Undergraduate Essay Writing – I

http://www.urgentcustomessays.com/blog/2009/09/undergraduate-essay-writing-i/Undergraduate Essay Writing – IEssay Blog

Introduction

In the practice of teaching writing to tertiary students, the traditional approach has been process-oriented with its emphasis on teaching students how they should go about the task of preparing their written assignments. For the most part, this approach has not been research based, and could be seen as offering the apprentice writer prescriptive advice about the strategies presumed to be necessary for writing, such as taking notes in particular ways and being well organised.

Among the inadequacies of this approach are: firstly, that students are not challenged to reflect on their own conceptions of what an essay is in the particular academic discipline in which they are writing and on the different approaches that can be adopted in confronting particular tasks; and secondly, that the outcomes of the process of writing, that is, the written assignments that students present for assessment, are rarely systematically analysed and used to illustrate the prescriptive advice. Recent research on student learning in higher education has focused on the first of these issues and recent linguistic research on student essay writing in higher education has focused on the second.

Much of the research into student learning in higher education has been conducted from within what has been termed a ‘first order’ perspective in which the emphasis is on describing various aspects of learning from the perspective of an independent observer. Over the last decade a new approach to such research has developed–a ‘second order’ perspective–in which the focus is on describing the experience of learning from the viewpoint of the student (Marton, 1981, 1988). This research, termed phenomenography, suggests that the way students conceive of the learning task affects their approach to learning in that situation and subsequently to the outcomes (Ramsden, 1988; Prosser & Millar, 1989).

Hounsel (1984,1987), in the only known phenomenographic study of essay writing, showed that students’ conceptions of essays varied according to the discipline. He observed a relationship between conceptions of essays and outcomes, just as Biggs & Telfer (1987) did between approaches to writing and outcomes. However, the methods used to analyse outcomes, namely the students’ essays, were based on informed intuition rather than detailed linguistic analyses of the essays.

Although there have been a number of studies by practitioners in writing instruction investigating the outcomes of student writing in the form of more detailed analyses of students’ essays, few of these studies have been based on close linguistic analysis. Insightful studies such as those by, for example, Ballard & Clanchy (1988) have relied on expert understanding of the requirements of academic writing for particular contexts, but have not been based on a theory of language and of the relationship between text and context. In order to explore this relationship between text and context, the theory of systemic functional grammar (Halliday, 1985) provides a systematic means of analysing the text in terms of its context. The theory serves to explain the way that the resources of language can be deployed to create different meanings, according to the social function being served within a defined context.

Within the cultural context of higher education in a Western country, written texts are of critical importance in shaping academic careers. The university context is one of analysis, criticism, argumentation, substantiation of claims, acknowledgement of others’ ideas, and so on, while the subculture of each discipline within the overall academic culture determines different epistemological approaches, and distinctive ways of thinking. The student, in learning how to write appropriately for each discipline, is actually embarking on a process of initiation into the culture of that discipline, through which he or she must learn what kinds of meanings are appropriate to reproduce, what kinds of questions appropriate to ask, and so on. On this broad cultural backdrop, the particular demands of each situation such as a certain writing task are defined.

The essay that the student produces to satisfy these cultural and situational demands is the manifestation of the student’s understanding of what is required. Any one essay is distinguished by the choices that the writer has made at many different levels, between choosing what stages the essay should proceed through, choosing what meanings to include in each stage, and choosing the best wordings to encapsulate those meanings. The totality of these choices, once made and recorded in writing, can be referred to as a ‘genre’. The distinctive shape of a genre is described in terms of its stages which comprise generally predictable patterns of grammar and vocabulary. Genres are not random phenomena. They are conventions which are both predictable and recognisable, having evolved over time because they have proved effective in achieving a particular social function. Although genres are not immutable, as can be seen, for example, in the evolution of the scientific article over the last century (Bazerman, 1988), writers whose lack of control of particular generic conventions is manifest in texts which markedly contravene expectations are unlikely to be successful in achieving the social purpose of their writing.

Although systemic functional linguistic studies have been conducted on a range of pedagogical genres in primary and secondary schools (for example, Martin & Rothery, 1980), analyses of tertiary written texts have been minimal (for example, Martin & Peters, 1985; Drury & Webb, 1991). In all such studies, the aim is to identify the typical linguistic features that predominate in each of the stages of the text, and across the text as a whole, in order to describe how the text goes about achieving its contextually defined purpose.

In investigating student writing, the combination of phenomenographic and systemic linguistic perspectives is appropriate for several reasons. Firstly, both approaches are primarily concerned with meaning, and how meaning is construed by learners in terms of their conceptions of, and approaches to, the essay writing task (in phenomenography) and in what they write (in systemic functional linguistics). Secondly, they are both concerned with the influence of context on this construction of meaning. However, previous research in phenomenography has not systematically looked at the product of student writing (i.e. the whole essay), nor has previous research in systemic functional linguistics looked at the way students approach the task of writing. Thus, while both research approaches address meaning in relation to context, they focus on different aspects of the learning task. If the aim is eventually to improve the quality of student writing, a combination of both research approaches is appropriate, and would enable deeper reflection on how to teach students to develop their own writing skills.

This paper outlines research undertaken into student essay writing in the first year of an undergraduate course in social sciences. The paper presents the method and results of the study, and discusses the relationship between the underlying theories. Finally, some implications for practice in the teaching of writing at university level are presented.

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Tags: Guide, Introduction, Undergraduate Essay Writing