Writing for Publication
COACHING FOR WRITERS OF ACADEMIC PAPERS
Mary McIntosh
Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy
Like all nonnative speakers of English who publish research, Italian academics are increasingly obliged to write papers in English. They often receive vague feedback from reviewers indicating a generic need to improve their English. At the Politecnico di Torino, a large scientific university with over 800 academics, external proofreaders are frequently sought to make improvements, often at a distance. This type of intervention “… is highly unlikely to …meet all textual requirements” (Turner, 2011). In response to the need for proofreading the 5 English teachers developed an internal coaching service offering one facetoface appointment per paper. Over 5 years the service has transformed to encourage learning through a dialogic approach in order to contribute to “selfregulation” and “circumvent the limitations of oneway transmission of feedback” (Yang and Carless 2013). We help researchers identify problem areas in their papers and recognize rhetorical moves by acting as live readers, asking for clarification about meaning and helping to rephrase unclear sections or prompting onthespot corrections. The English team’s limited expertise in the technical field confronts writers with the need for clarity. An unforeseen benefit of this approach has been the development of a new professional relationship with academic staff which has raised the profile of English teachers in the university. Interviews with users indicate that the current service is not exactly what researchers expect but it is nevertheless relevant to their needs. In the future we hope to implement peer feedback groups in order to meet demand for more opportunities for feedback.
References
Bibliography
Turner Rewriting in higher education: the contested spaces of proofreading, Studies in Higher Education. Vol.36, No.4 , June 2011, 427440
Yang and Carless 2013, The feedback triangle and the enhancement of dialogic feedback processes , Teaching in Higher Education, Vol. 18, No. 3, 285297
Zhang, Sheng, Li. Evaluating an Academic Writing Course – based on an Integrated Model . The Journal of Asia TEFL, Vol. 11 No.1, 95125