Writing in and across Disciplines
EMBEDDING WRITING INSTRUCTION IN A POSTGRADUATE DEGREE PROGRAMME: A CASE STUDY
Stuart Wrigley
Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK
This presentation reports on an academic writing intervention in a large, international business studies Master’s programme in a researchled university in the UK. The Master’s programme faces several of the increasingly welldocumented challenges in UK business schools, such as skewed diversity (Robson & Turner, 2007), large class sizes, and varied motivation patterns, such as students wanting a degree but not wishing to integrate in UK communities of practice (Tian and Low, 2012). The variable academic performance of students on the programme was seen as symptomatic of the contextual challenges outlined above, so the decision was taken to embed the teaching of writing into the Master’s curriculum. The benefits of embedding writing instruction are well known (e.g. Hyland, 2000), and the main design principles driving our intervention were based on the CEM model (Sloan and Porter, 2010) and on those developed in Wingate et al. (2011), which emphasise the relationship of academic writing and critical reading. The intervention was evaluated via analysis of a survey, a focus group with students, class observations, email correspondence with students and analysis of student performance. Findings suggest that the intervention met with considerable success, despite concerns raised by stronger students and ongoing diversity and classsize issues. It is suggested that to reduce the potential for disengagement and failure, a joinedup approach is needed that combines the embedding of academic writing instruction with institutional moves to diversify the international student body and reduce class sizes.
References
Hyland, K. (2000). Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing. London: Longman.
Robson, S. & Turner, Y. (2007). ‘Teaching is a colearning experience’: academics reflecting on learning and teaching in an ‘internationalized’ faculty. Teaching in Higher Education , 12:1, 4154.
Sloan, D. & Porter, E. (2010). Changing international student and business staff perceptions of insessional EAP: using the CEM model. Journal of English for Academic Purposes , 9, 198210.
Tian, J. & Low, G. D. (2012). To what extent are postgraduate students from China prepared for academic writing needed on UK master’s courses? Language, Culture and Curriculum , 25:3, 299319.
Wingate, U., Andon, N. & Cogo, A. (2011). Embedding academic writing instruction into subject teaching: A case study. Active Learning in Higher Education , 12, 6981.