genre, rhetorical, subject matter and discourse community knowledge components. Meanwhile, writing strategies and goal orientations were identified as two important factors influencing the development of disciplinary writing proficiency in a foreign language context. Two questionnaires were made and piloted to endorse these two factors among 538 postgraduate TEFL students. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), we proposed a model to show the relationship among these two factors and the components of DWE. The results showed that those who followed mastery goals used all types of writing strategies to develop different subcomponents of DWE. On the other hand, those who followed context and career-directed goals used strategies to develop rhetorical knowledge mostly.

Supplemental Material for Framework for Disciplinary Writing in Science Grades 6–12: A National Survey

Supplemental Material for Framework for Disciplinary Writing in Science Grades 6–12: A National Survey

Teaching Disciplinary Writing as Social Practice: Moving Beyond ‘text-in-context’ Designs in UK Higher Education

This paper concerns the teaching of disciplinary academic writing in Higher Education in the UK and is motivated by the need to identify an EAP instructional design that will facilitate student writers’ engagement with disciplinary writing as a situated social practice. In the paper I describe and critique what I characterise as a ‘text-in-context’ genre-based pedagogy influential in EAP provision in the UK, and then sketch out the broad parameters of a ‘social practice’ instructional design, enactable within the context of UK Higher Education.

Brokering Disciplinary Writing: TAs and the Teaching of Writing Across the Disciplines

Brokering Disciplinary Writing: TAs and the Teaching of Writing Across the Disciplines

Interactive Writing in the Disciplines: A Common Core Approach to Disciplinary Writing in Middle and High School

In this article we argue that interactive writing (IW), an approach to writing instruction, is uniquely supportive of secondary content-area teachers working to integrate meaningful writing instruction without sacrificing time or attention to content. Drawing on research and our experiences with IW in middle school settings, we explain the roots of IW and its potential to support powerful writing instruction in the disciplines because of its emphasis on externalizing thought, negotiating meaning, and teaching conventions of writing and language in the context of real writing.

Peer Feedback in Disciplinary Writing for Publication in English: The Case of ‘Rolli’, a German-L1 Novice Scholar

Achieving publication in Anglophone science journals is a goal of many multilingual scholars, and failure can have huge implications for individuals’ future careers and for the global dissemination of scientific knowledge. Despite the importance of the topic, there is still a lack of bottom-up research, which investigates the experience of writing for publication in English from the perspective of the novice scholar. This article presents the case of ‘Rolli’, a German-L1 novice scholar facing the challenge of writing his first article for publication as the lead author and writing it moreover in English. The study uses text history, interviews, and feedback comments to portray the socially-situated story of a novice multilingual writer on a trajectory to successful publication. The case shows how peer feedback was pivotal in achieving publication. Rolli’s ability to respond to this feedback was a key success factor in the writing for publication process. The case sheds light on the importance of peer feedback in disciplinary writing.