LEARNING WRITING THROUGH RESEARCHING WRITING: STUDENTS INVESTIGATE HOW STUDENTS’ PAPERS PROGRESS

Writing in and across Disciplines

LEARNING WRITING THROUGH RESEARCHING WRITING: STUDENTS INVESTIGATE HOW STUDENTS’ PAPERS PROGRESS

Katrin Girgensohn

European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany

This presentation will report about a German university seminar for master students of linguistics, based on the method of discipline­based inquiry learning. This approach includes that students work with real­world questions, develop research skills, solve problems, collaborate within and beyond the classroom, deepen their understanding of content knowledge and participate in the public creation of knowledge (Stephenson n.y.).

The aim of this seminar was to foster students’ research competences as well as their writing competences.

The problem that students had to solve was to find an evidence­based answer to the question if a former seminar in which students had to write excerpts and to revise those excerpts after getting peer feedback was a helpful setting to gain writing competences. Students had a database of 45 texts, including excerpts’ first version, excerpts’ second version and critical reflections. Additionally, they had access to the text basis for the excerpts and to the peer feedback comments. In small groups, students developed research questions, chose a methodology for their inquiry and conducted the research. Results were presented and discussed at an internal conference. Afterwards, the students published their results collaboratively in an academic journal, following the collaborative authorship concept of the CERN (Grasshoff 2012). The presentation will explain this learning arrangement more deeply and introduce the students’ research results briefly. Based on evaluation data, the learning outcomes will be shown from the students’ point of view.

References

Graßhoff, G. & Wütherich, A. 2012, ​ MetaATLAS, ​ , Bern Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Bern.

Stephenson, N., n.y.. ​ Introduction to Inquiry­based learning​ . [online] Available at: < http://www.teachinquiry.com/index/Introduction.html> [Accessed 27 December 2014].