David Woolls (CFL Software Development)

Who’s the copycat?

This paper gave the background to the development of CopyCatch, a computer program specifically designed to monitor coursework for evidence of collusion. The paper considered the problems for lecturers which the general availability of e-mail and the free access to information on the Internet enjoyed by all students can cause. It set out the principles behind the operation of the program and included a demonstration of CopyCatch in action on real case data.

The potential uses are wider than simply detection, although it is important that this element works well and reliably. The other obvious use is as a deterrent, but a less obvious use is pedagogic, and the paper will conclude with consideration of some ways in which CopyCatch might be applied in the classroom as a positive contribution to the development of good practice and perhaps better writing.

Erik Borg (Leeds College of Technology)

The use of source material and the proper forms of acknowledging other writers’ work often is a problematic area for students studying in Britain whose first language is not English [NNS students]. This paper considered the use of source material in the initial academic writing of native-speaking [NS] and NNS students on an MEd. in TESOL programme. It found that there is considerable continuity of problems between NS and NNS students (for instance, both groups have difficulty with formatting). This study found that there are distinctive features of student citations, as well as similarities and differences between NNS and NS students in the use of citations. By looking at the texts, the features and problems of student citations are described. Interviews with NNS students then suggest that these students had less experience with writing from sources and less experience in taking a critical stance than NS students. Although the study is primarily descriptive, some cautionary advice may be drawn from it.

Maggie Charles (Oxford University Language Centre)

This paper investigated the role of patterns which have an introductory it subject, a link verb and an adjective, e.g. ‘it is clear that…’ or ‘it seems reasonable to attribute…’. I drew upon two corpora of theses written by native speakers, in politics/international relations and in materials science, in order to show how these patterns contribute to the construction of an appropriate academic persona. I argued that differences in the know-ledge-making practices of the two disciplines lead to observed differences in the use of the patterns, thus creating an academic persona appropriate to the discipline concerned. I also suggested that similarities between the two corpora derive from more general academic procedures and values. For example, writers in both disciplines use the choice of adjective to construct a general academic persona, one that embodies attributes valued in the academic community as a whole, e.g. honesty, reasonableness, helpfulness and professional competence. In conclusion, introductory it patterns can be used to construct an appropriate persona both for a specific discipline as well as for the general academic community.

Diane Pecorari (University of Birmingham)

Citation is a complex aspect of academic writing, and one that would appear to pose special problems for second-language writers. Inexperienced writers may produce what Howard (1995) has called patchwriting, a text made up of extracts from sources, stitched together. And while patchwriting lacks the component of deception understood by the word ‘plagiarism’, the distinction between the two may not be obvious in the product.

This paper presented the preliminary findings of a study of overseas students’ master’s dissertations. Student writing was compared to source texts, revealing substantial textual repetition. Students were interviewed about their writing practices, and asked to discuss the ways in which the repetition may have come about, and the students’ supervisors were asked to evaluate the students’ use of sources in the light of disciplinary standards.

Howard, Rebecca (1995). Plagiarisms, authorships, and the academic death penalty. College English 57 (1): 788-805

Jon Mills (University of Luton)

This paper described CATEAP software, which has been developed, and continues to be developed by Jon Mills at the University of Luton.

CATEAP provides all the materials for the writing component of the Academic English and Study Skills module for first year undergraduate students whose first language is not English. CATEAP aims to explain and provide practice in a number of language functions that are employed in academic discourse and provides approximately 40 hours of writing activities. CATEAP is for classroom use with a teacher present and lock-step is necessary at various points during each lesson.

Each lesson incorporates a variety of tasks and task types including pages of exposition, drills, short essay writing, peer critiquing and use of a concordancer. Peer critiquing of essays takes place over the intra-net with the students adopting pseudonyms. Students report that they like the anonymity that this virtual classroom provides. The role of the teacher is concerned with managing the virtual classroom, allowing students to sometimes work at their own pace and at other times focussing the entire class in lock-step.

Susan Linklater and Esther Dunbar (EFL Unit, University of Glasgow)

This talk described a computer-based course developed and run during the 1999 pre-sessional course at Glasgow University.

The aim was for students to produce a piece of writing to be published on the Web. The final piece had to demonstrate the ability to find, evaluate and use source material without plagiarising. The process involved using a class discussion board, the World Wide Web, MSWord97, and teacher monitoring via remote control software.

We evaluate the logistics of running such a course, based on our experience. Examples of the students’ work were shown, including their contributions to the discussion board.

Olwyn Alexander (Heriot Watt University)

In this talk I considered the mismatch between student and teacher perceptions of the nature of an on-line discussion space using questionnaire data from a cultural studies class for Socrates exchange students. I discussed ways in which interaction might be encouraged and students might be prompted to think critically about their contributions.

Ros Richards (CALS, University of Reading)

The Dearing Report specifies that higher education in the UK should ‘sustain a culture which demands disciplined thinking, encourages curiosity, challenges existing ideas and generates new ones’ (National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education in UK 1997:6). To date the medium of writing remains the principal means of assessing student success in this respect. It is therefore important to explore how critical thinking may be developed and expresed in the context of EAP writing instruction. The aim of this presentation was to show how the effective teaching of academic writing depends on developing both cognitive and metacognitive critical thinking skills and strategies.

Tan Bee Tin (Chichester Institute of Higher Education)

It is common to hear teachers telling their students to ‘be original’ and to ‘think the unthinkable’ in their academic writing tasks, but how original ideas are generated and how great minds think the unthinkable often remain unexplained and univestigated. This paper examined the different ways ideas are framed (developed and linked with each other) and the ways knowledge is constructed in writing by overseas students on British undergraduate programmes, using the written examination papers of Malaysian undergraduate students on a BEd programme with the Centre for International Education and Management at University College Chichester as the main source of data. Though overseas students are expected to succeed in the expected discourse of the British educational institutional culture, how to succeed in that culture is not often made explicit to them. The investigation of the multi-dimensionality of idea framing and knowledge construction can throw light on various educational and pedagogical issues.

Julie King* and Randal Holme (University of Durham)

Research into the use of metaphor and analogy in the formation of abstract meaning and conceptualisation (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson, 1999) has now established itself as a cornerstone of cognitive linguistics. However, it has yet to significantly influence ELT/ESP/EAP approaches to pedagogy. This session put forward a series of techniques which base themselves upon an understanding of how metaphor can build our sense of text structure establishing its relationship to the reader and its wider sense of intertextuality. Our objective was to recount action research on the application of classroom techniques to specific areas of writing.

* Julie King was the sole presenter, as Randal Holme was unable to attend this meeting

Sandra Cornbleet (University of Leicester)

An oral activity was presented as the lead-in and awareness-raising phase of a lesson on ‘the discursive essay’, of the IELTS Task 2 type.

As an IELTS examiner, I have read many Task 2 scripts which have failed to take into account the conventions of formal/academic writing and have had a far too subjective and ‘oral’ approach. I therefore adapted a well-known task which would deliberately confront the differences between the oral and written media. As well as providing a contrast of register, the activity reflects various ways of organising such an essay which students are then encouraged to identify and appraise.

The workshop replicated the classroom situation and participants were finally invited to discuss alternative extensions to the basic format for application to other teaching requirements.

Jeanne Godfrey (University of Westminster)

Is plagiarism becoming an increasing problem in British Universities?

Cases of ‘mass cheating’ in the media seem to fade into insignificance as you read yet another perfectly phrased essay from an IELTS 6.0 undergraduate. Academic Quality departments have a growing number of cases to deal with, and ‘cut and pasteitis’ seems to be reaching epidemic proportions. EAP practitioners in particular need to be able to identify more clearly what is and isn’t plagiarism without the fear that they may be accessories to the crime.

This workshop discussed the complex nature of plagiarism and explore how it involves the fundamental principles and skills of academic endeavour. We discussed current studies on plagiarism, and the usefulness of samples of related teaching materials and student handbook information on the topic.

The outcome of the workshop was a list of ways of preventing students becoming ‘accidental plagiarists’, examples of, and ideas for related teaching material, and strategies and suggestions to feedback to management and the institution as a whole.

Nick Groom (Institute of Education)

This short talk presented a schema which attempts to further develop Angele Tadros’ basic Averral/Attribution polarity, by theorising these concepts as opposite poles between which a cline of propositional responsibility can be described. I further suggested that particular instantiations on this cline can be classified by means of an elaboration of Thompson and Ye’s ‘writer’ and ‘author’ as textual and intertextual voices respectively. Possible applications of this model for research and pedagogy were considered, and participants were given the chance to test out the model using some attested examples from academic texts.

Anne Pallant (CALS, University of Reading)

This workshop followed on from Ros Richards’ review of theory and research in critical thinking. We looked at various strategies that contribute to the development of EAP students’ critical thinking in relation to their writing, and how such strategies can be included apprpriately in classroom learning. Activities included: categorising various writing strategies, assessing examples of tasks and designing tasks, which contribute to the development of critical thinking.

Gianfranco Conti (University of Reading)

This paper reported results of a longitudinal study involving 10 novice writers of L2-Italian. The study investigated, over nine months, the impact of learner training in metacognitive strategies on grammar accuracy and revising processes in L2 composing, as well as on general L2 learning habits. The aims of the strategic instruction were: (a) to increase the learners’ insight in their interlanguage and in the nature and causes of the performance errors in their essay-writing, through a number of student-directed activities involving metacognition and language awareness; (b) to train learners in the systematic application of selective attention to specific mistakes and in the deployment of error-detection strategies. The findings suggest that the training may have helped the learners reduce the occurrence of a number of persistent errors in their essay-writing. Furthermore, the participants have reported significantly higher levels of L2 awareness and metalinguistic knowledge as a result of the greater involvement in teacher corrective feedback brought about by the training. They have also claimed that the student-driven error-targeting that the process involved made them more self-reliant and organised as language learners. Finally, the process appears to have positively affected the learners’ emotional response to corrective feedback with positive consequences for their levels of motivation.

Jennifer Palmer

There is an implication in psycholinguistics that learners go through certain composing processes when writing. These have been identified by Bereiter & Scardamalia (1983) as planning, execution, and self monitoring. There is a parallel implication in ELT methodology in the form of process writing, where students are encouraged to work through the various stages, monitored both by the teacher and themselves.

Revision has thus been elevated to a new importance in teaching. The approach to revision has changed over the years, alongside new developments in the theories of language and theories of learning. In traditional composition classes, the focus was on the final product and teachers tended to correct surface errors primarily. When process writing became popular, there was a shift in correction procedures towards commenting on meaning, since the process approach was largely concerned with helping learners to develop their creative potential. With the advent of the genre approach to writing in EAP settings, the questions is raised as to how revision strategies need to be changed to incorporate the new emphasis. So far little research has been carried out into revision in genre writing. A study by Villamil and Guerrero (l998) into peer revision, reported that in both the narrative and the persuasive mode, grammar revision still predominated. Shaw and Liu (1998) however, found that style was given more attention than accuracy in an intensive EAP course. This research looks at the perceived priorities of EAP students, when revising a first draft on a foundation course which prepares them for university entrance. The genre under investigation is a mini- discursive essay. The results indicate that students have different priorities at different linguistic levels. If this is the case, it might have implications not only for how we view L2 language development, but also for how we teach L2 writing.

Diana Ridley (Sheffield University)

One important way of contextualising Ph.D. research is to position it effectively in relation to the research and theories of others. In examining the literacy practices and learning processes involved in this activity, I believe it is necessary to consider the role of a literature review. The focus of this talk is to present the first stage of my research which is a survey of 50 Ph.D. theses. In the sample of theses, five different organisational patterns are discernible which reflect the variety of ways in which knowledge tends to be constructed in different disciplines. This in turn appears to influence the part played by the literature review. Different characteristics of Ph.D. literature reviews are evident in terms of the extent to which they are identifiable, their relationship with the rest of the thesis, their length, positioning within the thesis, titles, the referencing systems used, and the extent to which personal pronouns are used.

Paul Thompson *(CALS, University of Reading) and Christopher Tribble (CALS Associate)

Extending Swales’s (1990) division of citation forms into integral or non-integral, we present a classification scheme, and the results of applying this scheme to the coding of academic texts in a corpus. The texts are PhD theses, written in two departments at the University of Reading: Agricultural Botany and Agricultural Economics. The results lead into a comparison of the citation practices of writers in different disciplines, and the different rhetorical practices of these disciplines.

We then looked at examples of EAP student writing and apply the same analysis to their citation practices. Lastly, we reviewed the treatment of citations in well-known EAP textbooks, and suggest that these books do not give adequate guidance to EAP students, particularly those at postgraduate level, on the rhetorical choices that they can make.

Swales, J. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

* Paul Thompson was the sole presenter, as Chris Tribble was unable to attend this meeting.

This talk dealt not so much with the practical possibilities for language correction but rather with the issues that surround the subject. It was the result of a short-term, small-scale project that began with news of an overseas student’s experience of language correction at an American university. Comments have been collected from English language staff and overseas students at Goldsmiths College; information has been anecdotal in nature as well as via questionnaire. The focus has been on attitudes to, and experiences of, language correction of academic writing of mainly postgraduate Arts and Humanities students. Issues range from diversity of definition, conflicting assumptions and expectations, to considerations of boundaries, and the pragmatic versus the ideal.

Mary Scott (Institute of Education)

In this paper I discussed three excerpts from wordprocessed academic coursework by international students whose first language is other than English. The analyses have led me to a new way of thinking about the possibilities of written English as a a semiotic resource when texts are composed wholly or partly on the computer, and to a new perception of what development might mean in relation to academic writing – an essential and ongoing preoccupation if I am better to help my students improve the quality of their academic writing.