FROM SCAFFOLDING TO INDEPENDENCE: TEACHING ACADEMIC
WRITING TO EFL DOCTORAL STUDENTS OF GEOGRAPHY
Robert Helán
Language Centre, Faculty of Medicine Department, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
ABSTRACT
The poster deals with teaching disciplinary writing in English for publication, stemming
from a three-year-long project financed by EU structural funds. A combination of
specific approaches to teaching academic writing is put forward drawing on corpus
linguistics, creative writing, and collaborative methodologies. Specifically, the poster
discusses the benefits of the Masaryk University’s text-analytic tool, the use of
strategies from creative writing, and the advantages of team teaching and students’
online peer-reviewing.
FIGURE 1: process of communication
The three main components involved in any communication, i.e. the sender, the message,
and the receiver, can be taken as points of departure for the investigation of academic writing
pedagogies (Hyland 2009):
1. sender or writer-oriented approach: writing is a creative and cognitive process with certain
stages (pre-writing, writing, post-writing) and skills (brainstorming, editing, rewriting)
2. message or text-oriented approach: writing requires the use of certain genre-specific and
discipline-specific lexico-grammatical and rhetorical features
3. receiver or reader-oriented approach: writing has a social dimension in that the writer
should anticipate the target audience.
1. FOCUS ON THE SENDER/WRITER
- teaching the POWER writing process (see figure 2 below) to EFL students since skilled
writers compose differently from novices (in terms of planning, revising, regularity, etc. –
Silva 1993 cited in Hyland 2009).
- developing students’ skills in the specific stages of the writing process such as
brainstorming, mind mapping, free writing, outlining, editing, and reviewing.
- using techniques from the field of creative writing for the individual stages of the writing
process: e.g. for brainstorming – listing arguments for and against choosing a specific
topic; acrostic – the first letter of a keyword is a stimulus for forming a message related to
the keyword (Pazderníková 2009).
- making use of MULC (Masaryk University Language Centre) Peer-Review© in MULC’s
Virtual Study Space (http://vjs.muni.cz/peer-review/), created within the COMPACT project
(Štěpánek & Hradilová 2013): it is an online peer-review (student-to-student) tool.
FIGURE 2: stages of the POWER process
REFERENCES
Hyland, K. (2009). Teaching and Researching Writing. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
Kamler, B. & Thomson, P. (2006) Helping Doctoral Students Write. Pedagogies for Supervision. Oxon and New York: Routledge.
Paltridge, B. et al. (2009) Teaching Academic Writing. An Introduction for Teachers of Second Language Writers. Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press.
Pazderníková, P. (2009) Creative Writing and Scientific Work. The Use of Creative Techniques for Preparation, Writing and
Presentation of Scientific Text. Dissertation. Brno: Masaryk University.
Shulman, M. (2005) In Focus: Strategies for Academic Writers. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Swales, J. M. (1990) Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Štěpánek, L. & Hradilová, A. (2013) Designing ICT-Enhanced Language Programmes: Academic Writing for Postgraduate Studies. In:
Language Learning in Higher Education. 2(1), pp. 163-171.
2. FOCUS ON THE MESSAGE/TEXT
- using linguistic resources available to students for producing academic texts: using
templates for writing – provide students with patterns for expressing thoughts thus
clarifying them, they are common formulas helping to generate quality writing.
- using structural move analysis (Swales 1990) providing students with steps/moves for
part-genres (such as introduction to research articles) – encouraging them to include
the required moves in their writing
- looking at instances of good writing – analyzing them in terms of moves, putting a
part-genre together based on the most appropriate sequence of moves (problemsolution,
general-specific)
FIGURE 3: skeleton writing/syntactic borrowing (Kamler & Thomson 2006)
Skeleton writing/syntactic borrowing:
- useful to novice doctoral students who have only recently ‘joined’ the discourse community of
discipline-specific professionals
- encourages students to take on the role of an experienced, authoritative writer
- scaffolds a writer/researcher identity via adopting and adapting helpful language
3. FOCUS ON THE RECEIVER/READER
- teaching the concept of discourse community (Swales 1990): the difference between
expert vs. novice members of the discipline; the knowledge of important topics in the
discipline; the necessity to take on the role of a scientific researcher.
- building activities around the target journals students wish to publish in with questions
leading them to adapt their writing to meet the journals’ criteria.
- collaborating via team teaching with an expert from the discipline, organizing workshops
with experts from the field of creative writing and corpus linguistics, practicing online or inclass
peer-reviewing, personal conferences regarding students’ written work.
- building small corpora of texts from journals students wish to publish in and then
uploading these into Masaryk University text-analytic tool called Sketch Engine (see figure
4) – https://ske.fi.muni.cz/login/
- familiarizing students with any guidelines for publishing in their disciplines (see figure 5).
FIGURE 5: guide for researchers in geography: Publishing and Getting Read
FIGURE 4: text-analytic tool Sketch Engine created at Masaryk University