SocioCultural Context of Writing
SYMPOSIUM TITLE: ANALYSING ACADEMIC WRITING PRACTICES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TARTU: A MULTIFACETED PERSPECTIVE ON LANGUAGE, TEACHING AND TRADITION
PRESENTATION TITLE: ESTONIAN STUDENTS’ WRITING IN ENGLISH: TEXT CONSTRUCTION AND ARGUMENTATION IN ENTRANCE EXAMINATIONS
Pille Põiklik¹, Ülle Türk²
¹University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia ²University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
In 2014, the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Tartu returned to using a written entrance examination on the BA level. In one part of the examination paper, candidates produced 200word written answers to a question based on a text they read in the examination room. As a preliminary indicator of their writing skills, these short texts are of high interest for the department, giving us a general idea of the candidates’ ability to express themselves in academic written English. In order to analyse their answers, the texts were typed in and coded, resulting in a corpus of 127 texts (one for each candidate, 24,561 words in total). This section of the symposium focuses on how the candidates approached the task of answering the question given, including a discussion of how they structured their text, what strategies they used to support their arguments, and how and to what extent they made use of the text provided for them. Within the framework of the symposium, we aim to discuss the potential influence of the Estonian context on the students’ writing in English and take a comparative look at the expectations associated with academic writing in different cultural settings.