Writing in and across Disciplines
POSTGRADUATES’ GENREKNOWLEDGE DEVELOPMENT IN ‘NEW DISCIPLINES’
Kathrin Kaufhold
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Interdisciplinary and reflexive research approaches in the Humanities and Social Sciences increasingly influence postgraduate academic writing (Starfield and Ravelli 2006). Writing conventions here are often contested (Casanave 2010) and new forms of English for Academic Purposes pedagogies are required. This paper examines students’ development of genre knowledge (Tardy 2009) in the context of these tendencies: How do master’s students studying in interdisciplinary fields perceive and develop genre knowledge in the multilingual and interdisciplinary learning context of a Swedish university? What are pedagogic challenges and perspectives for a facultywide EAP course? The paper presents an ethnographically informed case study (Barton and Hamilton 1998) with eight participants who completed a crossdisciplinary EAP course. The data material includes regular interviews with the students, interviews with disciplinespecific teachers, the analysis of students’ texts written as part the EAP course, sample texts introduced to the course by the students as well as their final thesis. Initial results highlight the role of students’ previous genre knowledge in the understanding of writing conventions for their new interdisciplinary projects; the students’ positioning towards their programme of study; and the uncertainties of conventions in relatively young disciplines, such as Fashion Studies, that are still in the process of formation. Thus postgraduate EAP courses can neither be generic nor disciplinespecific but have to actively involve students as researchers of their own writing and include the analysis of students’ past writing and other texts relating to their current projects.
References
Barton, D., and Hamilton, M. (1998) Local literacies: Reading and writing in one community . London: Routledge.
Casanave, C. P. (2010) ‘Taking risks?: A case study of three doctoral students writing qualitative dissertations at an American university in Japan’ Journal of Second Language Writing 19 (1), 116.
Starfield, S., and Ravelli, L. (2006) ‘"The writing of this thesis was a process that I could not explore with the positivistic detachment of the classical sociologist": Self and structure in New Humanities research theses’ Journal of English for Academic Purposes 5 (3), 222243.
Tardy, C. M. (2009) Building genre knowledge . West Lafayette: Parlor Press .