Writing in and across Disciplines
A GENREBASED STUDY OF CASE RESPONSE WRITING ON AN MBA PROGRAMME
Philip Bernard Nathan
The English Language Centre, University of Durham, Durham, UK
Business students at European Universities and internationally, are faced with a variety of academic writing tasks, ranging from essays to critiques, and from casebased assignments to business reports, research proposals and research reports, amongst other academic writing tasks (Cooper and Bikowski, 2007; Nesi and Gardner, 2012). This variety of tasks and the varying linguistic features underpinning their realisations, present significant challenges for both business students and their academic writing tutors, aiming to provide effective, targeted support. As casebased writing is widely used to support teaching and learning on business programmes (e.g. MaufetteLeenders et al., 1997, 56), yet previous studies are largely limited to business case reports (e.g. Nathan, 2013), in order to deepen understanding of casebased writing, this paper reports a small corpusbased study, based in 36 casebased nonreport writing texts (ca. 42000 words) written in three disciplines (Finance, Human Resource Management and Marketing) on a UK MBA programme. Using Wordsmith Tools 6.0 (Scott, 2012), key differences were identified between the disciplinary texts in terms of modal verb deployment, business lexis, use of personal pronouns and a range of other rhetorical features. Levels of literature citation differed markedly with negligible citation in the Finance and Marketing texts (<1 citation per thousand words) but much higher levels of citation in Human Resource Management texts (4.6 citations per thousand words). Awareness of such variation in casebased writing should serve as a useful aid to informing academic writing pedagogy in the context of the European Business School.
References
Cooper, A., & Bikowski, D. (2007). Writing at the graduate level: What tasks do professors actually require? Journal of English for Academic Purposes 6: 206221
MauffetteLeenders, L. A., Erskine, J.A., & Leenders, M.R. (1997). Learning with cases. Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario
Nathan, P.B. (2013) Academic writing in the business school; The genre of the business case report Journal of English for Academic Purposes 12 (1): 5768
Nesi, H. and Gardner, S. (2012). Genres across the disciplines: Student writing in higher education. Cambridge Applied Linguistics, Cambridge
Scott, M., (2012). WordSmith Tools version 6, Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software