The appliance of Science: the challenges of Undergraduate Science Students writing Popular Science

Abstract

Popular science writing is rarely referred to in the literature yet could be used as a genre writing task for undergraduate science students. Starting in the academic year 2013-14, a popular science article writing task has been used as the main writing task in an English in the Discipline course for second year undergraduate science students from multiple scientific disciplines at the University of Hong. In this course students are formally taught the genre features of popular science articles and research articles using the concept of reader-writer proximity (Hyland 2010) in which the fixed rhetorical features are used to “construct both the reader and writer as people with similar understandings and goals (p.116).” In the first run of the course in 2013-14, 17 samples of student work were analysed for genre features through Hyland’s concept of proximity, and focus group and individual interviews conducted with the same 17 students. The objectives of the study were to determine (1) to what extent students can incorporate and successfully use genre features of popular science in their writing, (2) what factors affect students’ ability to incorporate and successfully use popular science genre features, and (3) based on the findings what are the pedagogical implications for helping students to write successful popular science articles in future courses? From this data it was determined that some students could incorporate and use genre features of popular science extremely well, that the main factor affecting students’ ability to do this was motivation to carry out research and background reading, particularly of journal articles, and that the main pedagogical implications were that more scaffolding for out-of-class research and background reading was needed in order to help increase student motivation.