7.5 Supporting Academic Writing Development
Academic writing is an essential skill that enables students to learn and to communicate what they have learned. It is generally more technical, formal, dense, abstract, objective, and rigorous. These features are what makes a piece of writing more or less academic. They enable experts to engage in the advanced literacy practices of generalization, abstraction, distillation, interpretation, and argument. As such, they are highly valued by the academic community. In order to succeed in academic learning and disciplinary socialization, students need to develop the linguistic (and other semiotic) resources that are functional and effective for realizing and instantiating the discursive features of academic writing. One key to this development work is to provide students with ample opportunities to read many academic texts in disciplinary contexts. Reading and responding to a wide variety of texts valued by disciplinary insiders maximizes students' exposure to authentic models of academic writing, and is especially important for those who have limited experience with it in or out of school.
Exposure alone does not guarantee proficiency in academic writing, however. Students need support in learning to write for academic purposes. Such support has traditionally been given in the form of strategy instruction or grammar instruction. In strategy instruction, students are explicitly taught how to generate and organize ideas for writing, summarize texts, revise and edit compositions, and collaborate with peers (Graham & Perin, 2007). This line of support is typically process oriented and informed by cognitive theories of learning, but pays minimal attention to grammar as a creative resource for making meaning. For example, Self-Regulated Strategy Development, a program developed by Harris and Graham (1996), teaches students specific academic strategies and self-regulation skills for planning, drafting, and revising writing, such as paying attention to the writing prompt, listing the main idea, adding supporting ideas, including transition words, setting goals, self-evaluation, and task analysis. Each strategy or skill is explicitly taught in six stages: teacher helping students develop background knowledge about the target strategy/skill, teacher and students discussing the strategy/skill, teacher modeling the strategy/skill, students memorizing the strategy/skill, teacher supporting application of the strategy/skill, and students independently using the strategy/skill.
The second line of support focuses on grammar. In grammar instruction, students are explicitly taught academic language features through language-based tasks. For example, sentence combining is often used to teach students to write more sophisticated sentences. With several reviews of empirical research (e.g., Graham & Perin, 2007; Locke, 2010) suggesting that traditional grammar instruction, with its emphasis on isolated, drill-like exercises, rarely improves the quality of students' writing, there is an increasing recognition that alternative approaches to teaching grammar are needed. British writing researcher Debra Myhill and her colleagues (e.g., Myhill et al., 2013) recently described a more contextualized way of teaching grammar that has been found to be effective in improving students' writing. The approach draws on a theoretical conception of writing as a process of design and a functional view of grammar as choice, linking grammar input to the demands of writing. It is guided by the following pedagogical principles:
· Use a grammatical metalanguage purposefully in relevant contexts, with grammatical terminology explained through examples rather than definitions;
· Establish a link between the grammatical feature introduced and the writing context, showing how the use of the grammatical feature enhances the quality or effectiveness of writing;
· Engage students in conversation about the structure, meaning, and effects of the grammatical feature being introduced;
· Encourage "creative imitation" by offering model patterns for students to play with and then use in their own writing;
· Make meaningful connections between reading and writing by using examples from authentic texts that students read;
· Design activities that nurture students' ability to make informed grammatical choices in their writing and to see writing as a process of designing meaning; and
· Encourage playfulness and experimentation in language use.
Essentially, what Myhill advocates is a pedagogy for writing that embraces "playful explicitness with grammar" (Myhill et al., 2013, p. 103). In this pedagogy, a metalanguage, such as that informed by SFL, can be used. Instead of focusing on identifying and defining grammatical labels, metalinguistic terminology is explained and exemplified in the context of rich discussion about relevant texts that students have read or constructed, with an emphasis on understanding how language is used in these texts, how meaning is shaped through grammatical choices, and why the author made these linguistic choices. Discussion about the connections between grammatical choices and the meanings they make enables students to see why certain constructions, academic or otherwise, may be more or less appropriate or effective in certain contexts. This deepens students' understanding that academic writing is not a process of accumulating an inventory of academic language features, but rather a process of making informed judgments as to which grammatical choices best realize the meanings intended by the author and prevent potential misunderstandings by the reader.
This pedagogy also sees imitation as central to writing development. The use of authentic model texts as scaffolds supports the learning of grammatical patterns and discourse structures that are functional for making specific meanings for specific genres and contexts. It avoids the pitfalls of examples artificially created to exemplify a grammatical point. By imitating the language choices expert writers make, students are less fearful of failure and more willing to try out new patterns, manipulate novel structures, recontextualize familiar resources, and experiment with creative ways of combining language resources. Initially based in imitation, these playful grammatical exercises can go a long way in helping students generate original texts with innovative language patterns and discourse structures.
Jones, Myhill and Bailey (2013) described a research project in which grammar instruction was embedded in three teaching units on writing (i.e., fictional narrative, argument, and poetry) in a way that draws students' attention to the connections between a linguistic feature and its effect on writing. In fictional narrative unit, students experimented with using different grammatical persons (first vs. third person) to create different voices or viewpoints, varying sentence lengths to create textual rhythm, using sentence fragments or short sentences for emphasis, and expanding noun phrases to create character description. In the argument unit, grammar instruction focuses on using modal verbs to create different degrees of assertion, using coordination to create counter arguments, and using subordination to articulate propositions. In the poetry unit, grammar instruction focuses on using expanded noun phrases to create a picture poem, comparing line length in poetry with sentence variety in prose, and using sentence patterning for effect. The focus of these grammar lessons was not on error or accuracy, but on helping students recognize how grammatical choices shape the text and fashion the meaning in a way that satisfies the author's rhetorical intentions and addresses the needs of audience.
The sort of grammar instruction envisioned by Myhill can be embedded in the broader context of disciplinary exploration, where students are learning to write different academic genres at the same time they are developing content knowledge and disciplinary habits of mind. A pedagogical heuristic for accomplishing these goals simultaneously is the genre teaching-learning cycle, illustrated in Figure 7-2, which is modified from the models proposed by Rothery (1994) and Exley, Kervin, and Mantei (2016). The cycle consists of four stages: building knowledge and context, analyzing model text (s), playing with language, and constructing text (s).(https://www.daowen.com)
Figure 7-2 Revised Genre Teaching-Learning Cycle
In Stage 1, students explore a question or issue that is of interest to them or significant to their discipline (e.g., Is the Sino-U.S. trade war just about the trade imbalance between the two countries? Should genetic editing be allowed? What are the global implications of China's Belt and Road Initiative?). During the exploration, they inevitably engage with academic and disciplinary texts that address the question or issue. Reading and discussing these texts helps develop the content knowledge and language resources needed to write about the topic in whatever genre that has been determined to be the focus of study. It also renders subsequent writing tasks relevant and meaningful.
In Stage 2, mentor texts in the target genre (e.g., historical explanation, scientific report, literary interpretation, mathematics proof, artistic critique) are selected for detailed analysis. Specifically, using functional grammar analysis tools described in Chapter 3, the teacher engages students in discussing the meaning and craft in these exemplar texts, paying particular attention to their purpose, generic structure, and lexicogrammatical features.
In Stage 3, the teacher designs tasks that highlight or reinforce key linguistic features identified in the mentor texts that the class has examined. These tasks can focus on key, unfamiliar, or challenging ways language is deployed to make meaning in the target genre within a particular discipline. They give students the opportunity to "play" with the specific language features used in the texts they have read closely, further cementing their understanding of the structure, logic, meaning, and function of these features and developing their facility in using them in academic writing. Samples of these language-based tasks, adapted from Fang (2010), are presented in Table 7-2. They are to be completed in authentic, meaningful contexts, using language samples selected from the texts students are reading and writing.
Table 7-2 Sample Tasks for Language Play
As can be seen from the table, a key focus of these tasks is to provide explicit support to students in learning to use academic language, particularly the nominalized syntax of academic discourse. This focus is especially important, given students' struggle with academic registers and the value of compactness to academic writing. According to Biber and Gray (2010, p. 19),
Traditional grammar practice for advanced academic purposes tends to focus on elaborated structures, often dependent clauses like relative clauses, adverbial clauses, and complement clauses. Phrasal modification — especially noun phrase structures with multiple levels of phrasal embedding— is usually given much less attention. This practice might in part reflect a perception that phrasal modification is somehow easier than clausal embedding. However, …, the opposite is in fact the case: meaning relations are much clearer and more explicit in clausal embedding than in phrasal embedding. The implication is that EAP reading courses should provide extensive practice in decoding texts with extensive phrasal modification.
In the final phase, the teacher encourages students to use some of the key or unfamiliar language features discussed earlier as they attempt to compose a new text in the target genre. Students are guided through the composing process of generating ideas, creating drafts, making revisions, and publishing their work online (or in print), with an emphasis on revision, where special attention is given to the power of lexicogrammar in shaping, clarifying, and manipulating meaning. To reduce writing anxiety, the teacher can first work with students, or have students in small groups work collaboratively, to compose the new text before letting them individually work on the new text on their own.