Innovative Methods and Practices of Academic Writing and Writing Instruction
CAPTURING THE STRUGGLE: UNDERSTANDING THE METACOGNITIVE STRATEGIES FOR ACADEMIC WRITING OF WORKBASED LEARNERS AT UNIVERSITY
Sacha Mason
Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK
This presentation explores the struggles and challenges that learners on a workbased Foundation Degree (FdA) in Applied Studies encounter when undertaking academic writing during their first year on the programme. The experiences of first year FdA undergraduates are investigated in a small scale, qualitative study where the processes that learners engage with related to their academic writing are discussed. Data were gathered from individual feedforward tutorials, reflective ejournals to record their academic writing progress and the assessment grade for final module of the FdA programme. The feed forward tutorials were analysed, along with participants’ ejournal entries, for the identification of metacognitive awareness of writing strategies evident from the participants’ reflections. The findings focus on the processes of writing and emerging concepts of authorial identity, writing voice and professional practice. Many of the participants spoke of their concerns about their writing, of a disturbance in their ways of being in any one of their multiple roles of professional learner, practitioner, mother, partner, writer for example. The participants’ conscious awareness of such disturbances, which Archer describes as a modus vivendi (2003: 16), or cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957) suggests reflexivity (Archer 2003).
References
Archer, M. (2003). Structure, agency and the internal conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Festinger, L. (1957). The relationship between behaviour and cognition. In Contemporary approaches to cognition . Cambridge: Harvard University Press. A Symposium held at University of Colorado.
Stierer, B. (2000). Schoolteacher as students: academic literacy and the construction of professional knowledge within master’s courses in education. In B. Lea, & B. Stierer, (Eds.), Student writing in higher education: New contexts. Buckingham: Open University Press.