Learning to write for academic purposes: Specificity and second language writing

Abstract

The massive expansion of English as the academic lingua franca has meant that many students around the world are now studying their subjects in a second language. This is the case in Hong Kong where Higher Education has been conducted in English since early in colonial times while students mainly receive their secondary education in Chinese medium schools. In 2012 we were given an opportunity to reimagine the kind of English we taught when the city totally reformed its educational system by removing a year from students’ school experience and adding it to their time at university. At Hong Kong University we took this opportunity to completely redesign our courses, dropping the professional courses we offered to each faculty to focus on “English in the Discipline”. This recognizes that learning to write at university involves acquiring a new and challenging literacy rather than topping up generic writing skills learnt at school. Because the conventions of academic communication differ considerably across disciplines, identifying the particular language features, discourse practices, and communicative skills of target groups becomes central to teaching English in universities. Teachers therefore had to become researchers of the genres they were to teach and to devise courses around the principle of ‘specificity’.

In this presentation I talk a little about this process and how we provided a curriculum structure which built 30 English in the discipline courses on a new common first year English for General Academic Purposes course for 3000 students. Mainly, however, I will discuss the principles of disciplinary specific language on which it is based. To do this I will provide evidence which draws on my research into how features of academic writing vary across fields, how academics in construct different disciplinary-based identities, how tutors have different perceptions and expectations about student writing, and how the assessment tasks they assign differ considerably across fields. Overall, the presentation highlights the disciplinary-specific nature of writing and argues for targeting teaching to best support L2 students towards control of the discourses that disciplinary insiders are likely to find effective. The approach recognises that the writing L2 learners are asked to produce at university represents a range of genres, contexts, epistemologies and interpersonal expectations and that offering the most specific learning experience we can is the most appropriate starting point for instruction.