Scaffolding Academic Literacy with Low-Proficiency Users of English 3030390942, 9783030390945

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Scaffolding Academic Literacy with Low-Proficiency Users of English Simon Green

Scaffolding Academic Literacy with Low-Proficiency Users of English

Simon Green

Scaffolding Academic Literacy with Low-Proficiency Users of English

Simon Green School of Education University of Leeds Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-39094-5 ISBN 978-3-030-39095-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39095-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Harvey Loake This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my wife and daughter for their patience during the writing of this book, and to my former colleagues and students in both the Colleges of Applied Sciences and the Leeds BA programme in Oman.

Acknowledgements

Some of the data presented in Chapter 5 is reproduced from Green, S. (2013) “Novice ESL Writers: A Longitudinal Case-Study of the Situated Academic Writing Processes of Three Undergraduates in a TESOL Context” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 12, pp. 180–191. This is with kind permission of the editors of Journal of English for Academic Purposes.

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Contents

1 7

1

What This Book Is About References

2

The 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

Nature of Academic Literacies Introduction Academic Literacy as Social Practice Academic Literacy and Genre Academic Literacy and Academic Communities Academic Literacy and Domains of Literacy Knowledge 2.5.1 The Contextual 2.5.2 The Declarative 2.5.3 The Procedural 2.6 Summary References

11 11 12 17 20 27 27 28 30 36 36

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Scaffolding the Construction of Academic Literacies 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Scaffolding and Academic Literacies 3.3 Who Should Receive Academic Literacy Support? 3.4 How Specific Should Academic Literacy Instruction Be? 3.5 What Should Academic Literacy Instruction Focus On? 3.6 Summary References

41 41 43 48 51 56 65 66 ix

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CONTENTS

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Academic Literacy and Communicative Language Ability 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Communicative Language Ability and Academic Literacy 4.3 Scaffolding Academic Literacies with Students with Low English Language Proficiencies 4.4 Summary References

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71 71 73 81 90 90

A Case in Point: The University of Leeds/Omani Ministry of Education BA Educational Studies Programme 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Background to the ‘Leeds BA Project’ 5.3 Methodology 5.4 The Organisation of Teaching and Learning on the BA 5.4.1 Making Input Accessible 5.4.2 Scaffolding Output 5.5 Discussion 5.6 Summary References

95 95 96 97 100 100 103 108 111 112

Conclusion References

115 122

Appendix

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References

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Index

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About the Author

Simon Green currently teaches and researches in the School of Education at the University of Leeds. He has worked in the field of TESOL since 1982 for the British Council, and for Ministries of Education and universities in Africa, China, Europe and the Middle East, most recently in the Sultanate of Oman. His research interests are in academic discourse, academic literacies and English for Academic Purposes.

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Acronyms

CEFR CLIL EAP EFL EGAP EMI ESAP ESL ESP GCC ICLHE IELTS L1 L2 RGS RT SDAIE SFL SI SIOP TOEFL WAC WID

Common European Framework of Reference for Languages Content and Language Integrated Learning English for Academic Purposes English as a Foreign Language English for General Academic Purposes English-Medium Instruction English for Specific Academic Purposes English as a Second Language English for Specific Purposes Gulf Cooperation Council Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education International English Language Testing System First Language Second Language Rhetorical Genre Studies Regional Tutor Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English Systemic-Functional Linguistics Sheltered Instruction Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol Test of English as a Foreign Language Writing Across the Curriculum Writing in the Disciplines

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List of Tables

Table 5.1 Table A.1

Table A.2 Table A.3

Table A.4

Input to output on the BA The structure of the first year of the BA programme, showing the interweaving of intensive and extensive modes of teaching and learning Sample intensive mode lecture/seminar plan Day-release sessions devoted to consolidating understanding of modular concepts and scaffolding the writing of the EDUC 2031 assignment The scaffolding of assignment writing in one regional group

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126 128

129 130

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CHAPTER 1

What This Book Is About

Abstract Green first highlights the key concern of the book: the consequences for both academic literacy and disciplinary teaching and learning in English-medium higher education institutions in regions such as the Gulf Cooperation Council nations, of first year intakes with low English language proficiencies. The chapter then sketches out the trajectory of the book: Chapters 2 and 3 explore academic literacy and the ways in which it may be scaffolded. Chapter 4 considers the problems posed by lowproficiency users of English in English-medium instruction in the GCC. Chapter 5 presents a case study of literacy instruction in which literacy and content teaching were integrated. Chapter 6 considers the implications for higher education in the GCC and beyond. Keywords Academic literacy · English language proficiency · Gulf Cooperation Council · Undergraduate entry

English-medium higher education, the delivery of undergraduate or postgraduate programmes through English, is now a global phenomenon. As Macaro et al. (2018) indicate, there are higher education institutions throughout Asia and Europe which now offer specific programmes in English or have adopted English as the exclusive medium of instruction. For example, in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries such as Oman or the United Arab Emirates, the majority of higher education

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institutions have maintained an exclusive or partial English-medium policy since the 1980s or 1990s (Donn and Al-Manthri 2010). There may be a number of motivations for the partial or comprehensive adoption of English as a medium of instruction in countries where English is a second or foreign language. Macaro et al. (2018) suggest that one common and powerful motivator appears to be the dominance of English in international scientific communication and academic publication. If ESL students and academics are to engage with international science, the ability to construct and share knowledge through the medium of English is essential, and English-medium higher education is perceived to be the best way of achieving this. Nevertheless, whatever the motivations for adopting English-medium instruction in countries with English as a second language (ESL) populations, there are widespread concerns about its implementation. Macaro et al. (2018) review 83 studies of English-medium instruction from ESL or EFL countries, and their findings do not present a positive picture. Although they found no clear evidence that English-medium instruction has a negative effect on content learning, they found little to suggest that it was having a positive impact on students’ English language levels. They cite, for example Rogier (2012), a doctoral study which measured the language gains of Emirati students in English-medium higher education over a four-year period, using the International English Language Testing System (IELTS)1 as the comparative measure. This study indicated that after four years of full-time English-medium instruction, the participating students had made overall gains of no more than 0.5 of a band, which seems slight progress. Further, Macaro et al. (2018) found a widespread concern on the part of academics and students about student levels of English proficiency. Studies reporting staff and/or student concerns about low or inadequate levels of student proficiency in English were noted from Turkey (Basıbek et al. 2014), Spain (Doiz et al. 2011), France (Napoli and Sourisseau 2013), the UAE (Belhiah and Elhami 2015), Iraqi Kurdistan (Borg 2016) and Korea (Choi 2013) to list just a few. In each of these cases, academics considered the English proficiency of their students to be so low as to severely restrict learning. My concern in this book is chiefly with one such English-medium higher education context: the countries of the GCC. The GCC is a strategic bloc, comprised of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman,

1 https://www.ielts.org/.

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Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, with a stated mission to achieve regional economic and political integration (Hanieh 2018). One of the things the GCC countries share is an educational system in which primary and secondary education is conducted through the medium of Arabic but in which tertiary education is conducted largely through the medium of English (Donn and Al-Manthri 2010). This enforced transition from Arabic-medium secondary education to English-medium tertiary education poses young Arabs and the higher education institutions which they enter, with a significant problem. Even though almost all GCC higher education institutions run preparatory programmes from one to two years in duration, the levels of English with which students enter first year degree studies are markedly lower than the level they require to cope with their lectures, complete their assigned reading and write their assignments and exams (Belhiah and Elhami 2015; Ghobain 2015). In the UK and other countries where English remains the majority first language, higher education institutions generally require second language users of English to have an English language proficiency in the B2 or C1 bands of the Council of Europe’s (2011) Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). In the UK, this is typically evidenced by an IELTS score of 6.0–7.0 overall. In the GCC countries, despite some variation, they are consistently significantly lower. Stated requirements for IELTS across institutions in the GCC are usually in the 5–5.5 band but as the majority of students enter their degree studies on the basis of institutionally administered language assessments, rather than IELTS/TOEFL assessments, actual levels of proficiency may well be rather lower. Arguably, a reasonable assessment for the majority of students entering higher education in the GCC would probably be CEFR B1, a whole CEFR band lower than their counterparts in the UK. As it has been estimated that movement from B1 to B2 requires between 180 and 260 hours of guided study,2 there is a chasm between the linguistic resources students can deploy when they enter their studies and the linguistic challenges posed by the discourse they encounter in lectures, in reading material, in discussions with their tutors, and the level of discourse they must try to produce in their coursework and examinations. This linguistic chasm has significant impacts: it severely restricts students’ ability to learn and to develop the ‘academic literacy’ skills they require to

2 http://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2018/10/11/how-long-learn-language/.

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construct and share knowledge through the medium of English. It also provokes, as a consequence, specific strategic pedagogic responses from academics grappling with the fact that their students’ low English proficiencies filter out much of their expository and explanatory discourse. In this book, I want to do two things. My first objective is to highlight the problems posed by low entry-level English language proficiencies and the way higher education institutions and academics in the GCC currently respond to them. My second objective, drawing on contemporary theories of academic literacies and disciplinary teaching, is to suggest the outlines of an alternative solution. Chapters 2 and 3 are preparatory. Chapter 2 provides a working definition of the concept of academic literacy as the ability to construct and share knowledge within specific academic contexts, drawing on recent work by Wingate (2015), Lillis et al. (2015), Lillis and Scott (2008), Bawarshi and Reiff (2010), and Swales (2016), amongst others. Chapter 3 complements Chapter 2 by considering the way the construction of academic literacies may be scaffolded (Woods et al. 1976; Mercer 1995). Specifically, the chapter considers a number of choices that higher education institutions face in planning the scaffolding of academic literacies. These choices concern who should receive academic literacy support; what degree of disciplinary specificity is necessary in this support; and what areas academic literacy support should emphasise. I shall offer examples from international English-medium higher education to explain my points, most of which will come from the UK or the GCC, the contexts with which I am most familiar. Chapter 4 raises the key concern of this book, implicit in the preceding discussion. This is the issue of language proficiency. In the first part of the chapter, I briefly consider the nature of communicative language ability drawing on the work of Bachman (1990) and Bachman and Palmer (2010), and its relation to academic literacy, and consider standard assessment measures such as IELTS used by higher education institutions globally to assess the English proficiency levels of international students whose first language is not English. I then discuss the differences between the English language proficiencies required for entry to undergraduate studies in the UK and the GCC and the impact these have in the GCC on teaching and learning. I then consider the way higher education institutions in the GCC typically support the construction of academic literacies and highlight the problems these pose. In the second part of the chapter, I consider an alternative approach to the scaffolding of academic literacies

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by students with low English language proficiencies drawing on a range of theoretical currents cohering around two radical curricular innovations: the expansion of disciplinary curricula to include academic literacy instruction and the adoption of a ‘language-aware’ pedagogy. The former draws on ideas suggested by theorists within Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education (ICLHE) (Gustafsson et al. 2011; Gustafsson and Jacobs 2013; Paretti 2011; Leibowitz 2005, 2013; Leibowitz et al. 2011) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) (Clughen 2012; Deane and O’Neill 2011; Parker 2010). The latter draws on ideas from Sheltered Instruction (Short et al. 2011), and Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (Cline and Necochea 2003). I argue for an approach to scaffolding the construction of academic literacies which both embeds literacy instruction within disciplinary teaching and enacts a language-aware pedagogy in which teachers modify both linguistic input and classroom interaction in order to make disciplinary input accessible to students with low levels of English language proficiency. Chapter 5 presents a case in point. The chapter discusses how academic literacies were scaffolded on a teacher education project run as a collaboration between the University of Leeds and the Omani Ministry of Education from 1999 to 2009. This was the largest such collaboration in the GCC and has had a significant impact on the Omani education system (Wedell and Atkins 2009). However, my concern in this book is the model of teaching and learning that emerged on the BA in response to the English language proficiency levels of the students. This organisation of teaching and learning achieved two key things: (a) it provided modular input in accessible, negotiated English which permitted the students to engage actively and constructively with modular content through the medium of English and (b) it provided a careful scaffolding of modular outputs (typically 3000-word written assignments) in a structured manner quite untypical of UK universities. The chapter will do two things: (a) provide an overview of the BA, indicating the socio-educational background to the project, the starting point of the participants and the modes of teaching and learning developed on the BA; and (b) present aspects of three case studies of academic literacy development on the BA, interweaving multiple streams of textual and interview data from a year-long longitudinal project, and showing how the organisation of teaching and learning on the BA scaffolded the participants’ learning and literacy development.

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The final chapter draws out the relevance of the study for (a) the literature on academic literacies; (b) the scaffolding of academic literacies in low English proficiency contexts such as the GCC; and (c) the understandings of how academic literacies might be supported further afield, in the UK and other English-as-majority-first-language countries. With regard to (a), the study raises the issue of language proficiency in academic literacy, an issue at best peripheral to the majority of studies in the academic literacies literature, and by doing so foregrounds the situation of academics, EAP teachers and undergraduates in English-medium higher education systems in countries where English is a second language. With regard to (b), the study offers strong support for an approach to scaffolding academic literacies which integrates explicit literacy work with disciplinary teaching along the lines advocated by many writers in the Writing in the Disciplines movement, and strong support too to advocates of Sheltered Instruction. With regard to (c), the chief implication is that higher education in the UK could be more inclusive if institutions and disciplinary academics were willing to consider expansions of disciplinary curricula to integrate explicit discussion of the discourse of their disciplines into their teaching. In writing this book, I hope to address multiple audiences. The first group of audiences are located within the GCC. One audience includes academic literacy practitioners such as English for Academic Purposes working in higher education institutions in the GCC. To them, I suspect that much of what I have to say will seem wearyingly familiar. I hope that the way I have framed the problem may help them see that persistent failure in English achievement is not the fault of English language departments and certainly not the fault of students entering higher education. By casting the problem as a structural fault running right through higher education in the GCC, I hope that these readers will see that the problems require solutions at an institutional level. I hope too that this book may inform attempts on the part of English departments and English teachers in GCC universities to build the kinds of bridges that must be built with disciplinary staff and departments if the sharing of responsibility for the scaffolding of academic literacies is ever to be achieved. I hope too that this book might be read by disciplinary teachers in GCC universities: by academic engineers, mathematicians, physicists, designers, geographers, historians, sociologists, business administration lecturers, IT lecturers, medicine and healthcare academics. I shall argue that the problems

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posed by student with English language proficiencies require a rethinking of traditional academic roles and while this will certainly require a leap on the part of EAP/ESP teachers, it will require a much bigger leap from disciplinary academics. However, the audience I am chiefly seeking for this book are institutional policy-makers in the GCC, especially those with responsibilities for curriculum design in the disciplines. The people I would most like to read this book are not English teachers, or disciplinary teachers, but deans of faculties and colleges in positions to make authoritative decisions about what is taught in disciplinary areas, how it is taught, and how disciplinary teaching may be integrated with or at least related to teaching directed at facilitating the construction of academic literacies. The second group of audiences consists of academic literacy practitioners, disciplinary academics and curriculum policy-makers in higher education contexts such as the UK. I believe the implications of what I discuss in this book ripple out far beyond the GCC. The issues of language and literacy I shall discuss and the kinds of solutions I propose have relevance to all higher education institutions in which fresh undergraduates grapple with the challenge of constructing viable academic literacies.

References Bachman, L. F. (1990). Fundamental considerations in language testing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bachman, L. F., & Palmer, A. S. (2010). Language assessment in practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Basıbek, N., Dolmacı, M., Cengiz, B., Bürd, B., Dilek, Y., & Kara, B. (2014). Lecturers’ perceptions of English medium instruction at engineering departments of higher education: A study on partial English medium instruction at some state universities in Turkey. Procedia—Social and Behavioural Sciences, 116, 1819–1825. Bawarshi, A., & Reiff, M. J. (2010). Genre: An introduction to history, theory, research and pedagogy. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press. Belhiah, H., & Elhami, M. (2015). English as a medium of instruction in the gulf: When students and teachers speak. Language Policy, 14(1), 3–23. Borg, S. (2016). English medium instruction in Iraqi Kurdistan [Online]. Available from: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/pub_ Teaching%20English_Publication%20En_Web%20version_v1.pdf. Accessed 8 July 2018.

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Choi, S. J. (2013). Issues and challenges in offering English-medium instruction: A close examination of the classroom experiences of professors. Studies in English Language & Literature, 39(2), 275–306. Cline, Z., & Necochea, J. (2003). Specially designed academic instruction in English (SDAIE): More than just good instruction. Multicultural Perspectives, 5(1), 18–24. Clughen, L. (2012). Writing in the disciplines: Building supportive cultures for student writing in UK higher education. Bingley: Emerald. Council of Europe. (2011). Common European framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Deane, M., & O’Neill, P. (2011). Writing in the disciplines. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Doiz, A., Lasagabaster, D., & Sierra, J. M. (2011). Internationalisation, multilingualism and English medium instruction. World Englishes, 30(3), 345–359. Donn, G., & Al-Manthri, Y. (2010). Globalisation and higher education in the Arab Gulf states. Oxford: Symposium Books. Ghobain, E. (2015). Translation as a scaffolding strategy in English-medium classrooms. International Journal of Translation, 27, 1–16. Gustafsson, M., Eriksson, A., Räisänen, C., Stenberg, A.-C., Jacobs, C., Wright, J., et al. (2011). Collaborating for content and language integrated learning: The situated character of faculty collaboration and student learning. Across the Disciplines, 8(3), 1–11 [Online]. Available from: http://wac.colostate.edu/ atd/clil/gustafssonetal.cfm. Accessed 5 June 2018. Gustafsson, M., & Jacobs, C. (2013). Editorial: Student learning and ICLHE— Frameworks and contexts. Journal of Academic Writing, 3(1), ii–xii. Hanieh, A. (2018). Money, markets, and monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the political economy of the contemporary Middle East. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leibowitz, B. (2005). Learning in an additional language in a multilingual society: A South African case study on university-level writing. TESOL Quarterly, 39(4), 661–681. Leibowitz, B. (2013). Attention to student writing in postgraduate health science education: Whose task is it—Or rather, how? Journal of Academic Writing, 3(1), 30–41. Leibowitz, B., Bozalek, V., Carolissen, R., Nicholls, L., Rohleder, P., Smolders, T., et al. (2011). Learning together: Lessons from a collaborative curriculum design project. Across the Disciplines, 8(3) [Online]. Available from: https:// wac.colostate.edu/docs/atd/clil/leibowitzetal.pdf. Accessed 5 June 2018. Lillis, T., Harrington, K., Lea, M. R., & Mitchell, S. (Eds.). (2015). Working with academic literacies: Case studies towards transformative practice. Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse.

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Lillis, T., & Scott, M. (2008). Defining academic literacies research: Issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 4(1), 5– 32. Macaro, E., Curle, S., Pun, J., An, J., & Dearden, J. (2018). A systematic review of English medium instruction in higher education. Language Teaching, 51(1), 36–76. Mercer, N. (1995). The guided construction of knowledge: Talk amongst teachers and learners. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Napoli, J., & Sourisseau, J. (2013). L’EMILE est-il appliqué dans l’enseignement supérieur? Enquêtes sur le site Toulousain. Recherche et Pratiques Pédagogiques En Langues de Spécialité Cahiers de l’Apliut, 32(3), 123–143 [Online]. Available from: https://journals.openedition.org/apliut/3906. Accessed 5 June 2018. Paretti, M. (2011). Interdisciplinarity as a lens for theorizing language/content partnerships. Across the Disciplines, 8(3) [Online]. Available from: https:// wac.colostate.edu/docs/atd/clil/paretti.pdf. Accessed 5 June 2018. Parker, J. (2010). Writing the disciplines: International perspectives. London: Sage. Rogier, D. (2012). The effects of English-medium instruction on language proficiency of students enrolled in higher education in the UAE (Unpublished PhD thesis). University of Exeter. Short, D. J., Echevarría, J., & Richards-Tutor, C. (2011). Research on academic literacy development in sheltered instruction classrooms. Language Teaching Research, 15(3), 363–380. Swales, J. (2016). Reflections on the concept of discourse community. ASp. la revue du GERAS, 69, 7–19. Wedell, M., & Atkins, J. (2009). The BA project as an example of large-scale educational change. In J. Atkins, M. Lamb, & M. Wedell (Eds.), International collaboration for educational change: The BA project (pp. 2001–2011). Muscat: Ministry of Education, Sultanate of Oman. Wingate, U. (2015). Academic literacy and student diversity: The case for inclusive practice. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Woods, D., Bruner, J., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17, 89–100.

CHAPTER 2

The Nature of Academic Literacies

Abstract Green outlines a view of academic literacy as social practice, situated within academic communities defined by discipline, institution and broader educational culture. Green identifies the kinds of multi-modal communicative practices that characterise undergraduate academic literacies; highlights the centrality of genre to the production and consumption of academic texts; identifies some features of academic communities and the lines along which they may be differentiated; and specifies the domains of knowledge on which students must draw in order to construct their academic literacies. Keywords Academic literacy · Situated social practice · Genre · Academic communities

2.1

Introduction

In this chapter, I shall try to explain what academic literacy is, or as I shall argue, what academic literacies are. I define academic literacy in very broad terms as the ability to communicate in the ways required by a particular academic community, to a standard that legitimates participation in that community at a given level. A first year sociology undergraduate

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able to grasp the key points of the texts she has to read and the lectures in which she must participate, able to offer her opinions in a seminar or tutorial without causing offence or confusion, and able to write assignments drawing on sources and arguing a viewpoint, to pass standard, has achieved a level of (functional) academic literacy appropriate to her level of participation. Literacy is thus bound up with two fundamental notions. The first is communication and I shall argue that academic literacies require participants at all levels to engage in interconnected, multi-modal communicative practices directed at the consumption and production of 3D texts. The second is identity and membership of and legitimate participation within specific social communities. I shall argue that academic literacy is about developing an academic identity and learning to think, behave and interact in ways specific to and valued by host academic communities. In the rest of this chapter, I shall develop this definition. In Sect. 2.2, I shall explain how a social practice view of literacy differs from a (perhaps traditional) ‘technical’ view of literacy and why literacy can no longer be associated purely with reading and writing. I shall then discuss key academic literacy practices. In Sect. 2.3, I shall briefly discuss the nature of genre and explain why genre is so central to academic communication, and then discuss some of the main genres students might need to engage with as readers, listeners, speakers or writers. In Sect. 2.4, I shall consider the nature of academic communities and some of the factors that differentiate them. Finally, drawing on the previous three sections, I shall try to identify the domains of knowledge on which students must draw in order to construct their academic literacies and thus the areas of knowledge that teachers, tutors and academic institutions must consider if they wish, adequately, to scaffold the construction of academic literacy.

2.2

Academic Literacy as Social Practice

One view of literacy defines it as the ability to read and write. This understanding of literacy is what informed the work of the theorists of the ‘Great Divide’ (Goody and Watt 1963; Havelock 1982; and more recently Ong and Hartley 2012), whose concern was to explore the societal consequences of a shift from oral to written communication. It is also the understanding that informs much of literacy teaching in primary education (see papers in skill-focused practitioner journals such as The Reading Teacher, for example, Senn 2012). This view both limits the notion

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of literacy to the written word and tends to concentrate on the kinds of proceduralised knowledge and technical skills involved in reading and writing. These include knowledge of the written word as an orthography or script and the cognitive and sensorimotor skills for decoding and inscribing it, and also knowledge of the written language (e.g. how written lexico-grammar differs from spoken, or how coherence and cohesion are achieved in writing as opposed to speech). It also includes familiarity with common written text types or ‘genres’ and the way information is typically organised in them. There are I believe two problems with this view: the ‘technical’ focus and the restriction of literacy to the written word. To consider the first: such a view of literacy is clearly sound so far as it goes: reading and writing unquestionably do depend on mastering the technical skills of decoding and encoding. No one can be literate without mastering these. The problem is that it does not go far enough. A view of literacy that stops at technical mastery obscures the multiplicity of different ways in which, the different purposes for which, and the variety of cultural or situational contexts (Halliday 2003) in which, reading and writing are carried out. Street (1984) referred to this understanding of literacy as an ‘autonomous’ view because it abstracts literacy from the ways and contexts in which and the purposes for which reading and writing abilities may be used. The alternative to this autonomous understanding of literacy is what Street and others (Street 1984; Gee 2015) have referred to as an ‘ideological’ view. This view concerns itself with precisely those aspects of purpose and context that the technical/autonomous view obscures: it constructs literacy as ‘social practice’, that is, as ways of using literacy skills and knowledge, for socially constructed purposes, within specific sociocultural contexts. As a consequence, the singular notion of literacy gives way to a plural notion of literacies, of different domain-specific ways of using the technical skills of reading and writing, reflecting different social purposes in different contexts. This in turn leads to the view that literacy practices are not universal or in any way ‘natural’. They are, therefore, contestable and liable to subversion. This idea is of great significance for students of all levels of participation (undergraduate, taught postgraduate, research postgraduate), from all educational and linguistic backgrounds, and for all higher education teaching staff and for the institutions in which they work. The clear implication is that there is no such thing as a single, unitary academic literacy

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which can be broken down into a set of discrete study skills that students can be taught. There is, for example, no single, finite set of textual forms and processes that can be identified as ‘academic writing’ despite the plethora of EAP textbooks on the market suggesting that this is the case. There are instead many different ways of writing, working from within different genres (see below) and reflecting the different communicative purposes, the epistemologies and the fundamental values of different academic communities. Much has been written about the way disciplinary epistemologies shape disciplinary discourse (see Hyland 1999, 2000, for example). The ways theoretical physicists concerned with string theory write are different from the way sociologists pursuing Frankfurt School critical theory write, reflecting their different understandings of what counts as knowledge and how it may be constructed. At a deeper level, Turner has argued that international academic writing is characterised by different kinds of ‘rhetoricity’ (Turner 2011) or more simply ‘writtenness’ (Turner 2018) by which she means ‘a cultural ideal, whose values are implicit rather than explicitly espoused’ and ‘saturated with ideological and cultural value’ (2018: 7). Western writtenness harks back to the empiricist epistemologies of emergent seventeenthcentury European science with its mandatory careful guiding of the reader step by step and its plain, neutral, unemotional tone. Specifically, Turner characterises Western academic writing as enacting three specific ideologies: an ‘expository’ ideology in which a writer reveals the uncovered truth of the world; a ‘smooth read’ ideology in which the writer charts a course for the reader to follow, guiding him/her along the way to preempt ambiguity or confusion; and a ‘conflation’ ideology in which writing and thinking processes are seen as mirror images (with the implication that unsmooth writing equals confused thinking). The implication is that ‘orientalist’ rhetoricity or rhetoricities may be very different. These discoursal differences pose significant challenges to students of all backgrounds, and their difficulties in coping with these challenges are often hampered by the fact that many disciplinary academics lack insight into the nature and scale of the challenges they face. Too often they seem to assume that their particular disciplinary conventions are universal and so fail to grasp that their students are grappling with a conflict of literacies rather than a deficit. As Hyland (2002: 58) notes: Because academic literacy is often regarded as unitary and autonomous […] it is easy for both teachers and students to see writing difficulties as

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learners’ own weaknesses. […] Presenting academic skills as universal and transferable […] disguises variability, and misrepresents writing as a naturalized, self-evident and non-contestable way of participating in academic communities.

The second problem concerns the restriction of literacy to reading and writing. In many ways, this is a consequence of the technical view of literacy: if we concentrate on what something is rather than what it does, it becomes possible to dissociate it from other related practices or modes of communication. When we start to look at how reading and writing are used to communicate in the real world, this ceases to be possible. As Kalantzis and Cope (2012) point out, all communication is intrinsically multi-modal . Communication of meaning may draw on any or many of the following modes in complex configurations: the written mode (‘communicating written meanings in traces that may be found by another as a message-prompt’, 2012: 193); the visual (still or moving images); the spatial (‘[p]ositioning oneself in relation to others, creating spaces and ways of moving around in spaces […] and experiencing spatial meanings’, 2012: 193); the tactile (‘experiences and things whose effects can be felt as touch, smell and taste’, 2012: 193); the gestural (‘expressions of the face, eye movements and gaze, demeanours of the body, gait, clothing and fashion, hairstyle, dance, action sequences’, 2012: 193); the audio (‘communication that uses music, ambient sounds, noises’, 2012: 193); and the oral or verbal (‘in the form of live or recorded speech’, 2012: 193). A restaurant menu, for example, will use a combination of written language and images laid out in a specific way and made available to the reader in an artefact that can be easily handled, used and stored for further use on a table, thus integrating the written, the visual, the tactile and possibly the spatial depending on where the reader encounters it. There is a second reason which bears closely on the concerns of Goody, Havelock and Ong with the social consequences of the written word. Central to their understanding of literate communication was the creation of texts which could transcend their time and place of production. As Lankshear and Knobel (2011) point out, what was socio-historically significant about the emergence of written practices was the ‘encoding’ of texts, that is the creation of ‘texts that have been rendered in a form that allows them to be retrieved, worked with, and made available independently of the physical presence of another person’ (2011: 40). However, this notion of encoding would logically have to include recordings

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of speech replayable at a later date or in another place, something which has been possible since the invention of the gramophone. It would also have to apply to the creation of images if those images may be said to encapsulate meanings. As Lankshear and Knobel (2011: 40) continue: In our view, someone who ‘freezes’ language as a digitally encoded passage of speech and uploads it to the internet as a podcast is engaging in literacy. So, equally, is someone who photoshops an image - whether or not it includes a written text component.

The discussion has led us to a view of literacy not as a singular, technical ability, but as mastery of multiple, different ways of using written and spoken language and other semiotic resources specific to particular communicative domains. So what then are the multi-modal literacy practices characteristic of academic communication? As I have argued elsewhere, the kinds of literacy practices students and academics engage in in higher education are chiefly concerned with the construction, display and sharing of knowledge in a reasoned and evidenced manner (Green 2016). Students have to master a range of practices to do with searching for, analysing and synthesising information, and developing and communicating arguments to address particular questions. They have, for example, to be able to sift reading lists to prioritise sources relevant to an issue, to carry out electronic library searches and assess the relevance and likely reliability of sources, to take detailed notes and in such a way that the meaning of the original is captured. They have to use such sources to develop their own arguments, reflecting critically upon them. They have to analyse assignment questions in order to understand what they need to do to succeed in their assessments. They have to plan, draft and edit written or multi-modal assignments. They must also—and this is where the notion of literacy as reading and writing alone crumbles—have to participate in lectures, seminars and tutorials, literacy events that may require them to comprehend and take notes upon a multi-modal presentation interweaving a spoken exposition accompanied by a slide-show presentation, to discuss issues with their peers, to ask questions of their lecturer and to present their own views on a topic. They must also be able to communicate with lecturers, peers and administrative staff out of formal teaching events, to build academically supportive social networks or to navigate the administrative systems of their institution. All of these practices may be subsumed under a notion of academic literacy.

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Academic Literacy and Genre

Central to an understanding of the communicative practices listed above is genre. We can characterise genres as the frames through which people carry out the social practices they engage in as members of their cultures; the way they do the what of their lives. Although the term has been used in different ways by different schools of thought within genre studies (see Bawarshi and Reiff 2010 for an overview from a Rhetorical Genre Studies perspective), all, I would argue, are broadly consistent with the early definition given by Swales (1990: 3) as: classes of communicative events which typically possess features of stability, name recognition and so on. Genre-type communicative events (and perhaps others) consist of texts … (spoken, written or a combination) plus encoding and decoding procedures as moderated by genre-related aspects of text-role and text-environment.

What Swales is getting at is that a genre is not a class of texts per se, but a class of texts written (or spoken) in specific ways to be read or heard in specific ways, to achieve identifiable, recurrent rhetorical and social goals, in recurrent social situations. This dynamic connection between text and socio-rhetorical situation is emphasised by Coe (2002: 197): [G]enre is a motivated, functional relationship between text type and rhetorical situation. That is to say, a genre is neither a text type nor a situation, but rather the functional relationship between a type of text and a type of situation. Genres survive because they work, because they respond effectively to recurring situations.

Genres are thus textual ways of doing things in society and they exist because, for the time being, they facilitate the social action in question. They are also culturally situated, within communities of people, a fact emphasised by Tardy (in Johns et al. 2006: 237): [G]enre is based on the idea that members of a community usually have little difficulty in recognizing similarities in the texts they use frequently and are able to draw on their repeated experiences of particular contexts to read, understand, and perhaps write the text that occurs in them relatively easily. It is through this recurrent use of conventionalized forms

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and communicative practices that individuals develop relationships, establish communities, and get things done: Genres therefore not only embed social realities but also construct them.

Recent work in genre studies has looked at the ways genres bridge the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of communication. Bawarshi (in Johns et al. 2006: 244–245) writes: How writers discover what they want to say, what content they decide to include, why they should include it and how they should structure it, and what effects what they include will likely have within particular rhetorical situations and on particular audiences—these all depend on writers’ knowledge of the genre in which they are writing. As such, I propose that we think of genres not as the culmination of, but as the starting point for, the teaching of invention. […] If genres are symbolic worlds we textually inhabit in order to participate in consequential actions, then part of invention must involve explicitly examining the conventions that shape these worlds. Genre analysis enables such examination by helping writers identify and describe a genre’s conventions (from its lexical and syntactic patterns to its structural, rhetorical, and thematic patterns) as well as its typical rhetorical situation (where and why it is used, who uses it, under what conditions, and when).

For Bawarshi, getting into a genre is a way of entering a discoursal world, of working out what can be said and done with and through it. Academic genres may be divided into two broad categories: the professional and the pedagogic. The professional covers all those genres that academics engage in as part of their work, of which a few obvious ones would be the research or journal paper, the grant application, the conference presentation, the multi-modal lecture, the seminar and the tutorial. Because these genres are central to what academics do as researchers and teachers, their structures are relatively well established and also well researched. Probably the best example is the empirical research article, with its characteristic four-stage structure of introduction, methods, results and discussion and Swales’ groundbreaking analysis of the introduction stage in terms of three obligatory moves enacted by a larger number of alternative gambits (Swales 1990). Swales’ analysis and the ‘Create a Research Space’ model derived from it showed that research article introductions serve a specific purpose which is to define a research gap and so provide a theoretical justification for the research being reported.

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Research has also shown how the kind of move analysis developed by Swales and others can be integrated with analyses of deeper informational structures, and with linguistic realisations in lexico-grammar, for example the use of specific kinds of cohesive devices to signal argument structure. For example, as we shall see in Chapter 3, Bruce (2008) shows how a section in a ‘social genre’ such as a research paper (e.g. the methods section describing a research design) might be analysed not just in terms of stages and moves but also in terms of ‘cognitive genres’ or underlying informational structures such as description, recount of steps, explanation and so forth. Although undergraduate and taught postgraduate students are rarely expected to produce texts in these genres, they encounter many of them as consumers so are faced with the immediate and pressing challenge of gaining insights into their purposes and structures and characteristic stages and moves. There have also been a number of attempts to identify specific student or pedagogic genres but these analyses have always found very great variation between the requirements of different disciplines, different institutions and different academics within them. There have been a number of studies of academic assignments at graduate (Casanave and Hubbard 1992; Bridgeman and Carlson 1984) and undergraduate levels (Bridgeman and Carlson 1984; Braine 1989) and with regard to a range of disciplines. The Bridgeman and Carlson study, for example, looked at chemistry, different branches of engineering, psychology and computer science. These early studies generally reported significant variation between disciplines with regard to purpose, length, discourse structure and rhetorical organisation. Labels such as ‘research paper’, one of the most common cross-disciplinary designations for written assignments, have almost no utility from a genre studies perspective. Samraj (2004) limited her use of the term to refer to papers in which students use secondary sources to discuss previous research on a particular area but even with this degree of narrowing, the term could not be related to a specific set of generic features. Her study of papers from two relatively close disciplines, Wildlife Behaviour and Conservation Biology (both environmental in focus), considered a number of different aspects of genre organisation: overall organisation, intertextual links, sentence subject choice, and the construction of role and found differences in all areas. She concluded that:

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what faculty call research papers do not constitute a clearly defined genre […] Instead, it can be argued that they form a heterogeneous genre with a number of sub-genres. These various sub-genres that are produced in the context of different disciplinary courses may be said to have their own more narrow communicative purposes, such as identifying a research gap in the field, which is manifested textually not just in the macro-organization of the text (in terms of a research recommendation in the conclusion) but also in sentence-level patterns such as the types of subjects. (2004: 14)

More recent corpus-based research (Nesi and Gardner 2012) has identified a limited number of groups of pedagogic genres, at least in UK higher education. Nesi and Gardner’s study of student writing from four British universities and four broad disciplinary areas, differentiated by level of participation (first year undergraduate, second year and so on), using the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus,1 concludes that the bulk of student writing may be allocated to one of the thirteen ‘genre families’. However, although this research has made a valuable contribution in marking the parameters of variation, it does actually confirm the established picture of very significant heterogeneity across disciplines and levels of participation.

2.4 Academic Literacy and Academic Communities I opened this chapter by saying that literacy is bound up with two things: communication and identity. It is now time to look at the second of those. Gee (2015) distinguishes between ‘discourse’ and ‘Discourse’ (with a capital D). The former denotes the situated, communicative use of language, the latter something altogether broader and more encompassing. Discourses are: ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing that are accepted as instantiations of particular identities [ … ] by specific groups, whether one is being a lawyer of a certain sort, a biker of a certain sort, a business person of a certain sort […]. Discourses are ways of being ‘people like us’. (Gee 2015: 4)

1 https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/research-directories/current-projects/2015/ british-academic-written-english-corpus-bawe/.

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Discourses subsume discourses as elements in the socially constructed ways of life lived by collectivities of individuals within societies, differentiated one from another along a multitude of lines: gender, sexuality, age, profession, interests, political affiliations being but a very few. Discourses are, in sum, constructs of identity. Gee’s understanding of literacy is bound up with this notion of Discourse. Gee makes a distinction between the Discourse of the home/upbringing, which is ‘primary’, and all other Discourses which are ‘secondary’. For Gee, a literacy is mastery of one of the multitudes of secondary Discourses that constitute the societies in which individuals live. To be literate is to take on or perhaps better ‘grow into’ a secondary identity as, for example, a corporate lawyer with all that that requires in terms of educational achievement, the cultivation of social connections, professional and other learning experiences, the development or accentuation of personality traits, and adherence to conventions of dress, appearance and demeanour. Along with all the other things, this includes mastery of the communicative practices that go with being a lawyer. Of course, to get to the point where an individual may be accepted by the world as a corporate lawyer, an individual will have had to grow into very many other Discourses along the way, developing the requisite cultural, social and economic capital (Bourdieu 1999). Becoming a student means entering and trying to inhabit and find one’s place within a number of different Discourses to do with academic study and living as a student. One such Discourse may well relate to parttime work as a bar-person, barista or whatever. Other identities will be constructed in the context of study and the programme or school, clubs, societies or other interest groups within or outside the university, and in friendship groups. Creating and sustaining these identities or Discourses will take sustained literate activity in a many, possibly overlapping sometimes conflicting directions. The notion of a Discourse—a way of being ‘one of us’—requires us to think about the nature of the communities that give rise to the ways of thinking, behaving and communicating that characterise academic Discourses of various kinds. One useful concept in characterising academic communities is Swales’ (1990) notion of a ‘discourse community’ and more specifically the (2016) notion of a ‘folocal’ discourse community. For Swales, a discourse community is a ‘socio-rhetorical network’ of individuals connected through either a shared interest, in the case of a ‘focal’ community such as the international membership of the Royal Philatelic

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Society London,2 or a shared workplace as in a ‘local’ community such as the staff of a particular branch of a bank. Some discourse communities are Janus-faced and these, Swales terms ‘folocal’ communities. This notion best characterises the kinds of academic community a student enters: Perhaps a clearer instance is that of a university department in a researchactive university. Members of such departments are members of both a local DC and a focal one. They understand how things operate in their own institution as they go about their teaching and administrative activities. Unlike outsiders, they know when rooms and buildings are locked, and where and to whom to make an application for some small amount of money. But they are also specialized scholars whose closest colleagues are likely to be elsewhere, perhaps even in other countries, and whose activities involve presenting at conferences in other places and publishing in distant journals. (Swales 2016: 6–7)

Although Swales thinks here of academics, the same kinds of interactions, drawing on the same kinds of knowledge, characterise students, though the particular configurations of interactions will probably differ from undergraduate to taught postgraduate to research postgraduate. These interactions will be structured by communicative genres of various kinds, appropriate to the student’s level of participation. This is so because academic departments are not communities of equals: Discourse communities display ‘an explicit or implicit hierarchy and/or structure which, inter alia, manages the processes of entry into and advancement within the discourse community’. Further, these communities develop shared understandings, which mean that much information may remain tacit, and ‘horizons of expectation’, that is ‘defined rhythms of activity, a sense of its history, and value systems for what is good and less good work’. Swales’ most recent work suggests a strong overlap with the notion of ‘communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998, 2006), which Wenger (2006: 1) defines as: ‘groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly’. They may be, for example: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils

2 http://www.rpsl.org.uk/home.asp.

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defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope. (2006: 1)

Wenger points out that a community of practice ‘is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest’ (2006: 1). This shared domain of interest brings with it a sense of expertise, i.e. an ability to discourse in the domain that members possess and non-members (may) lack. In pursuing their interest in their domain, members interact, work with each other, support each other and in so doing build networks of relationships. These relationships of interaction are also a defining feature of a community of practice. Further, members of a community of practice are practitioners and so: [t]hey develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction […]. The development of a shared practice may be more or less self-conscious. The “windshield wipers” engineers at an auto manufacturer make a concerted effort to collect and document the tricks and lessons they have learned into a knowledge base. By contrast, nurses who meet regularly for lunch in a hospital cafeteria may not realize that their lunch discussions are one of their main sources of knowledge about how to care for patients. (2006: 2)

Communities of practice are not communities of equals, and Lave and Wenger (1991) use the term ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ to refer to the status and activities of new entrants to a community of practice, who possess a (relatively) limited degree of expertise and so rank low in the hierarchies of the community. Although the term ‘peripheral’ indicates a marginalisation, it also suggests licence and potentiality. The term ‘legitimacy’ indicates that peripheral members are not expected to meet the standards of fully fledged members of the community and that their inevitable shortcomings as practitioners will be counted as legitimate attempts to learn. This potentiality for ‘situated learning’ is one of the distinctive features of Lave and Wenger’s work on communities of practice. To take one example from Lave and Wenger (1991), Yucatec midwives in Mexico undergo an implicit apprenticeship lasting many years in which no formal

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teaching takes place and no explicit acknowledgement of the apprenticeship—as opposed to the learning that results from it—is ever made (Lave and Wenger 1991). The earliest stages of this apprenticeship are usually listening to midwives who are family members talk about their work and observing them in their work. Later stages might occur after a woman has had a child herself and might well involve simply supporting a family member in carrying out a procedure. This supporting role gradually, over the years, increases to the point that a woman will finally be recognised as able to perform all of the tasks of a midwife. Academic communities clearly display some of the features of communities of practice, as evidenced with the overlap with Swales notion of a folocal discourse community. What is less certain is the extent to which academic communities may afford opportunities for situated learning through peripheral participation in shared labour. On one level, I think the answer is fairly clearly negative. The relationship of master and apprentice or newcomer does not seem to fit readily with an academic department. In the contexts Lave and Wenger studied, novices were peripheral participants in authentic, collaborative community activities: the Yucatec midwives and their novices were engaged in the shared labour of helping real women have real babies. Undergraduates and their tutors are rarely in this position. It is possible that this might be the case in some postgraduate contexts in which, for example, a lecturer might involve a student in research activity, but it would not appear to fit most undergraduate contexts in which novices work on their own pedagogic tasks, somewhat removed from the publishable research writing carried out by experienced academics. Indeed, a direct comparison would suggest that undergraduates actually play the role of object of the activity, and so would be analogous to the woman in labour or possibly the emergent child, rather than a novice attendant! However, in less obvious ways, I believe the idea of a community affording situated learning does hold. Both academics and their students are engaged, albeit in different ways and to different degrees in a shared social practice, the construction of knowledge. Academic departments in research-intensive universities clearly display a hierarchy of participation in this regard moving from the most peripheral, that of the undergraduate and the taught postgraduate, levels of participation largely limited to consumption of new knowledge produced by more central participants, to research postgraduates working on their own projects, leading to the production of their journeyman piece, their thesis, and their

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first publications, to academics at the various grades of seniority. There is therefore, I would argue, a shared practice underlying the life of an academic department. There are also mechanisms for situated learning: the teaching and learning practices of a university department offer not just the transmission/construction of knowledge but a modelling of the processes of constructing and sharing knowledge. Students meet and interact with teachers who help them to transform disciplinary knowledge in disciplinary ways through lecturing, leading seminars, chatting informally, setting reading and assignments and providing feedback on submitted work. They offer participation in disciplinary ways of thinking, investigating, collaborating, talking and writing: the discourse of their community that enables participation within the Discourse of the community. In an early paper, Aviva Freedman (1993) reflected on an earlier piece of research (Freedman 1987) in which she had investigated the way a group of law students had learnt to write in their law programme. As we will see in the next chapter, two of the things Freedman noted were the absence of both explicit teaching of the genres required by law academics and explicit investigation of the genres by students. What she noted instead was that the academic community formed what she referred to as an ‘enabling context’, a layered, multidimensional frame for interactions which implicitly guided the students to master the kind of writing required. Freedman’s description is characteristically vivid so I shall quote her in full: In the law study I was impressed by the richness and thickness of the texture of the context woven by the instructors and by the degree to which the writing elicited was a response to this context. This enabling context was established through the lectures, through the reading assigned, through the questions posed in the seminars to the students, and through the talk and social interaction in general in the lecture-hall and seminarroom. The assignment evolved naturally out of the disciplinary conversation, and in responding to it, the students were able to draw on the appropriate cues so that on the one hand they all produced the same distinctive academic sub-genre (writing for law), and on the other hand through this writing, they enacted the ways of thinking and the ways of identifying, delimiting, construing, and approaching phenomena characteristic of this discipline. (1993: 239)

In this discussion of the nature of academic communities and the possibility of situated learning, Freedman’s notion of an enabling context

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seems to me to be of especial relevance. It seems to me that although academic communities are not obviously like Lave and Wenger’s (1991) communities of Yucatec midwives in Mexico, or Vai tailors in Liberia, or non-drinking alcoholics attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, they do offer disciplinary interactions in the shared practice of constructing knowledge that are, I would argue, identical in outcome if not in process. This discussion of academic communities provokes a number of questions. One of them concerns the lines along which academic literacies may be differentiated. One part of the answer is explicit in the idea of legitimate peripheral participation. The literacy practices of a first year undergraduate will not be scrutinised in the same way or judged by the same standards as the work of a taught postgraduate, a research postgraduate or an academic, each of which will have to meet increasingly more exacting standards of disciplinary communication. So one dimension along which literacies will differ within a community is level of participation. Level of participation is a differentiator within a community but there are I believe at least two powerful external differentiators. The first and to date the best explored is discipline (Hyland 2000, 2004, 2015). As Stoecker (1993: 451) writes: ‘Within each discipline, a unique subject matter defines the dimensions of knowledge, the modes of inquiry, the significant reference groups, the work experiences, and the rewards of the faculty’. Academic disciplines form at least partially discrete discoursal worlds. This has long been recognised in classification systems such as Biglan’s (1973) hard/soft, pure/applied and life/non-life distinctions reflecting observed differences in academic activity such as the way academic staff allocate their time, the kinds of scholarly output academics produce, sources of research funding and staff attitudes. These are all important as dimensions of community culture but the chief concern for this study is their impact on communicative practices in the construction of knowledge. What does seem clear is that epistemological differences are enacted through discoursal differences: the writing of theoretical physics is unlike that of sociology because their constructions of knowledge, i.e. what knowledge is and how it can be made, are fundamentally different. A second differentiator is rather harder to define because it is so large and all-encompassing but it has been alluded to above in the discussion of Turner’s (2018) notion of a ‘writtenness’, that is a set of literacy practices reflecting a set of often tacit and uncontested underlying values. I shall call this ‘national educational culture’ for want of any better term. What

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I am getting at here is, for example, the difference in educational culture between undergraduate studies in a Chinese university and a British university: the difference in the demands made on students, the relative autonomy offered students, the position of academics as authorities and the kinds of educational practices that enact these core educational values. There is an obvious danger of essentialising educational cultures here but the substantial body of research in Contrastive Rhetoric and Intercultural Communication (Connor 1996, 2004; Scollon et al. 2012) suggests that it is legitimate to make tentative generalisations about educational culture. Further, the research emerging from the UK into the experience and progress of the large number of Chinese students undertaking undergraduate or postgraduate studies (see, for example, Leedham 2015) strongly suggests that these intercultural differences may have an impact on the way students approach the literacy practices of their host communities.

2.5 Academic Literacy and Domains of Literacy Knowledge In this final section, I shall try to draw on what has been said above to spell out the particular domains of knowledge that students must draw on to construct their academic literacies. I would argue that these may be put under one of the three categories: the contextual, the ‘declarative’ and the ‘procedural’ which may be glossed, respectively, as knowledge of where communication takes place, knowledge of what to communicate about and knowledge of how to communicate. 2.5.1

The Contextual

The first of these is perhaps the hardest to conceptualise as contexts of communication are always multi-layered and multifaceted. Halliday’s well-known distinction between context of situation and context of culture (Halliday 2003) goes some way to providing a frame for understanding. The distinction shows how a specific interaction between persons, concerning a specific matter or communicative content or a specific social action, carried out through a particular communicative mode, for example a face-to-face, spoken interaction between a tutor and an undergraduate concerning the meaning of written feedback on an assignment, is embedded within a wider culture definable in terms of shared meanings that enable the participants to make sense of where they are (in a university,

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probably in a tutor’s office), who they are (tutor and student), what they are doing there (negotiating the meaning of written comments) and so to use their respective linguistic resources to get the business of the social action carried out. However, this leaves vague the nature of the culture that makes the situation meaningful. What gives rise to the shared meanings that enable communication in specific situations to take place? I have argued above that academic literacies are best understood as situated within academic communities, understood either as discourse communities or communities of practice and these are best taken as the cultures we need to understand. I have argued elsewhere (Green 2016) that every community may be understood, as a culture, on two levels. One is a surface level of observable regularities, actors and actions, affordances, constraints, technologies and materiel. The other is a deeper level of ethos, of values. So a student entering a school must understand at a surface level, who is who, who does what, how it is done, and what the norms of accepted action and communication are. How, for example, does a student seek an extension on submission of an assignment? What level of formality is appropriate in an email to a tutor? How may a student put a point of view in class without causing offence or confusion? The deeper level of ethos concerns the purposes of the community and the values that underlie the actions, systems, procedures and interactions of the membership. The surface level may be noted through careful observation, the deeper only through inference and attempts to draw out explicit articulations from insiders. 2.5.2

The Declarative

The distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge is one that has long been used in academia (Berkenkotter et al. 1988) but it is of general application. Declarative knowledge covers what people know about their world—the price of milk in their local supermarket, the name of the current Prime Minister of the UK, the best route home from where they work, the best drug to prescribe for hypertension, the correct temperature for welding, the correct form to use to apply for a passport and so forth. Procedural knowledge covers the (often implicit) knowledge of how to do things—how to construct the introduction to a research paper, how to negotiate a reduction in the price of an item on sale in a market, how to cook spaghetti Bolognese, how to conduct a staff meeting in a university department and so on. Clearly, the two are not distinct and procedural

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knowledge will always depend on declarative knowledge: knowing how to cook spaghetti Bolognese depends on a knowledge of ingredients, cookbooks, cookers and food preparation techniques. In some cases, it is not entirely clear what knowledge is best considered declarative and what procedural. However, what is clear is that participation in a culture requires a knowledge of what to do and how to do it. For a student, the declarative is chiefly defined by subject knowledge. The inclusion of subject knowledge in a discussion of literacy might not seem immediately necessary but it is clear that the emergence of the ability to communicate about a subject matter goes hand in hand with the development of subject knowledge. This is partly for the obvious reason that without a content communication is impossible but also for the more profound reason that situated literacy practices are specific because they represent the ways particular kinds of content, studied for particular reasons, may be communicated about. The relationship between declarative and procedural knowledge is not an arbitrary one. Alexander (2003) shows this in her model of academic expertise, charting the way subject knowledge, ‘processing strategies’ (procedural knowledge) and the student/academic’s level of engagement with the subject interact to effect quantitative and qualitative changes, moving from ‘acclimation’ through ‘competence’ to ‘proficiency’. With regard to declarative knowledge, Alexander (2003) distinguishes between ‘domain knowledge’, which ‘represents the breadth of knowledge within a field (e.g. how much one knows about history)’, and ‘topic knowledge’, which ‘is about depth; how much an individual knows about specific domain topics (e.g. the Magna Carta or the Boston Tea Party)’ (Alexander 2003: 11). In the area of TESOL, key topics would probably include general learning theories, theories of first and second language acquisition, models of communicative competence, learner differences, learning strategies, approaches and methods in teaching, methods and issues in language assessment, materials design, curriculum and syllabus planning, amongst others. Breadth of knowledge would require some familiarity with the perspectives of key figures in the discipline (Chomsky, Vygotsky, Bruner and Tomasello, for example) and an awareness of both historical and contemporary disciplinary debates. The debates surrounding Krashen’s Monitor Model in the 1980s and 1990s (see, for example, Krashen 1982; Gregg 1984) or the role of genre-based as opposed to process-based pedagogies in the teaching of writing (see, for example, Cope and Kalantzis 1993) might stand as examples.

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2.5.3

The Procedural

It is a little more complicated to describe procedural knowledge as the term subsumes a very wide range of things including knowledge of technologies for analogue and digital searching for information, consuming and producing texts, strategies for reading, writing and taking notes on sources and in lectures. However, four areas of knowledge appear fundamental to academic communication: knowledge of genre, knowledge of register, knowledge of process and rhetorical knowledge. Before I address these, I must make clear that by ‘knowledge’ I mean a practical, largely implicit, ‘knowing-in-action’ (Schön 1984, 1995). The objects of this knowledge, for example genre, might well form part of the declarative knowledge of a linguist but for most students and academics they will remain at an unarticulated, implicit level at which they can be drawn on in performance. 2.5.3.1 Genre Knowledge With regard to student genre knowledge, I have indicated above a distinction between genres for consumption and genres for production. Clearly, this is not a watertight distinction. A lecture, for example, will inevitably be dominated by a lecturer and a student may contribute nothing to it other than attention. However, other students may well contribute by asking or answering questions or by participating in small-group discussions. In the latter case, students are to some extent co-constructing the text of the lecture. One genre that undergraduate students will have to engage with largely as consumers is the IMRD research paper mentioned above. To engage with an IMRD paper efficiently and effectively, students need to grasp its overall purpose, the way each section contributes to realising that purpose, the pivotal role played by the research questions (as everything either leads to or follows from these), and so where to go to find the specific information they need. As producers students will need to gain insights into the specific pedagogic genres required in their disciplines and at their level of participation, genres illuminated to some degree by the work of Nesi and Gardner (2012) referred to above. First year arts and humanities students are overwhelmingly likely to find themselves writing ‘essays’. First year life sciences students on the other hand may write some ‘essays’ too but are rather more likely to write ‘methodology recounts’, ‘explanations’, or ‘exercises’ and ‘research reports’ (described in detail by Nesi and Gardner 2012).

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Given the wide range of genres with which students might be faced and the likely differences with whatever they have faced before, some theorists such as Johns (2011) have argued that students need to acquire a ‘genre awareness’, that is an understanding that genres vary in significant ways, and be equipped with cognitive tools with which to interrogate and find out about new genres. In her view, the issue is therefore not about training students in specific genres but in equipping them with the knowledge and skills to deal with any new genre they might meet. 2.5.3.2 Register Knowledge By ‘register’ I mean, broadly, the lexico-grammatical choices that writers must make when they attempt to construct a text, spoken or written, in the distinctive ‘language of the academy’. At a syntactic level, Gillett (2005) points to the prevalence of clause subordination, ‘that/to’ complement clauses, lengthy sequences of prepositional phrases, attributive adjectives and passives. He notes also that written texts tend to be shorter, to be lexically denser and richer and to have more complex words and phrases, with greater nominalisation and more noun-based phrases. At a lexical or lexico-grammatical level, the corpus analysis work of Coxhead (2000) and more recently the Oxford Phrasal Academic Lexicon researchers has made it possible to identify specific words and phrases which appear in English-medium academic discourse across academic disciplines. Coxhead (2000) lists 570 such word families. The more recent Oxford Phrasal Academic Lexicon distinguishes between spoken and written words and between words and phrases, listing, for example, 370 written phrases and 250 spoken.3 These register differences are not merely a matter of convention: they are expressions of key values within English academic writing, and as such are ideological and express a particular kind of ‘writtenness’ (Turner 2018), as I have discussed above. In choosing words and phrases to convey a sense of objectivity and neutrality or in spelling out the course of a developing argument, students are participating in and perpetuating the ‘expository’ and ‘smooth read’ ideologies of Western ‘writtenness’. Whether they grasp this or not, to construct a functional academic literacy, students must in some way develop a ‘feel’ for what sounds ‘academic’ and what does not.

3 https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/wordlists/opal.

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In recent years, with the emergence of the idea of English as a lingua franca reflecting the communicative purposes of users who are not native speakers of English and the explicit challenge this poses to the dominance of native speaker models of English (Jenkins 2007), there has been a growing interest in the way academic English may be shaped by its nonnative users (Mauranen 2012). Quite what the impacts will be and how long they will take to emerge as acceptable/preferred forms is debatable but given the relative numbers of non-native academic users, some impact on register seems likely. However, at present, it seems unlikely that register modifications will fundamentally change the nature of Western ‘writtenness’. 2.5.3.3 Rhetorical Knowledge The rhetorical dimension of academic literacy is a broad area, and in this short section, I will limit the discussion to certain key skills and practices: those relating to what Halasek (1999) has referred to as ‘disposition towards discourse’, intertextuality, the orchestration of voice and the construction of authorial identity. I will concentrate on these because they are of critical importance in the making and legitimating of scientific claims, arguably the fundamental purpose of scientific discourse. Firstly, to engage with the literature, student writers must first identify and obtain sources, using a range of search strategies (Riazi 1997), and then engage with them, drawing on a range of critical reading strategies and skills. As Scarcella (2003: 26) writes: Readers must determine the credibility of the sources cited in the texts […] they must be able to relate the readings to the realities of specific disciplines – whether political, social or scientific. They must be able to determine how the claims and evidence in the readings can be accounted for in different ways. In addition, they must be able to distinguish fact from skewed opinion.

What is required from a critical reader is what Halasek (1999) has called ‘active engagement’, the willingness to appropriate a text and to reconstruct it with regard to a reader’s own concerns: ‘successful critical reading and writing […] are dependent upon a person’s conscious efforts to represent others’ words in terms of her own experiences, positions and concerns’ (1999: 116). Similar conceptions are to be found in the Bakhtinian notion of the construction of ‘internally persuasive’ discourse (Bakhtin in

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Morris 1994) and Scholes’ (1989) notion of ‘centrifugal reading’. However, as Halasek concedes, this is not the only kind of reading. There are circumstances when an alternative ‘disposition towards discourse’ is required: a centripetal approach (Scholes 1989), in which the reader suspends criticality and actively sets their own concerns aside for a while in order to let a writer ‘speak’ and receive a sympathetic hearing. These ‘two dispositions must work in concert, for both reception and engagement are, to varying degrees with various texts, necessary in achieving, maintaining, and creating knowledge’ (1999: 127). Secondly, readers and writers must negotiate both intertextuality (Voloshinov 1973) and heteroglossia (Bakhtin in Morris 1994). Intertextuality denotes the fact that all texts refer to other texts, either through the explicit, acknowledged use of those texts (Fairclough 2001) or through the use of ideas so pervasive in a culture, that the textual sources of those ideas may not even be known to a reader or writer (Fairclough 2001). Heteroglossia denotes the fact that discourse is diverse and ideological: the particular discourse that manifests itself in a specific text will be an articulation of a particular view of the world and will be a discoursal construction of the world from the perspective of some or other social grouping. The negotiation of intertextuality and heteroglossia is in my view the main challenge faced by an academic reader or writer. In scientific writing, it is clear that negotiation of intertextuality and heteroglossia is central to the legitimacy of a text, even at the most marginal level of legitimate participation within an academic community. As Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995: 59) write, to be accepted as science, a paper has to include ‘an intertextual framework for … local knowledge’, that is to position itself in a range of ways, in relation to other relevant texts, and through this to articulate the position of a discourse in relation to other discourses. Hyland’s (2000) corpus analysis of academic papers across the hard sciences and the humanities with regard to citation examines some of the dimensions of this positioning. Citation may be used to situate a piece of research within an overarching narrative, to demonstrate the novelty or utility of a piece of writing, to create a credible professional persona or to place oneself within an ideological community. One aspect of this positioning is the orchestration of voice. How this might be achieved in practice is demonstrated by a study by Baynham (1999) who uses Bakhtin’s notion of double-voicing to look at the ways novice academic writers (student nurses) incorporated the voices of other

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(authoritative) writers while at the same time taking up a position in relation to those writers. Baynham identified three kinds of failure in the use of authoritative texts: firstly, a tendency to present a collage of quotations and paraphrases but without taking up a position in regard to them; secondly, the taking up of a clear position in relation to the topic but without incorporating the voices of other writers; and thirdly, plagiarism, the use of sources without attribution. The successful writers in the study had managed to incorporate authoritative voices, but had taken up positions of their own through the use of positive and negative modalities. These findings are echoed by Tang (2009) in her account of the projection of authority in writing through dialogic engagement with both reader and other writers. She too identifies as essential the articulation of an authorial voice through dialogue with other writers. Thirdly, writers have to use rhetoric to construct their identities. Clarke and Ivaniˇc (1997) and Ivaniˇc (1998) look at ways in which writers construct their ‘authorial selves’ through their writing. They distinguish between three selves in fact—the real autobiographical self, the self as disclosed or constructed through the text and the authorial self, which is the ‘I’ Baynham (1999) deals with: This aspect of writer identity is more to do with writers having their ‘own voice’ in the sense of its content rather than its form. The writer’s voice in this sense means expressing their own ideas and beliefs. This is what people usually first think of as ‘writer identity’: whether the writer is present in the writing with a strong authorial voice or not: whether s/he is saying something’. (1997: 152)

They identified a number of textual practices relating to this, some of which overlap with Baynham’s successful and unsuccessful orchestration of voice: the use of the first person and the scope of that use, the ways in which writers position themselves in relation to other authorities, the use of modals and hedging to vary degrees of certainty and the use of personal experience. 2.5.3.4 Process Knowledge The final area of knowledge concerns ‘process’, or an understanding of how to get something done. There is an overlap with the kinds of rhetorical practice I have discussed above but in this section I am thinking more of an understanding of how to break down a complex task into discrete,

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manageable sub-tasks and how to sequence and carry them out; how, for example, to respond to an assignment question and get the assignment written, to standard and submitted on time. Writing processes, and particularly academic writing processes, have been a focus for study since the 1970s. Early work in this area (see, for example, Flower and Hayes 1980; Zamel 1982; Arndt 1987) looked at the cognitive processes writers go through as they work within rhetorical situations to address rhetorical problems. Flower and Hayes concluded that there are three central processes: planning (setting goals, generating ideas, organising information), translating (putting ideas into words/text) and reviewing (evaluating, editing), under the supervision of a reflexive ‘monitor’, drawing on two primary sources of knowledge. The cognitive focus of this work has shifted in recent years to a socio-cognitive, in recognition that cognition is social rather than belonging to an abstracted cognising individual. One of the chief early insights from research into academic writing process is that writing, certainly writing in which knowledge is transformed rather than simply told or recounted (Bereiter and Scardamalia 1987), is almost always a recursive nonlinear process in which writers move back and forth and from task to task. Clarke and Ivaniˇc (1997) offer an intuitive, experientially based description of the stages they believe academic writers go through when they write. They are at pains not to describe it as a model but they do suggest it reflects their and their students’ experience. Their process starts with analysing whatever assignment has been set, relating this to the kinds of writing students are already familiar with, working out goals and aims for the writing, gathering information and content for the writing, taking into account logistical factors, thinking about the audience for the writing, developing and clarifying ideas, trying to establish an authorial presence in the writing, deciding what stance to take up in relation to the ideas discussed in the writing and then drawing on all of these to plan, draft and revise. All of these Clarke and Ivaniˇc (1997) see as interactive rather than sequential stages and all, notably, are interwoven with emotional responses to the process of writing, especially ‘experiencing … panic, pain, anguish’ as they put it (Clark and Ivaniˇc 1997: 98). One may question aspects of the model. For example, do ‘pain’ and ‘anguish’ really need to be experienced in all academic writing? However, I believe the model presents a conceptualisation of an academic writing process in terms of key stages that would be intuitively familiar to most academic writers. One of the things students need to master with

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regard to getting their assignments done is this kind of complex, interactive, recursive process. One obvious concern with research into process writing is the desire to identify processes leading to success and those not. Torrance et al. (2000) identified broad patterns amongst the writing processes of undergraduates and found a detailed planning approach seemed to have the best results, though they also found a ‘think-then-do’ approach also seemed to produce good results where students already had a clear idea of the structure of their essay. Elsewhere (Green 2013), I have identified two broad approaches to writing, both of which were successful: a detailed planning approach in which extensive work went on before drafting through, for example, mind-mapping, outlining and so forth; and an extensive drafting approach in which minimal outlining was done but time was invested heavily in an iterative process of drafting and redrafting, allowing the discoursal construction and articulation of ideas. There are clearly process options and one thing students must learn is which process suits them and how best to deploy it.

2.6

Summary

In this chapter, I have tried to describe in general terms what an academic literacy is: relative mastery a set of genre communicative practices, situated within a specific academic community. I have tried to indicate some of the more obvious literacy practices with which students must engage and indicated the main domains of knowledge on which they must draw in order to construct an academic literacy. These are, firstly, an understanding of context, the ethos and practices of the host academic community. The second is declarative knowledge of the discipline in both breadth and depth. The third is procedural knowledge of process, rhetoric, register and genre. In Chapter 3, I shall consider the ways in which the construction of academic literacies in higher education may be supported.

References Alexander, P. (2003). The development of expertise: The journey from acclimation to proficiency. Educational Researcher, 32(8), 10–14. Arndt, V. (1987). Six writers in search of texts: A protocol-based study of L1 and L2 writing. ELT Journal, 41(4), 257–267.

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Bawarshi, A., & Reiff, M. J. (2010). Genre: An introduction to history, theory, research and pedagogy. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press. Baynham, M. (1999). Double-voicing and the scholarly ‘I’: On incorporating the words of others in academic discourse. Text, 19(4), 485–504. Bereiter, C., & Scardamalia, M. (1987). The psychology of written composition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Berkenkotter, C., & Huckin, T. (1995). Genre knowledge in disciplinary communication: Cognition/culture/power. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Berkenkotter, C., Huckin, T. N., & Ackerman, J. (1988). Conventions, conversations, and the writer: Case study of a student in a rhetoric Ph.D. program. Research in the Teaching of English, 22(1), 9–44. Biglan, A. (1973). The characteristics of subject matter in academic areas. Journal of Applied Psychology, 57, 195–203. Bourdieu, P. (1999). Bourdieu: A critical reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Braine, G. (1989). Writing in science and technology: An analysis of assignments from ten undergraduate courses. English for Specific Purposes, 8, 3–15. Bridgeman, B., & Carlson, S. (1984). Survey of academic writing tasks. Written Communication, 1, 247–280. Bruce, I. (2008). Academic writing and genre. London: Continuum. Casanave, C., & Hubbard, P. (1992). The writing assignments and writing problems of doctoral students: Faculty perceptions, pedagogical issues, and needed research. English for Specific Purposes, 1, 33–49. Clarke, R., & Ivaniˇc, R. (1997). The politics of writing. London: Routledge. Coe, R. M. (2002). The new rhetoric of genre: Writing political briefs. In A. Johns (Ed.), Genre in the classroom: Multiple perspectives (pp. 197–207). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Connor, U. (1996). Contrastive rhetoric: Cross-cultural aspects of second language writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connor, U. (2004). Intercultural rhetoric research: Beyond texts. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 3(4), 291–304. Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (1993). The powers of literacy: A genre approach to teaching writing. London: Falmer. Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213– 238. Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and power. Harlow: Pearson. Flower, L., & Hayes, J. R. (1980). The cognition of discovery: Defining a rhetorical problem. College Composition and Communication, 31(1), 21–32. Freedman, A. (1987). Learning to write again: Discipline-specific writing at university. Carleton Papers in Applied Language Studies, 4, 95–115. Freedman, A. (1993). Show and tell? The role of explicit teaching in the learning of new genres. Research in the Teaching of English, 27 (3), 222–251.

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Gee, J. (2015). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. Hoboken: Routledge. Gillett, A. (2005). Using English for academic purposes: A guide for international students [Online]. Available from: http://www.uefap.co.uk/writing/features. Accessed 5 May 2005. Goody, J., & Watt, I. (1963). The consequences of literacy. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5(3), 304–345. Green, S. (2013). Novice ESL writers: A longitudinal case-study of the situated academic writing processes of three undergraduates in a TESOL context. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 12(3), 180–191. Green, S. (2016). Teaching disciplinary writing as social practice: Moving beyond ‘text-in-context’ designs in UK higher education. Journal of Academic Writing, 6(1), 98–107. Gregg, K. (1984). Krashen’s monitor and Occam’s razor. Applied Linguistics, 5, 79. Halasek, K. (1999). A pedagogy of possibility: Bakhtinian perspectives on composition studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Halliday, M. A. K. (2003). On language and linguistics. London: Continuum. Havelock, E. (1982). The literate revolution in Greece and its cultural consequences. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hyland, K. (1999). Academic attribution: Citation and the construction of disciplinary knowledge. Applied Linguistics, 20(3), 341–367. Hyland, K. (2000). Disciplinary discourses: Social interactions in academic writing. London: Longman. Hyland, K. (2002). Teaching and researching writing. Harlow: Pearson. Hyland, K. (2004). Disciplinary interactions: Metadiscourse in L2 postgraduate writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 13(2), 133–151. Hyland, K. (2015). Genre, discipline and identity. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 19, 32–43. Ivaniˇc, R. (1998). Writing and identity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Jenkins, J. (2007). English as a lingua franca: Attitudes and identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johns, A. (2011). The future of genre in L2 writing: Fundamental, but contested, instructional decisions. Journal of Second Language Writing, 20, 56–68. Johns, A., Bawarshi, A., Coe, R. M., Hyland, K., Paltridge, B., Reiff, M. J., et al. (2006). Crossing the boundaries of genre studies: Commentaries by experts. Journal of Second Language Writing, 15, 234–249. Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2012). Literacies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krashen, S. D. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon.

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Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2011). New literacies: Everyday practices and social learning. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leedham, M. (2015). Chinese students’ writing in English: Implications from a corpus-driven study. Abingdon: Routledge. Mauranen, A. (2012). Exploring ELF: Academic English shaped by non-native speakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morris, P. (Ed.). (1994). The Bakhtin reader: Selected writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, and Voloshinov. New York: Edward Arnold. Nesi, H., & Gardner, S. (2012). Genres across the disciplines: Student writing in higher education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ong, W., & Hartley, J. (2012). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word (30th anniversary ed.). London: Routledge. Riazi, A. (1997). Acquiring disciplinary literacy: A social-cognitive analysis of text production and learning among Iranian graduate students of education. Journal of Second Language Writing, 6(2), 105–137. Samraj, B. (2004). Discourse features of the student-produced academic research paper: Variations across disciplinary courses. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 3(1), 5–22. Scarcella, R. (2003). Academic english: A conceptual framework [Online]. Available from: http://lmri.ucsb.edu/publications/03_scarcella.pdf. Accessed 6 November 2005. Scholes, R. (1989). Protocols of reading. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schön, D. A. (1984). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books. Schön, D. A. (1995). Knowing-in-action: The new scholarship requires a new epistemology. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 27 (6), 27–34. Scollon, R., Wong Scollon, S., & Jones, R. (2012). Intercultural communication: A discourse approach. London: Wiley-Blackwell. Senn, N. (2012). Effective approaches to motivate and engage reluctant boys in literacy. The Reading Teacher, 66(3), 211–220. Stoecker, J. L. (1993). The biglan classification revisited. Research in Higher Education, 34(4), 451–464. Street, B. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swales, J. M. (2016). Reflections on the concept of discourse community. ASp. la revue du GERAS, 69, 7–19.

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Tang, R. (2009). A dialogic account of authority in academic writing. In M. Charles, D. Pecorari, & S. Hunston (Eds.), Academic writing: At the interface of corpus and discourse (pp. 170–188). London: Continuum. Torrance, M., Thomas, G. V., & Robinson, E. J. (2000). Individual differences in undergraduate essay-writing strategies: A longitudinal study. Higher Education, 39(2), 181–200. Turner, J. (2011). Language in the academy: Cultural reflexivity and intercultural dynamics. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Turner, J. (2018). On writtenness: The cultural politics of academic writing. London: Bloomsbury. Voloshinov, V. N. (1973). Marxism and the philosophy of language. New York: Seminar Press. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wenger, E. (2006). Communities of practice: A brief introduction [Online]. Available from: http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm. Accessed 12 November 2009. Zamel, V. (1982). Writing: The process of discovering meaning. TESOL Quarterly, 16(2), 195–209.

CHAPTER 3

Scaffolding the Construction of Academic Literacies

Abstract Green considers key policy questions in the planning of academic literacy instruction in higher education. Green first considers the nature of scaffolding in academic literacy and then considers three questions: Who should receive academic literacy instruction? How disciplinespecific should academic literacy instruction be? What focal areas should academic literacy instruction consider? Green argues for universal academic literacy instruction; for discipline-specific instruction; and for instruction that focuses on context, genre and rhetorical practice. Keywords Universal academic literacy provision · Discipline-specific instruction · Genre · Literacy context · Rhetorical practice

3.1

Introduction

In the last chapter, I tried to show that what we currently call ‘academic literacy’ is not reducible to a finite set of linguistic or educational study skills. Academic literacy is actually best thought of in the plural: literacies are sets of communicative practices characteristic of, shaped by and enacting the communicative purposes of specific academic discourse communities. They are therefore intimately bound up with membership of and participation within these communities: mastering an academic literacy

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is also a process of constructing a new identity and becoming comfortable in a new way of thinking, behaving and communicating. I argued above that academic literacies interweave strands of knowledge from a very wide range of areas but that it is possible to bracket most of these under the headings of contextual knowledge, declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge. The first requires an understanding of the specific teaching and learning community, both at the observable level of explicit structures, systems, regulations, restrictions and affordances, and a deeper, inferable level of ethos, that is the core values that motivate the community and regulate what it does. The second concerns the subject matter of disciplinary communication: the concepts, paradigms, issues, debates, research methodologies and so forth that constitute the ‘what’ of disciplinary communication. The third concerns the communicative practices, processes, genres, technologies and tools that characterise and enable disciplinary communication: the ‘how’ rather than the what. In Chapter 4, I am going to expand this understanding of academic literacy by raising an issue which has been implicit in what I have discussed so far but which I have not addressed directly: the issue of English language proficiency and its relation to the construction and scaffolding of academic literacy. To explore this issue, I shall concentrate on English-medium higher education contexts in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations, where students enter undergraduate studies with markedly lower English language proficiencies than their counterparts in the UK. I shall discuss what such low levels of proficiency mean for teaching, learning and the construction of academic literacy and then consider an innovative approach to scaffolding the construction of academic literacies with low English proficiency students, drawing on recent work in Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education (Gustafsson and Jacobs 2013), Writing in the Disciplines (Clughen 2012; Deane and O’Neill 2011), Sheltered Instruction (Echevarría et al. 2008) and Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (Cline and Necochea 2003). To prepare the ground for this discussion of language proficiency and literacy, in this chapter I shall discuss a number of issues to do with scaffolding the construction of academic literacies, exemplifying my points with reference to examples from around the world, but chiefly from the two English-medium higher education contexts with which I am most familiar, the UK and the GCC. My concern here is to indicate the choices higher education institutions face. I shall first of all indicate what I mean

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by scaffolding, drawing on sociocultural ideas associated with Vygotsky (Vygotsky 1978; Wertsch 1985) and Bruner (Woods et al. 1976; Mercer 1995; Bakhurst and Shanker 2001), and what the term scaffolding might mean in the present discussion of the construction of academic literacies. I shall then consider a number of specific choices higher education institutions face. The first issue concerns who should receive academic literacies support: Should it be selectively offered or should it be universally available? The second concerns the specificity of provision: Should academic literacy support concentrate on providing a general non-disciplinary academic foundation or should it aim for disciplinary specificity? The third concerns the focus of academic literacy support: bearing in mind the different strands of academic literacy discussed in the last chapter, what should academic literacy support emphasise?

3.2

Scaffolding and Academic Literacies

For Vygotsky (Vygotsky, in van der Veer and Valsiner 1994), as for Marx (Marx and Engels 1970), the relation between an individual human being and the world is not ‘abstracted’ or ‘contemplative’: we are born into the world and are inescapably involved in transforming it to satisfy our material and socio-psychological needs, using the culturally and historically determined affordances available to us. These affordances include symbolic tools: systems of iconic or graphic representation such as maps, models, diagrams, charts, computer programs, algebra or musical notation, but first and foremost language. Vygotsky’s conception of education is based on these foundations: education is a historically and culturally situated process bound up with the appropriation and transformation of the symbolic and material tools available to us in order to extend human capabilities. Equally radical was Vygotsky’s conception of how this appropriation takes place. Vygotsky did not see cognitive development as the maturation and externalisation of innate potentialities, in the way that Piaget (1977) did, but rather as the constructive and reconstructive internalisation of external concepts, values, symbols, received knowledge and other cultural cognitive artefacts. For Vygotsky, a child must first encounter these things as external cultural realities before he or she can begin to start appropriating them and making them his or her own. From the social nature of individual cognitive development, it follows that external acculturators, persons within the culture interacting with

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the individual learner, have a decisive role in the individual’s learning. Vygotsky’s (1978) concept of the ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD) constructs learning in explicitly interactional terms. The ZPD covers that range of tasks or problems or activities that a learner cannot yet undertake or solve alone, but which they could undertake or solve if appropriately assisted by a ‘more knowledgeable other’, that is someone who can already do the task or activity themselves. This assistance targeted at the ‘ripening ability’ of a learner is what is meant by ‘scaffolding’ in the term popularised by Bruner (Woods et al. 1976). The notion of scaffolding has been developed in slightly different ways over the years (see Verenikina 2008 for an historical overview) and in some cases so broadly that it might seem synonymous with ‘help’. However, as Bruner used it, the term refers only to interactive activity supportive of a learner’s movement through his/her ZPD at a given stage of development, under given circumstances, and that has as its goal the learner’s self-regulation, that is his/her ability to perform and manage a task on their own. As Mercer (1995) puts it, in his study of the ways in which classroom talk scaffolds learning, scaffolding is ‘the sensitive, supportive intervention of a teacher in the progress of a learner who is actively involved in some specific task, but who is not quite able to manage the task alone’ (1995: 75). Typically, in classrooms, this encompasses activity directed at stimulating interest in a task, demonstrating a task, simplifying a task, explaining and talking through a task, helping learners avoid distractions and keep on-task, pointing out priorities, helping learners control their frustration and giving feedback on the performance of a task. Drawing on our discussion in Chapter 2, appropriate scaffolding for the construction of academic literacies would seek to help students understand the values and systems of their target learning and teaching context; to develop insight into and some mastery over the genres through which they must communicate and the literacy processes in which they must engage; and a working familiarity with the literacy tools they must learn to use. The overall intention of such scaffolding would be self-regulation: enabling students to construct and communicate disciplinary knowledge independently, in a manner appropriate to their level of legitimate participation in their academic community. To take one example of scaffolding, feedback on assessed work, Sadler (2013) has argued that for students to develop writing expertise they must satisfy three requirements:

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they acquire a concept of high quality and can recognise it when they see it; they can with considerable accuracy judge the quality of their works in progress and connect this overall appraisal with particular weaknesses and strengths; and they can choose from their own inventories of potential moves those that merit further exploration for improving quality. (2013: 54)

So adequate assessment feedback should therefore seek to help students gain insight into what constitutes good writing in their field and why this is so, help students develop the ability to assess their own work in relation to these standards, and develop a strategic repertoire for writing. My concern in this chapter is to consider some of the options higher education institutions have in planning and implementing adequate scaffolding for the construction of academic literacies through, for example, the provision of English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) or English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) instruction. However, it is very important before doing so that we recognise that the construction of academic literacies may also be scaffolded in an entirely unplanned and largely unintentional manner simply through the interactions of students with their peers and tutors in the routine course of their disciplinary studies. In the last chapter, I introduced two ideas both of which draw their inspiration from sociocultural theory and both of which show how literacies may be constructed and scaffolded not through conscious literacy instruction but simply through engagement in the labour of a community. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) notion of situated learning and Freedman’s (1993) notion of an enabling context both concern learners moving through their respective ZPDs scaffolded by more knowledgeable others. What is notable about the scaffolding provided to both the novice Yucatec midwives in Lave and Wenger (1991) and to the law students in Freedman (1987, 1993) is that although highly comprehensive in terms of outcomes, it was unplanned, uncontrolled, unsystematic and occurred as a largely unintended consequence of the real work of the respective communities: the delivery of babies and the construction of declarative (rather than procedural) legal knowledge. There is now a substantial body of evidence, chiefly drawn from rich longitudinal case studies from around the globe, that indicates clearly that disciplinary interactions in the normal course of teaching do provide a high degree of scaffolding, at least for those students whose ZPD is in

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roughly the right place. Numerous studies indicate that textual interactions, in which a student interacts with an encoded text as a reader, listener, speaker or writer, or a combination of these roles, are critical to the construction of academic literacies. A student working on a second draft of an assignment, another student rehearsing an oral presentation, another analysing a still photograph or a video sequence and others taking notes on journal articles or lectures are all engaged in complex textual interactions. The literature on the construction of literacies shows students interacting with and learning from interactions with source materials such as journal articles, lecture notes, notes on articles, sample essays, their own previously completed work, outlines, drafts and marker feedback. Angelova and Riazantseva (1999) and Fishman and McCarthy (2001) both report their participants’ interactions with assignment questions to work out exactly what a particular assignment required of them. Hirvela (2004) and Tardy (2005) point out the way students ‘mine’ journal articles and other texts to search for generic features, rhetorical move constructions, lexis or generic phrases. Dong (1996), Blakeslee (1997), and Green (2013) all show the way students use their previous written work as points of reference when embarking on new writing. One participant in Green (2013) even had a sense of her previous written work as like early chapters in an ongoing story. Numerous studies report the way students interact with their own work in progress through outlining, drafting and editing (Green 2013). Gentil (2005) shows a student interacting with feedback: ‘Katia’, a student who was struggling to work out what to say and how to say it in her essays, was finally helped to focus her writing and develop an authorial stance as a scholar by her tutors’ oral and written feedback. Similarly, the literature indicates the impact of the interpersonal interactions students engage in the course of their disciplinary studies. The positive role of peer interactions has been noted by, amongst others, McCarthy (1987), Freedman (1987), Casanave (1995), Connor and Mayberry (1996), Angelova and Riazantseva (1999), Fishman and McCarthy (2001), and Gentil (2005). Such interactions might be explicitly work related or might be entirely social. Connor and Mayberry (1996), for example, studied the way in which a Finnish graduate student wrote an economics assignment at a US university and found that his interactions with his American classmates were decisive in determining the way he conceptualised the writing task. A similar finding emerges

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from Fishman and McCarthy (2001): ‘Neha’ clarified her understanding of the scope of assignments and content issues through listening to what other students had to say and trying to give her own opinion. She appeared to benefit greatly from the peer interaction or student-centred tasks her disciplinary tutor organised, for example, a peer-letter-exchange in which students wrote to each other and student-generated exams and questions, which subverted the established classroom roles and placed her in the position of teacher. In Green (2013), ‘Tattoo’, one of the three ESL undergraduates, established a network of peers with whom she interacted in different ways and it was clear that these relationships were of significance in her disciplinary learning and writing. Gentil (2005) noted that for one of the participants in his study, ‘Philippe’, social rather than work-related interactions with an Anglophone peer had a decisive effect on his attitude towards English, helping him construct a sense of dual identity and so begin to conform to English-medium disciplinary genre conventions. In academic contexts, where an approximation of the novice-mentor relationship is reproduced, it is usually between a student and a tutor or supervisor. Gentil (2005) who studied three francophone students constructing academic literacies in English noted that ‘[s]upervisors, disciplinary experts, language educators … played a role in the participants’ biliteracy development by serving as language brokers … who facilitated the crossing of discourse and language boundaries’ (2005: 453). For ‘Katia’, already mentioned above, the decisive interaction was with one particular tutor who advised her to look at the ways in which claims were made in her discipline. This led to changes in her argumentation style including the use of hedging and using claims to create research spaces (Swales 1990). A similar picture is presented by Spack (1997), who tracked a single Japanese student, ‘Yuko’ over a three-year period at a liberal arts college in the USA, and summed up her development as follows: Overall, Yuko matured as a reader and writer as she received meaningful input from numerous classroom experiences and from instructors who were conversant in their own fields and who could provide guidance for the work in their particular courses. She learned through continual practice, by becoming immersed in the subject matter and by talking about her projects with those who could share their expertise. (1997: 24)

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That said, the literature also shows that it is by no means certain that students will always find tutors willing to become mentors in quite the way workplace novices might expect, and where such relationships occur, they are complicated by many factors including goals and expectations (Connor and Mayberry 1996; Angelova and Riazantseva 1999; Fishman and McCarthy 2001), linguistic, geographical or cultural distance (Flowerdew 2000), power relations (Gosden 1996) or mentoring style (Belcher 1994; Dong 1996). I have cited this literature at some length to make clear that although this chapter and this book concern the planning of explicit academic literacy interventions (of all kinds), such interventions must be understood as in some way complementing or pre-figuring the ad hoc, unconscious academic literacy work that is carried out in every disciplinary classroom, and in particular through the negotiations and communications that take place between students and their tutors about assessed work. Indeed, I will argue in the next chapter that what is actually required to effectively scaffold the construction of disciplinary literacies by all students is in fact an expansion and a conscious planning of the academic literacy work carried out by disciplinary academics in their programmes. However, let us leave that matter until the next chapter and go on now to consider the choices facing higher education institutions, with reference to the UK and the GCC, with regard to scaffolding the construction of academic literacies.

3.3 Who Should Receive Academic Literacy Support? The first question concerns who should receive academic literacy support. Should it be a universal entitlement for all new students or should it be targeted at specific groups of students? In the UK, the need for explicit literacy provision of some kind has long been recognised but most universities direct it at two specific groups seen as ‘non-mainstream’: international students whose first language is not English and mature students taking up higher education opportunities after some years in the workplace. This is a simplification, and in many higher education institutions, the position is beginning to change, but it is a fair historical approximation. ‘Mainstream’ students are usually considered to be those from the UK who speak English as their first language and who come to university from a UK educational background. The assumption has tended to be

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that such students will absorb the literacy practices they need automatically through engaging in their disciplinary studies. This is exactly what Freedman (1993) was getting at in her characterisation of the way the law students she studied learnt to write in law genres: they learnt through a process of osmotic acculturation in which literacy practices were mastered unconsciously through engagement in disciplinary processes of knowledge construction and sharing. The literacy needs of mainstream students are not wholly ignored: most UK universities offer all students access to online or face-to-face resources or facilities. The University of Leeds, for example, offers a wide range of generic (i.e. not discipline-specific) material and resources, available to any student, through the university library.1 However, it is fair to say that the bulk of institutional provision is directed at students perceived to be ‘non-mainstream’. International students whose first language is not English must provide evidence of their English language proficiency on application and those not fully meeting the requirements will attend pre-sessional courses aimed at improvements in both language proficiency and academic acculturation. Mature students may be required to complete a ‘foundation year’ prior to commencing their degree studies, will develop study skills, generic academic writing and reading skills, and undergo a degree of acculturation. Typically, support for these groups will be offered by discrete units within a university unconnected with any particular discipline. At Leeds, for example, foundation year studies are run by the Lifelong Learning Centre,2 presessional and in-sessional EGAP and ESAP courses for international students are offered by the Language Centre.3 This separation of mainstream and non-mainstream is far from universal. In the USA, for example, almost all universities have long expected almost all of their students to go through ‘freshman composition’, a generic academic writing course taught by ‘compositionists’ rather than disciplinary academics (though see Heyda 2006, for a critical view). I would argue that although many ‘mainstream’ students may have a head start on many international or mature students, no student enters a disciplinary community with a fully formed understanding of the literacy practices required of them. Consequently, any student may potentially need

1 https://library.leeds.ac.uk/info/1401/academic_skills. 2 https://www.llc.leeds.ac.uk/. 3 https://www.leeds.ac.uk/info/130567/language_centre.

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academic literacy support of some kind over and above the implicit scaffolding provided by routine teaching. This potential need is undoubtedly deepened by the fact that many if not most academics hold tacit assumptions about the transparency and universality of the literacy practices of their discipline, and often do not understand why their students struggle to understand them. Lillis (2001) has written memorably about the ‘institutional practice of mystery’, the way assumptions of transparency and universality, accompanied by an unwillingness or an inability to engage explicitly with literacy practices, lead to the relative marginalisation of some students from participation in disciplinary studies. Wingate (2015) has argued that as any student may have potential needs for literacy support, there is a case to be made for providing explicit literacy instruction to all new students. In the GCC nations, the situation is very different. Although higher education is largely offered through the medium of English, the overwhelming majority of young people entering higher education speak English as a second language and come from Arabic-medium primary and secondary education. What is ‘mainstream’ in the GCC is therefore very different from the UK. For this reason, GCC higher education institutions offer academic literacy instruction on a universal basis and expect all of their new entrants to either pass through a preparatory ‘foundation studies’ programme, typically lasting between one and two years, or demonstrate an entitlement to full or partial exemption through, for example, presenting English language certification such as an IELTS certificate. These programmes do vary both across the GCC and between institutions within each country but they share a common emphasis on English, complemented by instruction in other areas which may include maths, general study skills and in most institutions some ICT instruction (see, for example, the Oman Accreditation Council’s specifications for foundation programmes).4 Many GCC higher education institutions also offer ongoing literacy instruction, typically in the form of some kind of roughly discipline-specific ESAP, and again to all students. The Colleges of Applied Sciences in Oman, for example, offer an EGAP programme in the first year of undergraduate studies and an ESAP programme in the second.5 There may be questions to be asked about the efficacy of the

4 http://www.oaaa.gov.om/Program.aspx#GeneralFoundation. 5 https://www.cas.edu.om/#.

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provision, as I shall discuss in the next chapter, but the prominence of literacy provision in GCC higher education institutions may make for a greater awareness of literacy issues amongst academics.

3.4 How Specific Should Academic Literacy Instruction Be? The second issue concerns the disciplinary specificity of academic literacies instruction: Should academic literacy support aim to support situated disciplinary/institutional literacies or should it aim for a general, transdisciplinary introduction to academic study? In institutional terms, this is the difference between providing ESAP and EGAP. As Hyland (2002) has argued, the understanding that academic literacies are situated within communities characterised by disciplinary epistemologies and specialised communicative practices strongly suggests that academic literacy support must be similarly specialist. If higher education institutions are to help support undergraduate physics students in understanding how to communicate within their disciplinary/institutional community, at their given level of legitimate participation, they must provide support that explicates and models the literacy practices of undergraduate physics discourse communities. However, universities in the UK, GCC and elsewhere are seriously hampered in their attempts to provide genuinely specialist support by an institutional separation of disciplinary content study from language/literacy study. Disciplinary studies in, for example, physics, sociology or civil engineering are devolved to disciplinary departments staffed by academics whose responsibility is to construct knowledge in their field through teaching and research. In the UK, as we have seen, anything to do with academic literacy is typically hived off to discrete units such as language centres, study skills units, academic support centres, writing centres or lifelong learning units. In the GCC, as I have indicated, such work is typically devolved to foundation studies departments. None of these will be staffed by disciplinary specialists. Language centres in the UK are typically staffed by TESOL-trained teachers with a languages or arts background. Similarly, in the GCC, foundation studies units will typically be staffed by English teachers, maths teachers and ICT teachers. This separation represents a fundamental structuring principle in higher education both in the UK and those nations which have adopted occidental

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models of the higher education, such as the GCC nations. It also represents a major challenge to academic literacies instruction and overcoming it is one of the issues I will address in the next chapter. This institutional separation reflects a deeply entrenched conceptual distinction between thought and language which Turner (2011, 2018) has traced back to Locke and the philosophical preoccupations of the early British empiricists. For Locke, thought and language were distinct, one being a medium for the other, an understanding conveyed vividly in Locke’s metaphor of the conduit. For Language being the great Conduit, whereby Men convey their discoveries Reasonings and Knowledge, from one to another, he that makes an ill use of it, though he does not corrupt the Fountains of Knowledge, which are in Things themselves; yet he does, as much as in him lies, break or stop the Pipes, whereby it is distributed to the public use and advantage of Mankind. (Locke 1689, in Turner 2011: 56)

This compelling but profoundly misleading image suggests that thought and language may be separated and thus become distinct professional and academic preoccupations. So the conceptual, disciplinary ‘fluid’ has become the domain of the disciplinary academic and the linguistic ‘pipework’ the domain of a kind of academic plumber, the language teacher. Mitchell and Evison (2006) consider the consequences of this separation: When students do not do well, the refrain is that they ‘can’t write’ not that they are struggling with learning. When students write well, on the other hand, their writing becomes a transparent conduit to the meanings they have grasped. So subjects and writing are intimately bound up on one level (most obviously where writing is the primary vehicle for assessment); and divorced on another. Again, writing, as an object of discussion, tends either to appear – when it is bad – or to disappear – when it is good. In each case, the result is to enable the subject specialists to disconnect the ‘problems’ of students’ writing from their responsibilities as disciplinary teachers. (2006: 69)

Along with absolving disciplinary academics of responsibility for their students’ literacy development, the devolving of literacy instruction to discrete units such as language centres or foundation units staffed by

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language-trained staff creates a structural ‘insider-outsider’ problem. The people tasked with developing literacies almost always lack the literacies they are trying to help their students develop. Hyland’s (2002) paper makes a powerful case for specificity in literacy support but there is a notable absence of detail on the ways in which language-trained English for Academic Purposes tutors might try to support students aspiring to enter a department of physics or business administration. Such tutors are in many ways faced with exactly the same challenges as the students they must try to help: a lack of insight into the ethos and procedures of the disciplinary community, unfamiliarity with its characteristic ways of communicating and most likely very limited declarative knowledge of epistemologies, concepts, debates and problems. Clearly, there are ways in which such outsiders can gain some insight into the literacy challenges their students will face, through questioning community insiders, gathering and analysing genre texts, observing lectures, looking at assignment and exam questions and so forth, but in the end none of this will alter the fact that the tutor is not and never will be a community insider. This insider-outside problem was at the core of what has become known as the ‘how far do we go debate?’ (Spack 1988a, b; Braine 1988; Johns 1988; Hyland 2002). In her first paper, Spack argued that language-trained tutors working from discrete literacy support units should not aim for specificity of support but rather stick to English for General Academic Purposes. She writes: English teachers cannot and should not be held responsible for teaching writing in the disciplines. The best we can accomplish is to create programs in which students can learn general inquiry strategies, rhetorical principles, and tasks that can transfer to other course work. This has been our traditional role, and it is a worthy one. The materials we use should be those we can fully understand. The writing projects we assign and evaluate should be those we are capable of doing ourselves. (Spack 1988a: 40–41)

Her argument is twofold. The first is a reflection of the insider-outside problem that disciplinary outsiders cannot be expected to understand or have mastery over disciplinary writing practices: EAP teachers cannot be expected to understand what engineers or chemists or theoretical physicists write about or how they write about it. The second is the assertion, against writers like Hyland, that there is a valuable common core of literacy practice and principle that EGAP tutors can offer their students. This

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would include general rhetorical principles like the use of sources to create arguments, ways of attributing content to sources, ways of showing stance in writing, process strategies for literature-searching, note-taking, outlining and drafting, strategies for following and taking notes in lectures, strategies for negotiating meaning in lectures and seminars, familiarity with key cognitive genres, familiarity with academic registers through, for example, academic word lists (e.g. Coxhead 2000) and so forth. The argument is not that this work will faithfully preview the specialist literacy practices students will need on their disciplinary programmes: it is that EGAP will provide students with a foundation of generic skills and knowledge that will enable them to quickly acquire the specialist literacy practices when they get there. Another way of viewing this is to suggest that EGAP may provide an introduction to the ‘occidentalist rhetoricity’ or ‘writtenness’ Turner (2011, 2018) described. Spack’s concern with teaching general rhetorical principles is, arguably, an introduction to Western forms of writing. I think Spack’s concerns are wholly valid and I think there is much in what she says about the value of a general academic foundation. I would also argue that the problems posed by the insider-outsider problem are so pervasive and so intractable that what passes for ESAP in many UK universities is probably best described as ‘EGAP with reference to disciplinary content’. A pre-sessional programme for students going on to civil engineering studies may well offer students engineering-related texts to read and topics such as bridge construction to discuss and write about, but the kinds of writing students do may well not represent the kinds of writing engineering students actually undertake, in terms of either genre or rhetorical practice. This is certainly the case in many higher education contexts in the GCC where literacy support in foundation and postfoundation studies is often conceived in pyramidal terms with a broad base of General English supporting a narrower band of EGAP which in turn supports an apex of ESAP, as in the Omani Colleges of Applied Sciences mentioned above. Because ESAP is delivered separately from disciplinary study and often with little or no input or involvement from disciplinary academics, EAP teachers are obliged to stick with what they know and can do, which is generally EGAP with a topical nod to disciplinary specificity. Although entirely understandable as responses to the insider-outsider problem, the exigencies of study in higher education institutions, the amount of new information that hits students when they enter their academic communities and the speed with which they must adapt do suggest

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that specificity in support is what is required. This means that finding ways of overcoming the insider-outsider problem is imperative. One answer to the problem is to bring together disciplinary expertise and language/literacy expertise, and such collaborations have a lengthy history. Amongst the earliest were team-teaching experiments such as those pioneered at the University of Birmingham in the 1980s (Dudley-Evans 2001; Dudley-Evans and St. John 1988). Team-teaching interventions of this kind generally brought together language/literacy specialists and disciplinary teachers to co-plan, co-teach and in some cases co-assess disciplinary teaching. One recent collaborative experiment from a South African context is reported by Bharuthram and McKenna (2006). In this collaboration, disciplinary and EAP tutors worked together to support and mark projects completed by 50 students. The assumption was that such a pairing would best serve to make disciplinary literacy practices explicit: (M)ainstream lecturers … are often incapable of making the required literacy norms overt… Good literacy teaching deconstructs the particular literacy practice as one of many possibilities and thereby exposes the dominant practice to be not a cloak of gold and shimmering colours but only the emperor wearing his underwear. While it may in the process of making practices overt, show why such practices are valued, good literacy teaching functions primarily to demystify such practices as simply the socially constructed norms of the particular discourse community. (2006: 498)

Overall, the experiment appeared positive, the key being the quality of writer-responsive feedback provided by the tutors. Comparison of drafts showed that the participants had taken the feedback into account and were producing work rated significantly higher by disciplinary tutors. However, despite such positive reports, there are a number of reasons why such close academic collaborations might be challenging both for institutions and for the individuals concerned. Wherever two people do what one did before, there are inevitably additional logistical and financial implications. Another obstacle is that the model challenges longestablished institutional cultures, working habits and accepted divisions of labour, and many disciplinary academics and possibly EAP teachers could feel pushed out of their comfort zones. Despite its obvious attractions, the team-teaching model has not been widely adopted in the UK and certainly not in the GCC, despite relatively successful experiments

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with it, for example one at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman in the late 1980s/early 1990s, reported in Flowerdew (1993). More recent attempts at bridging the disciplinary/literacy gap have generally placed fewer demands on disciplinary specialists and have, in the main, sought to allow both disciplinary and literacy specialists to remain within their respective ‘comfort zones’. Wingate (2015) and Green (2016) both theorise a form of collaboration in which students on pre-sessional or in-sessional courses work on assignments set (and marked) by disciplinary specialists but largely scaffolded by literacy specialists. This affords the students a chance to engage in disciplinary literacy practices (discussing disciplinary content in disciplinary ways) and to receive detailed summative and formative feedback on their performance. It requires relatively little input from disciplinary academics, beyond the design of the assignment, an initial briefing and the marking. It requires rather more from literacy specialists who provide help with analysing the assignment question, working on plans and outlines, searching for and evaluating literature and other more general EAP issues like citation and referencing practices, handling sources in an argument and register.

3.5 What Should Academic Literacy Instruction Focus On? The final issue to discuss here is what areas academic literacy instruction should emphasise. I suggested in Chapter 2 that academic literacies are woven from three strands of knowledge: insight into the ethos and organisation of the host academic community; the development of declarative knowledge of disciplinary concepts, issues and debates; and the development of different kinds of procedural knowledge. Of these, I highlighted insight into relevant genres, that is the kinds of texts students must consume and produce; awareness of register, that is a sense of appropriate lexico-grammatical choices; insight into rhetorical practices such as the construction of arguments based on sources, in such a way that the writer projects their authorial identity; and finally insight into process, the organisation of work to get complex tasks completed. I have tried to show that these distinctions are fuzzy: for example, declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge may merge or overlap in some points, and domains like genre and process which I have presented as distinct may actually be intimately connected as Bawarshi (2003) has argued.

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In principle, systematic academic literacy support could target any or all of these areas. However given the institutional separation of literacy and disciplinary study and the devolution of responsibility for declarative disciplinary knowledge to disciplinary academics, and responsibility for literacy instruction to disciplinary outsiders like EAP and ESP teachers, the scope for systematic literacy instruction delivered by literacy specialists means that the two principal foci for literacy support must be aspects of context, such as core academic values like academic integrity and aspects of procedural knowledge such as genre, register, rhetorical practices and process strategies. In higher education institutions in the UK and elsewhere, generally speaking, these remain the principal foci for pre-sessional and in-sessional EGAP and ESAP courses. There have, of course, been significant differences of emphasis. In the UK, North America, Australia and New Zealand, genre-based pedagogies of various kinds have dominated EAP and ESP for decades. As discussed above, theorists and teachers working within the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) tradition (Swales 1990, 1998, 2004) and the Systemic Functionalist Linguistics (SFL) tradition (Martin 2009) have emphasised the need to analyse the structure of texts in relation to their communicative functions in academic contexts. ESP theorists have taken established academic genres such as the research article and analysed them in terms of their recurrent stages and moves (as discussed in Chapter 2), linking these analyses to considerations of communicative function. EAP and ESP teachers working within this framework, and focusing on research articles, for example, would tend to start a pedagogic process by getting their students to read a research article and try to work out who it is for and what their purposes in reading the article would be. This examination helps students build up a sense of context and audience. Having established a context, teachers then move on to helping students break a text down into recurrent stages with specific overall functions and then, through comparative analysis, to work out the recurrent moves that enact each stage. One very good example of this kind of work in a UK context is reported by Tribble and Wingate (2013). Working with disciplinary specialists, initially in the areas of pharmacy and applied linguistics, Tribble and Wingate developed a corpus of samples of assessed writing representing key genres in the two disciplines and work from low to high scoring. Specific exemplars were analysed in terms of stages and moves and their quality ratings clarified by disciplinary specialists. These analyses formed

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the basis of sets of materials made available to students within the two disciplines as literacy resources and for a series of workshops offered to students to support their writing within the key genres. These workshops focused on particular stages within the key genres, for example introductions, and followed the instructional cycle developed within the Australian Systemic Functionalist school of genre studies (Cope and Kalantzis 1993; Kalantzis and Cope 2012). This three-stage model commences with analysis of exemplars and allows students to explore the structure of texts in relation to their contextual functions and to consider the qualities that make a text effective in their specific context. In the workshops reported by Tribble and Wingate, students were able to analyse both high and low scoring texts. The second stage involves co-construction of a text by tutor and students. In Tribble and Wingate’s workshops, participants worked in groups, on their own texts, brought to the workshop and reconstructed them on the basis of the input in the deconstruction phase and the comments of their peers. The final stage is independent construction, which was completed after the workshop. Tribble and Wingate used evaluation questionnaires completed by the participants, analyses of recordings of the group discussions and analysis of the changes made to the texts in the coconstruction phase to evaluate the intervention and the results suggested both a very positive reaction and clear evidence of genre learning. An alternative approach is given in Cheng (2008). Cheng (2008) reports a single-student case study (a postgraduate electrical engineer) drawn from a genre-based writing class in a North American context. Cheng taught a four-stage course in which she first used non-academic genres, such as wedding announcements, to develop students’ understanding of genre as a concept and to help them see discourse in terms of moves. The second stage focused on the generic features of research article introductions and the third and fourth on the generic features of the methods, discussion and conclusion sections, and then other academic genres, such as job application and manuscript submission letters. Cheng used a discovery-based approach to genre learning using research articles selected by the students from their own disciplines. Students were encouraged and supported to explore the rhetorical contexts of the genres, to understand their situated functions and to recognise their specific stages and features. Cheng’s focus student, ‘Fengchen’ developed an ‘explicit understanding of the intricate interaction of various rhetorical parameters, the influences of disciplinary practices on move patterns and the roles of voice, argument, and stance in academic writing’ (2008: 65).

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Theorists and teachers working from a Systemic Functionalist tradition have tended to adopt a rather different understanding of genre as characteristic organisations of information in broadly defined kinds of text. Macken-Horarik (2002: 21–22), for example, offers a (far from exhaustive) list of genres common in school, academic and professional discourse and indicates the kinds of socially recognised texts they appear in. These include the recount, which ‘retells events for the purpose of informing or entertaining’; the Information report which describes ‘the way things are’; the explanation which ‘accounts for how or why things are as they are’; the exposition which ‘argues for a particular point of view on an issue’; the discussion which ‘discusses an issue in the light of some kind of “frame” or position’; and the procedure which ‘instructs in how to do something through a sequence of steps’. Each of these genres has a characteristic rhetorical function (explaining, arguing, describing, instructing, for example), a characteristic organisation of information appropriate to its rhetorical function (so a procedure is organised as a sequence of steps), and they appear in specific kinds of texts (so a procedure, for example, appears in cookbooks, manuals or science textbooks). As in the case reported by Tribble and Wingate (2013) above, teachers working within this framework tend to adopt the three-stage process of deconstruction of exemplars, co-construction and independent construction. These approaches are in no way contradictory and a number of writers (e.g. Bruce 2008) have suggested productive ways of integrating them. Bruce makes a very useful distinction between ‘social’ genre and ‘cognitive’ genre: Social genres are … socially recognised constructs according to which whole texts are classified in terms of their overall social purpose. Thus for example, personal letters, novels and academic articles are examples of different social genres, which are created to fulfil different types of socially recognised and understood purpose. Although a specific example of a particular social genre may exhibit features of a single cognitive genre … it is more common for examples of social genres to exhibit features of more than one cognitive genre …. The term cognitive genre … [refers] to the overall cognitive orientation of a piece of writing in terms of its realization of a particular rhetorical purpose, something that is reflected in the way in which information is internally organized and related. Different types of rhetorical purpose (such as: to recount sequenced events, to explain a process, to argue a point of view) instantiate different cognitive genres. (Bruce 2008: 8, bold added)

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This distinction permits EAP/ESP teachers to start with a socially recognisable genre, to identify its characteristic stages and moves and then to go deeper into each stage in terms of informational/rhetorical organisation. For both analytical and pedagogic purposes, Bruce has suggested a three-level approach to textual analysis in which social genre, cognitive genre and linguistic realisation are all integrated. For example, if we take the research article as a social genre, we see four conventionalised sections: the introduction, the methods, the results and the discussion. Each of these has a characteristic move structure as discussed above and explicating these move structures is one of the tasks an EAP/ESP teacher must undertake to help students navigate their way through an empirical paper. So work on the introduction might involve reading several introductions and identifying the three key moves in the CARS model (Swales 1990) in each. A second level of investigation would involve taking each of the sections, for example the methods section, and identifying the different informational structures within it. Methods sections typically contain large sections of ‘recount’ so we expect to see a sequence of actions or steps, and for each step some element of ‘explanation’, so a point and rationale organisation. The third level of analysis, the level of linguistic realisation, permits teachers to make explicit how informational structures can be articulated. For example, the kind of interwoven recount and explanation typical of a methods section might be realised in a series of past tense statements, in either passive or active voice, linked by sequence markers (‘secondly’, ‘after that’) and complemented by clauses or sentences of explanation cognitive genre integrated through structures signalling cause/effect or reason (‘because’, ‘in consequence’, ‘for this reason’). The two approaches above prioritise the analysis of specific kinds of text in relation to their communicative contexts. Theorists working in the Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) tradition (Medway and Freedman 2003; Bazerman and Prior 2004), particularly influential in higher education in North America, have focused instead on explicating cultural contexts and getting students to understand the dialectical relationship between the genres they encounter and the contexts in which those genres are produced and consumed. As Reiff and Bawarshi (in Johns et al. 2006: 240) write, RGS approaches to literacy: teach students how to recognize genres as rhetorical responses to and reflections of the cultures and immediate situations in which they are used

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so that they are able to access, understand, and write within these cultures and situations, many of which are quite unfamiliar to them.

The pedagogic implications of this approach to genre study are that teachers should focus less on analysing texts and more on helping students understand the contexts in which genres are produced and consumed. In some instances, this might include a semi-ethnographic study of a particular writing context. One development of this concern with the dialectical relationship between context and text, along with a pragmatic recognition that no literacy instruction programme could include all of the genres a student is likely to encounter in their studies, has been the emergence of what Johns and others have referred to as ‘genre awareness’ pedagogies (Johns 2011), that is pedagogies which aim to equip students with an understanding of genre as a concept, develop insight into the way genres differ and provide a set of cognitive tools to use in interrogating unfamiliar genres when students meet them. Such a pedagogy ‘is realized in a course designed to assist students in developing the rhetorical flexibility necessary for adapting their socio-cognitive genre knowledge to ever-evolving contexts’ (Johns 2008: 238). This approach would suggest drawing on frames like Nesi and Gardner’s (2012) group of genre families or Carter’s (2007) disciplinary macro-genres to sensitise students to differences in genre function, structure and audience. Johns (2008, 2011) offer detailed examples of the kinds of probing tasks genre awareness pedagogies might use, drawing on frameworks like Carter’s macro-genres. One example of her ‘prompt analyses’ for genre awareness is given in Johns (2008: 244). This task asks students required to write in a new genre to ask themselves 10 questions. The first is to consider what they already (think they) know about the genre: What is this text called (its genre name)? What do you already think you know about what a text from this genre looks and ‘sounds’ like? For example, how should the text be organized? What kind of language do you need to use? (2008: 244)

The second is to consider what they have to do through the text: ‘What are you supposed to DO as a writer when completing this task? Are you asked to make an argument? To inform? To describe or list?’ (2008: 244).

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The third is to consider what they know about both the context for which they are writing and the context under which they will be writing: If you are writing this task in, or for, a classroom, what do you know about the context? What does the discipline require for a text? Under what conditions will you be writing? For example, are you writing a timed, in-class response? (2008: 244)

Subsequent questions ask students to consider their role as a writer in the text, what they know about the specific audience for whom they are writing, the specific content they must include, the kinds of sources they must include and how they must include them, any additional specifications such as word-counts, what they know about how the paper will be assessed, and finally to consider how the students might take greater ownership over the paper by negotiating with their tutor: ‘What about the paper you write can be negotiated with the instructor? Can you negotiate the topic? The types of sources used? The text structure?’ (2008: 244). These prompts force students to step back from a writing task and to marshal what they know or can find out about a genre before using it to create a text. Further, RGS theorists have tried to reclaim the concern with writing process that characterised the process movement in writing pedagogy, dominant in the 1970s and 1980s (Flower 1987; White and Arndt 1991; Susser 1994). As I have discussed above, Bawarshi (2003) has argued that writing processes are constrained by genres and that it is only through exploring genres that learners can come to an understanding of what and how they should write: A genre-based approach to L2 composition allows us to expand processbased notions of invention by shifting the locus of invention from an interior cognitive process located within individuals to a situated cognitive process located within genres. (Bawarshi, in Johns et al. 2006: 244)

This reclaiming of the process dimension of literacy is part of a wider ‘hybridisation’ of approaches to scaffolding academic literacies. In part, this is a matter of paradigmatic affinity, as in Bruce’s innovative synthesis of ESP and SFL approaches to genre (Bruce 2008), discussed above. RGS theorists (Bazerman and Prior 2004; Tardy 2009; Bawarshi and Reiff 2010; Bazerman 2013) and Academic Literacies theorists (Lillis 2001,

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2006; Lea 2004, 2013; Lillis and Scott 2008) share a concern to understand literacy as situated practice and to see literacies in the context of institutional and wider social power relations. Both groups of theorists share a concern that the close study of texts can, in effect, reify textual structures that are actually fluid, temporally specific responses to recurrent communicative situations. However, in larger part, the hybridisation reflects a realisation on all sides that each different approach has something to offer academic literacy instruction and that EAP and ESP teachers can only gain from drawing on as wide a body of theory as possible (see, for example, the discussion of genre-based and academic literacies approaches in Wingate 2012; and the boundary crossing discussions by Paltridge, Bawarshi, Tardy and others in Johns et al. 2006). Like a number of other writers, I have argued elsewhere (Green 2016) for a ‘social practice’ approach that integrates the kinds of close textual study advocated by ESP and SFL theorists, the semi-ethnographic exploration of context advocated by RGS theorists, the concern with developing genre awareness advanced by RGS and other theorists, the concern with process discussed by Bawarshi (2003) and the systematic focus on practice advocated by Academic Literacies theorists. As I have indicated in Chapter 2, academic literacies are interwoven from numerous strands of knowledge relating to context, disciplinary subject matter and a range of areas of procedural knowledge including genre, process and rhetoric and so instructional design needs to focus on all of these areas where possible. Green (2016) suggests an instructional design which helps new entrants to an academic community understand three areas: context, practice and genre. Context is constructed in terms of ethos ‘matters such as the epistemological values of the disciplinary/institutional community, and prevailing conceptions of academic integrity, learning, and the roles of students and academics’; organisation, ‘the administrative and teaching/learning systems in place, many of which may be accessible through handbooks, administrative web-pages and so on’; and affordance ‘study resources (libraries, online resources, access to digital technologies for study purposes) and also things like study and personal support systems (such as student counsellors)’ (2016: 101–102). Practice covers anything that a student will actually need to do in the course of their studies. For example, to complete a piece of assessed writing will involve a wide variety of practices:

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The process may begin with constructing an understanding of what an assignment question requires, through for example, iterative reading and reflection and discussion with peers or tutors, and writing to establish a base-line understanding, before reading in the literature. It will almost certainly involve grappling with a literature, and so involve practices of literature searching, maintaining a source management database such as an EndNote library, and making and working with notes to map the positions in a debate, and to develop a perspective. It may also involve practices such as ‘writerly reading’, that is reading with an eye to form as well as content (Hirvela 2004) or for example the analysis of genre-exemplars (Wingate 2012). It is likely to involve iterative outlining and drafting to articulate an argument (Wingate 2012), an authorial perspective (Tang 2009), and construct an authorial identity (Ivaniˇc 1998). It is likely also to involve the use of a range of digital tools (Lea and Jones 2011) and implicate a range of interpersonal interactions with peers or tutors or administrators. (2016: 102)

Work on genre should include both work on specific genres in the manner of Bruce (2008), discussed above, and genre awareness, in the manner of Johns (2008, 2011) and Devitt et al. (2004). Such instruction needs to equip students with tools to investigate new genres, using, for example, the ‘macro-genre’ frameworks of Carter (2007) or the genre families framework of Nesi and Gardner (2012) to prompt comparison and reflection. I have briefly discussed above the suggestion that one way of overcoming the insider-outside problem is to set up a collaboration between literacy and disciplinary tutors through, for example, the setting of a disciplinary assignment to be marked by disciplinary academics but scaffolded by literacy specialists. In Green (2016), I tried to sketch out some process options and I think these are worth reproducing here as they indicate how work on the various areas of knowledge might be integrated. I suggested that academic literacy instruction needs to start with an exploration of the teaching and learning context. The induction briefings that most universities provide and the documentation available (such as student handbooks) are important but I have suggested that the best way of getting to the level of ethos is to set a ‘scaffolded semi-ethnographic exploration’, an example of which would be ‘priming students and equipping them with task-sheets that require them to interview academics, higher-level students and administrators to gain insights into, for example,

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academic integrity, or core values like criticality’ (2016: 3). This exploration of context would be followed by the posing of an assignment replicating in large measure the kinds of assessed work the students will face in their disciplinary studies. Ideally, this assignment would be set and marked by disciplinary academics but scaffolded by literacy specialists who would support the students in unpacking the assignment, researching it, planning it, drafting and editing it. As I argued in Green (2016: 103), ‘this is an investment of time on their [disciplinary academics’] part but it is a very much smaller investment than that required in, say, a team-teaching project (Dudley-Evans and St. John 1988), and the possible pay-off in terms of student literacy is obvious’. Alongside this work on the assignment, there would need to be work on the modelling of literacy practices and genres, exploring the frameworks suggested above (Carter 2007; Nesi and Gardner 2012), doing literature searches or looking at strategies for projecting authority (Tang 2009). In Green (2016), I suggested that: [t]his work is best carried out in a series of discrete sessions […] these discrete sessions would feed into the ongoing work on the assignment and the experience of the assignment would feed back into the discrete sessions. It might therefore be best to consider the relationship between these two strands, the discrete sessions and the scaffolded writing project, as like a double helix: the two strands weave around each other affording links and connections in various ways. (Green 2016: 103)

3.6

Summary

In this chapter, I have tried to sketch out and discuss some of the key choices that face planners of academic literacy instruction in higher education. I have considered what scaffolding academic literacy instruction might mean and shown that explicit, planned instruction of the kind this book is concerned with is not the only scaffolding students receive: the routine interactions of their disciplinary studies provide many students with all the scaffolding they need. I have considered the issue of who should receive academic literacy instruction and argued that it should be a universal entitlement. I have considered the issue of the disciplinary specificity of academic literacy instruction and argued that the disciplinary specificity of literacies requires similarly specific instruction. However, I have noted that the institutional separation of literacy/language study from disciplinary study that characterises higher education creates an

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‘insider-outsider’ problem that makes it extremely difficult for literacy specialists to represent accurately the literacy challenges and practices their students will face. I have indicated that in many universities this results in a form of ESAP that is best characterised as generic EGAP with a topical content drawn from disciplinary areas rather than authentic disciplinary discourse. I have argued that overcoming this insider-outsider problem requires collaboration between literacy and disciplinary specialists and I have discussed some ways in which universities have tried to do this. I have considered the focus of academic literacy instruction. I have discussed contemporary approaches to scaffolding literacies and argued for a ‘social practice’ approach.

References Angelova, M., & Riazantseva, A. (1999). “If you don’t tell me, how can I know?” A case study of four international students learning to write the U.S. way. Written Communication, 16(4), 491–525. Bakhurst, D., & Shanker, S. (2001). Jerome Bruner: Language, culture, self. London: Sage. Bawarshi, A. (2003). Genre and the invention of the writer: Reconsidering the place of invention in composition. Logan: Utah State University Press. Bawarshi, A., & Reiff, M. J. (2010). Genre: An introduction to history, theory, research and pedagogy. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press. Bazerman, C. (2013). A rhetoric of literate action: Literate action (Vol. 1). Anderson, SC: Parlor Press. Bazerman, C., & Prior, P. (2004). What writing does and how it does it: An introduction to analyzing texts and textual practices. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Belcher, D. (1994). The apprenticeship approach to advanced academic literacy: Graduate students and their mentors. English for Specific Purposes, 13(1), 23– 34. Bharuthram, S., & McKenna, S. (2006). A writer-respondent intervention as a means of developing academic literacy. Teaching in Higher Education, 11(4), 495–507. Blakeslee, A. M. (1997). Activity, context, interaction, and authority: Learning to write scientific papers in situ. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 11(2), 125–169. Braine, G. (1988). Two commentaries on Ruth Spack’s “initiating ESL students into the academic discourse community: How far should we go?” A reader reacts. TESOL Quarterly, 22(4), 700–702. Bruce, I. (2008). Academic writing and genre. London: Continuum.

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Carter, M. (2007). Ways of knowing, doing, and writing in the disciplines. College Composition and Communication, 58(3), 385–418. Casanave, C. (1995). Local interactions: Constructing contexts for composing in a graduate sociology program. In D. Belcher & G. Braine (Eds.), Academic writing in a second language: Essays on research and pedagogy (pp. 83–110). Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing. Cheng, A. (2008). Analyzing genre exemplars in preparation for writing: The case of an L2 graduate student in the ESP genre-based instructional framework of academic literacy. Applied Linguistics, 29(1), 50–71. Cline, Z., & Necochea, J. (2003). Specially designed academic instruction in English (SDAIE): More than just good instruction. Multicultural Perspectives, 5(1), 18–24. Clughen, L. (2012). Writing in the disciplines: Building supportive cultures for student writing in UK higher education. Bingley: Emerald. Connor, U., & Mayberry, S. (1996). Learning discipline-specific academic writing: A case study of a Finnish graduate student in the United States. In E. Ventola & A. Mauranen (Eds.), Academic writing intercultural and textual issues (pp. 231–253). Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (1993). The powers of literacy: A genre approach to teaching writing. London: Falmer. Coxhead, A. (2000). A new academic word list. TESOL Quarterly, 34(2), 213– 238. Deane, M., & O’Neill, P. (2011). Writing in the disciplines. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Devitt, A., Reiff, M. J., & Bawarshi, A. (2004). Scenes of writing: Strategies for composing with genres. New York: Addison Wesley Longman. Dong, Y. (1996). Learning how to use citations for knowledge transformation: Non-native doctoral students’ dissertation writing in science. Research in the Teaching of English, 30, 428–457. Dudley-Evans, T. (2001). Team-teaching in EAP: Changes and adaptations in the Birmingham approach. In J. Flowerdew & M. Peacock (Eds.), Research perspectives on English for academic purposes (pp. 225–238). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dudley-Evans, T., & St. John, M. J. (1988). Developments in English for specific purposes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Echevarría, J., Vogt, M. E., & Short, D. (2008). Making content comprehensible for English language learners: The SIOP model. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Fishman, S. M., & McCarthy, L. (2001). An ESL writer and her discipline-based professor: Making progress even when goals don’t match. Written Communication, 18(2), 180–228. Flower, L. (1987). Interpretive acts: Cognition and the construction of discourse. Poetics, 16(2), 109–130. Flowerdew, J. (1993). Content-based language instruction in a tertiary setting. English for Specific Purposes, 12(2), 121–138.

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Flowerdew, J. (2000). Discourse community, legitimate peripheral participation, and the nonnative-English-speaking scholar. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 127–150. Freedman, A. (1987). Learning to write again: Discipline-specific writing at university. Carleton Papers in Applied Language Studies, 4, 95–115. Freedman, A. (1993). Show and tell? The role of explicit teaching in the learning of new genres. Research in the Teaching of English, 27 (3), 222–251. Gentil, G. (2005). Commitments to academic biliteracy: Case studies of Francophone university writers. Written Communication, 22(4), 421–471. Gosden, H. (1996). Verbal reports of Japanese novices’ research writing practices in English. Journal of Second Language Writing, 5, 109–128. Green, S. (2013). Novice ESL writers: A longitudinal case-study of the situated academic writing processes of three undergraduates in a TESOL context. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 12(3), 180–191. Green, S. (2016). Teaching disciplinary writing as social practice: Moving beyond ‘text-in-context’ designs in UK higher education. Journal of Academic Writing, 6(1), 98–107. Gustafsson, M., & Jacobs, C. (2013). Editorial: Student learning and ICLHE— Frameworks and contexts. Journal of Academic Writing, 3(1), ii–xii. Heyda, J. (2006). Sentimental education: First year writing as compulsory ritual in US colleges and universities. In L. Ganobscik-Williams (Ed.), Teaching academic writing in UK higher education (pp. 154–166). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hirvela, A. (2004). Connecting reading and writing in second language writing instruction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hyland, K. (2002). Specificity revisited: How far should we go now? English for Specific Purposes, 21(4), 385–395. Ivaniˇc, R. (1998). Writing and identity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Johns, A. (1988). Two commentaries on Ruth Spack’s “initiating ESL students into the academic discourse community: How far should we go?” Another reader reacts. TESOL Quarterly, 22(4), 705–707. Johns, A. (2008). Genre awareness for the novice academic student: An ongoing quest. Language Teaching, 41(2), 237–252. Johns, A. (2011). The future of genre in L2 writing: Fundamental, but contested, instructional decisions Journal of Second Language Writing, 20, 56–68. Johns, A., Bawarshi, A., Coe, R. M., Hyland, K., Paltridge, B., Reiff, M. J., et al. (2006). Crossing the boundaries of genre studies: Commentaries by experts. Journal of Second Language Writing, 15, 234–249. Kalantzis, M., & Cope, B. (2012). Literacies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Lea, M. R. (2004). Academic literacies: A pedagogy for course design. Studies in Higher Education, 29(6), 739–756. Lea, M. R. (2013). Reclaiming literacies: Competing textual practices in a digital higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 18(1), 106–118. Lillis, T. (2001). Student writing: Access, regulation, desire. New York: Routledge. Lillis, T. (2006). Moving towards an ‘academic literacies’ pedagogy: Dialogues of participation. In L. Ganobscik-Williams (Ed.), Teaching academic writing in UK higher education (pp. 30–45). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lillis, T., & Scott, M. (2008) Defining academic literacies research: Issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 4(1), 5– 32. Macken-Horarik, M. (2002). ‘Something to shoot for’: A systemic functionalist approach to teaching genre in secondary school science. In A. Johns (Ed.), Genre in the classroom (pp. 17–42). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Martin, J. (2009). Genre and language learning: A social semiotic perspective. Linguistics and Education, 20(1), 10–21. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1970). The German ideology. London: Lawrence & Wishart. McCarthy, L. (1987). A stranger in strange lands: A college student writing across the curriculum. Research in the Teaching of English, 21, 233–265. Medway, P., & Freedman, A. (2003). Genre in the new rhetoric. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis. Mercer, N. (1995). The guided construction of knowledge: Talk amongst teachers and learners. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Mitchell, M., & Evison, A. (2006). Exploiting the potential of writing for educational change at Queen Mary, University of London. In L. Ganobscik-Williams (Ed.), Teaching academic writing in UK higher education (pp. 68–84). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nesi, H., & Gardner, S. (2012). Genres across the disciplines: Student writing in higher education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Piaget, J. (1977). The essential Piaget. New York: Basic Books. Sadler, D. R. (2013). Opening up feedback: Teaching learners to see. In S. Merry, M. Price, D. Carless, & M. Taras (Eds.), Reconceptualising feedback in higher education (pp. 54–63). London: Routledge. Spack, R. (1988a). Initiating ESL students into the academic discourse community: How far should we go? TESOL Quarterly, 22(1), 29–51. Spack, R. (1988b). Two commentaries on Ruth Spack’s “initiating ESL students into the academic discourse community: How far should we go?” The author responds to Johns. TESOL Quarterly, 22(4), 707–708. Spack, R. (1997). The acquisition of academic literacy in a second language: A longitudinal case study. Written Communication, 14(1), 3–62.

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Susser, B. (1994). Process approaches in ESL/EFL writing instruction. Journal of Second Language Writing, 3(1), 31–47. Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swales, J. M. (1998). Textography: Toward a contextualization of written academic discourse. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 31(1), 109– 121. Swales, J. M. (2004). Research genres: Explorations and applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tang, R. (2009). A dialogic account of authority in academic writing. In M. Charles, D. Pecorari, & S. Hunston (Eds.), Academic writing: At the interface of corpus and discourse (pp. 170–188). London: Continuum. Tardy, C. (2005). “It’s like a story”: Rhetorical knowledge development in advanced academic literacy. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 4(4), 325–339. Tardy, C. (2009). Building genre knowledge. West Lafayette: Parlor Press. Tribble, C., & Wingate, U. (2013). From text to corpus: A genre-based approach to academic literacy instruction. System, 41(2), 307–321. Turner, J. (2011). Language in the academy: Cultural reflexivity and intercultural dynamics. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Turner, J. (2018). On writtenness: The cultural politics of academic writing. London: Bloomsbury. van der Veer, R., & Valsiner, J. (Eds.). (1994). The Vygotsky reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Verenikina, I. (2008). Scaffolding and learning: Its role in nurturing new learners. In P. Kell, W. Vialle, D. Konza, & G. Vogl (Eds.), Learning and the learner: Exploring learning for new times (pp. 161–180). Wollongong: University of Wollongong. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wertsch, J. V. (1985). Vygotsky and the social formation of mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. White, R. V., & Arndt, V. (1991). Process writing. London: Longman. Wingate, U. (2012). Using academic literacies and genre-based models for academic writing instruction: A ‘literacy’ journey. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 11(1), 26–37. Wingate, U. (2015). Academic literacy and student diversity: The case for inclusive practice. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Woods, D., Bruner, J., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17, 89–100.

CHAPTER 4

Academic Literacy and Communicative Language Ability

Abstract Green discusses the relationship between academic literacy and English language proficiency. Green first considers the nature of communicative language ability and its relation to academic literacy, contrasting the English proficiencies required for undergraduate entry in the UK and the GCC, illuminating the problems posed by low-proficiency users of English entering undergraduate studies in the GCC and indicating current pedagogic responses in the GCC to these problems. Green then draws on contemporary thinking in Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education and Sheltered Instruction theory to consider an alternative pedagogic response which both integrates literacy instruction and content teaching and makes content accessible through a language-aware pedagogy. Keywords Communicative language ability · Low-proficiency users of English · Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education · Sheltered Instruction · Language-aware pedagogy

4.1

Introduction

Having considered what academic literacies are, and in general terms how they may be scaffolded in higher education institutions, I want to move on in this chapter to consider an issue I have alluded to at various points © The Author(s) 2020 S. Green, Scaffolding Academic Literacy with Low-Proficiency Users of English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39095-2_4

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in the preceding pages but which I have so far refrained from addressing directly. This is the issue of English language proficiency and its relation to academic literacy in English-medium instructional contexts. Literacy rests on a linguistic foundation so, plainly, an English-medium academic literacy must presume a certain level of General English language proficiency. Despite this, the relationship between language proficiency and the construction of academic literacies is not an issue that features prominently in the pages of the major EAP/ESP journals nor for the most part is it one that is problematised within UK higher education, save perhaps at the level of departmental discussions about raising or lowering an IELTS entry requirement by 0.5 of a band. I suspect this is so because by and large UK universities are able to ensure that their international entrants commence their undergraduate studies with a language proficiency level sufficient for them to succeed in their studies without requiring academic literacy support beyond the pre-sessional General English/EGAP/ESAP course that the majority of international students go through. However, it is an issue that is of profound importance in higher education contexts such as the GCC where students enter English-medium higher education, following Arabic-medium primary and secondary education, and do so with an English proficiency level very much lower than their counterparts in the UK. Given that GCC universities replicate the same organisations of teaching and learning as UK and US universities, and in particular the radical separation between language/literacy and disciplinary study discussed in Chapter 3, the consequences of students entering degree studies with significantly lower levels of English proficiency are significant. These consequences are also largely unreported in the major EAP/ESP journals, which by and large reflect the concerns of academic literacies/EAP researchers and teachers in higher education contexts in countries where English is the majority first language. This is the issue I wish to explore in this chapter. I shall first provide a brief discussion of communicative language ability in English and how it may be evidenced, drawing primarily on the work of Bachman (Bachman 1990; Bachman and Palmer 2010) and with reference to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe 2011). I shall then contrast the language proficiency levels typically required by higher education institutions in the UK and the GCC, and having done so, I shall try to sketch out the consequences of the lower English language proficiency levels for teaching and learning and the construction of academic literacies in higher education institutions in

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the GCC. I shall then draw on a number of overlapping currents in contemporary thinking about the scaffolding of academic literacies, specifically ideas from Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education (Gustafsson and Jacobs 2013; Gustafsson et al. 2011); Writing in the Disciplines (Clughen 2012; Deane and O’Neill 2011); Sheltered Instruction (Echevarría et al. 2008; Short et al. 2011); and Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (Cline and Necochea 2003) to suggest a possible solution.

4.2 Communicative Language Ability and Academic Literacy A comprehensive model of academic literacy must include communicative competence, for without a level of communicative ability, there can be no literacy at all. Contemporary understandings of communicative language ability have their roots in earlier work by Hymes (1972) and Canale and Swain (1980). Hymes argued that when individuals communicate they draw on both a formal knowledge of language structures as argued by Chomsky (Chomsky and Peck Chomsky and Peck 1988) and a pragmatic or sociolinguistic knowledge of the communicative functions those structures perform in specific communicative contexts. Canale and Swain, building on Hymes’ model of communicative competence, developed the notion of strategic competence, which they characterised as an ability to use communicative resources to overcome communication breakdowns, for example the ability to paraphrase when we lack a specific word. These concepts formed the basis of the model of communicative language ability developed by Bachman (1990) and Bachman and Palmer (1996, 2010) which has been particularly influential in the sphere of language assessment (see, for example, the Cambridge KET, PET, FCE, CAE and CPE examinations and IELTS).1 Bachman and Palmer construct communicative language ability as the strategic deployment of ‘organisational’ and ‘pragmatic’ knowledge of language, interacting with knowledge of the world. Organisational knowledge, in their model, includes knowledge of the orthographic, morphological, syntactic, phonological and lexical systems (systemic knowledge) and knowledge of supra-sentential discourse patterns (textual knowledge). This is

1 https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/exams-and-tests/.

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a formal knowledge of language structures, the knowledge, for example, that in English, subjects precede verbs which precede objects; that /b/ is articulated in the same manner as /p/ but with the vocal cords vibrating; and that English paragraphs typically contain a thesis statement and supporting sentences. This is knowledge of the what of language but not of the why or when or where. Pragmatic knowledge is knowledge of how to use structures in contextualised communication to realise communicative objectives. It includes both functional knowledge, which relates to the illocutionary force of utterances, or what utterances actually convey to their hearers/readers, and sociolinguistic knowledge, which relates to appropriateness to context. A simple example would be the language items hello, how do you do, good morning, hi and yo, all of which share the same communicative function of greeting, but which have different contexts of use according to their formality, demographic restrictions or other features such as time-specificity. Bachman and Palmer also emphasise the importance of strategic competence and conceptualise this as a ubiquitous communication manager, operating all the time, though usually in the background, rather than as the repair/breakdown facility, postulated by Canale and Swain (1980). These considerations raise the question of precisely what level of communicative language ability in English is necessary to study at an Englishmedium university. In the UK, the standard set by universities for direct undergraduate admission is a mid-Level B2 on the Common European Framework of Reference scale,2 usually evidenced by an IELTS Academic overall score of 6.0. Universities in Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland may use different measures (TOEFL,3 for example) but the standards are comparable. There is now a substantial amount of research underlying these standards, much of it consisting of predictive validity studies of measures such as IELTS or TOEFL in which cohorts of entrants to English-medium higher education are assessed using IELTS, TOEFL or other measures and their scores correlated with their subsequent overall academic performance or, a more restricted focus, their language use in their academic settings. With regard to the latter, Ingram and Bayliss (2007),

2 https://www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-reference-languages/ level-descriptions. 3 https://www.ets.org/toefl.

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correlated entry-level IELTS scores from 5.0 to 8.0, with language use displayed in a range of academic settings (written assignments, lecture notes, interactions in class with peers and lecturers) by 28 English as a second language undergraduates and postgraduates at two Australian universities. The authors’ conclusion (Ingram and Bayliss 2007: 1) was that ‘the students were generally able to produce, in the context of their academic studies, the language behaviour implied by an IELTS test score’. They noted, however, that ‘there was no apparent relationship between IELTS scores and student performance in course-related tasks which were beyond the scope of the proficiency test’. Broadly similar findings were reported by Paul (2007) in a study of four ESL students at an Australian university. Such findings suggest that in the areas tested by IELTS, the test is a reasonable predictor of actual language use. With regard to the relation between IELTS scores and academic performance, the evidence is mixed at best. One early study, Cotton and Conrow (1998) found neither a positive correlation between IELTS scores and Grade Point Averages, nor a correlation between scores and reported language difficulties in their study of 33 students in their first year at an Australian university. More positively, Kerstjens and Nery (2000) correlated IELTS scores with Grade Point Averages for 113 first undergraduates at an Australian university and found a ‘small-to-medium predictive effect of academic performance from the IELTS scores’ but noted this accounted for less than 10% of the academic variation. However, one study from Egypt, which took a rather different focus, looking at the validity of IELTS cut-off points to determine entry to pre-sessional language courses (IELTS 5.0–6.0) or direct entry to Freshman Composition (IELTS 6.5–7.0), found a positive correlation between entry IELTS scores and performance at least with regard to reading and writing scores. Arrigoni and Clark (2015) investigated just under 1100 students entering pre-sessional language courses and freshman composition classes at the American University of Cairo and considered data including language scores and GPAs, as well as instructor perceptions of the students’ placement and language skills, obtained through interview, and student perceptions of the same through a questionnaire. Overall, their conclusion was that ‘[t]he use of IELTS for admission and the established cut-off scores seem justified by analysis of student data and stakeholder perceptions’ (Arrigoni and Clark 2015: 1). The problem is that academic performance is affected by many factors other than language ability and this has greatly muddied the waters for

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those studies which have tried to make clear correlations between specific levels of English ability and academic success. One widely reported problem is that an assessment such as IELTS cannot hope to sample adequately the range of literacy practices students may engage in (see, for example, Sedgwick et al. 2016; Moore and Morton 2005). A more important problem though, and one that bears directly on the core of this book, is the difference between the level of scaffolding for study provided in different contexts. It would be a straightforward matter to analyse the kinds of texts students at a particular level in a particular discipline have to read, and to produce measures of syntactic complexity, lexical occurrence and readability. However, simply analysing texts in these ways actually tells us relatively little about the linguistic challenges students face in dealing with these texts in particular teaching and learning contexts. This is because students never encounter a text outside of a specific context and this context will always mediate the text in some specific way. It may be, for example, that in one learning and teaching context a module tutor will provide pre-reading activities to guide students. In another context, the text may be the subject of extended classroom discussion. In another, the text may follow on from another preparatory text and so ideas may well be largely familiar. In other words, what would be necessary to adequately investigate the challenges posed by a particular teaching and learning context would be to explore not just the spoken, written or multi-modal texts consumed and produced but the ways in which consumption and production are mediated and scaffolded. There is the very strong possibility that certain kinds of mediation and scaffolding might make written and spoken texts accessible to students with lower language proficiencies than might be expected. It may also be that specific (higher) levels of English proficiency are required precisely because universities do not offer certain kinds of mediation and scaffolding. It is possible that, whatever the research evidence, the standard of CEFR B2 for undergraduate entry persists because it fits with the way UK universities organise teaching and learning and the way they go about scaffolding the construction of academic literacies. In particular, the CEFR B2 measure fits with the structural division between language/literacy and disciplinary teaching, and the lack of language/literacy support to be found in disciplinary programmes. Students who enter disciplinary studies with CEFR B2 are judged to be capable of getting through their studies without requiring significant language/literacy support from their host department. They may present what their host

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department would see as ‘deficiencies’ but these would normally be of a kind and scale that the student can safely be redirected to the university’s language or writing centre. They are unlikely to be of the kind that would require disciplinary staff to step outside of their habitual role and to devote time to helping their students understand and begin to master disciplinary literacy practices. In other words, the standard of CEFR B2 may not be an absolute requirement for undergraduate study in an English-medium context: it may simply be the level required for students to enter and succeed in the kinds of teaching and learning contexts UK universities construct, contexts which instantiate the separation of language/literacy and disciplinary study. In Gulf Cooperation Council countries, the position is both similar and radically different. Higher education in the GCC remains largely English medium, obliging young Arabs to master Modern Standard Arabic for their secondary education and then English for their tertiary education. GCC universities have to a great extent taken over and reproduced the teaching and learning systems and practices of their Western models (Davidson and Mackenzie Smith 2008; Donn and Al-Manthri 2010). Specifically, they have reproduced the separation of disciplinary study from language/literacy study, the latter devolved to pre-university preparation units and in-sessional EAP and ESP units. As in the UK, USA and elsewhere, disciplinary academics in GCC universities do not expect to become ‘English teachers’. Where GCC universities diverge strikingly from their US and UK analogues is in the level of English with which students enter disciplinary studies. Stated university English language requirements for direct entry into disciplinary undergraduate studies are generally set at around IELTS 5.0 or 5.5, 5.0 being the top of the CEFR B1 band and 5.5 being the bottom of the CEFR B2 band. Major public universities in the GCC have stated requirements of IELTS 5.5 or TOEFL equivalent (e.g. University of Bahrain,4 UAE University,5 Qatar University6 ) but smaller, private universities have lower requirements (e.g. Al-Ghurair7 in UAE only requires

4 http://www.uob.edu.bh/en/index.php/colleges/college-of-business/managementand-marketing/296-mba-program-revised/1611-admission-requirements. 5 https://www.uaeu.ac.ae/en/admission/undergraduate_admissions.shtml. 6 http://www.qu.edu.qa/students/admission/graduate/required-test-scores. 7 https://agu.ac.ae/study-at-agu/admissions/undergraduate-admision-requirements/.

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IELTS 5.0). Oman has officially required IELTS 5.0 since 2005,8 though until 2012 the Ministry of Higher Education deemed this aspirational and set the lower target of 4.5. However, it is unclear what even these low requirements actually mean in practice. Very few entrants to undergraduate studies in the GCC actually present IELTS or TOEFL certification. The very great majority of students enter their degree programme having passed through a foundation programme and the assessment of their language proficiency is wholly internal. There has been little or no research on this so far as I can ascertain but, as I can attest from my own work in the Omani Ministry of Higher Education, the institutional pressures to move students through the system tend to encourage a setting of standards according to the mode of the student body rather than an external standard such as IELTS. The upshot of this is that in very many higher education institutions in the GCC, students enter their undergraduate studies with English proficiencies as low as IELTS 4.0 or 4.5. This is a matter of significance for both teaching and learning in the disciplines and for academic literacy support. The difference between an IELTS 4.5 and a 6.0 may not sound enormous but Cambridge English Assessment estimates that movement from one CEFR band to another, for example, from B1 to B2 requires between 180 and 260 hours of guided study.9 The problems this creates are predictable. If GCC universities and colleges reproduce the teaching and learning systems of the UK or the USA, systems which require students to arrive with a solid mid-CEFR B2 level of English, there is clearly a chasm between the linguistic resources young Arabs bring with them to their studies and the linguistic resources they actually need to cope with the material they must read, the lectures they must comprehend and the written work they must complete. This I would argue is the structural problem of English-medium instruction in higher education in the GCC. Institutional responses to this are fairly uniform across higher education institutions in the GCC: institutions provide in-sessional EAP or ESP courses alongside disciplinary studies in the first and sometimes second

8 http://www.oaaa.gov.om/Docs/GFP%20Standards%20FINAL.pdf. 9 http://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2018/10/11/how-long-learn-language/.

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year of undergraduate studies (see, for example, the Credit English Language Programme, at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman10 ). However, such provision is invariably too little, too late. If the figure of 180 to 260 hours suggested by Cambridge English Assessment as the amount of time necessary to move from CEFR B1 to B2 is accurate, students entering undergraduate studies with B1 levels of English and grappling immediately with B2 level input may only reach a level approximating B2 towards the end of their first year. There is simply no possibility that in-sessional EAP could teach enough and sufficiently quickly to enable students to catch up. The consequence of this is that students flounder in their first year and academic staff must find strategies to cope with this. There is substantial evidence from the GCC region concerning the impact on student success of low language proficiencies. Harrington and Roche (2014) report research at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman into the relationship between entry-level language proficiency and academic success. They looked at 174 students and used three measures of language proficiency (academic writing, academic reading and recognition vocabulary), correlating those with Grade Point Averages, at the end of the students’ first year. The best predictors of GPA were the academic writing and recognition vocabulary knowledge measures, indicating that the measures could be used to identify ‘at-risk’ students at the point of entry. Belhiah and Elhami (2015) report survey research into student and teacher perceptions of the effectiveness of English-medium instruction at six universities in the United Arab Emirates. The sample (500 students and 100 teachers) was not large, given the numbers of students and academics in higher education in the UAE but nevertheless the findings suggested widespread concern, with students and teachers seeing low levels of English as a major problem. In fact, Belhiah and Elhami (2015) concluded that the problems were so pervasive that consideration should be given by higher education policy-makers to abandoning English-medium instruction in favour of a bilingual English-Arabic curriculum. Attractive though this is in an Arabic-speaking country, it is unclear how feasible it would be. It would require an entirely Arabic-speaking academic body very different from the notably international staff currently teaching at GCC universities. Much

10 https://www.squ.edu.om/lc/Academic-Programs/Credit-English-LanguageProgram.

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more serious challenges would be the predominance of English in international disciplinary discourse communities, the relatively small output of Arabic-language academic publishing houses and the huge quantitative task facing English-Arabic academic translators. It would seem that for the foreseeable future GCC higher education institutions are stuck with the problem of making English-medium instruction work. What is less well researched are the ways in which students and academics respond to the problems caused by low levels of English proficiency in English-medium instructional contexts. Unsurprisingly in view of the widespread disillusionment with English-medium instruction reported by Belhiah and Elhami (2015), there is ample evidence of one strategic response to the problem, translation or some form of ArabicEnglish translanguaging, that is a mixing of Arabic and English, often within an utterance. There is of course a substantial literature on the use of L1 in L2 language classrooms (Cook 2010), and there are a number of reports from the GCC of teachers using Arabic to scaffold either the learning of English or disciplinary learning (Ghobain 2015; Al-Musawi 2014; Bhooth et al. 2014). It is widely recognised not only that learners will always make use of their L1s in whatever class they participate in and whatever the learning focus, but also that skilful and systematic use of L1 by teachers may help learners acquire both disciplinary content and English. It has been argued that the benefits of translanguaging are such that the practice should become the norm in classrooms (see, for example, Daniel et al. 2019; Canagarajah 2011). The principal problem with this approach is that the use of Arabic as a subsidiary scaffold to make English comprehensible can very easily slip into a tokenistic use of English with the burden of communication and explanation falling squarely on Arabic. Ghobain (2015) refers to a study of medical training in Saudi Arabia in what was supposedly an English-medium instruction context, in which lecturers retained English medical terms but embedded these within consistent streams of Arabic. It is very difficult to pin down the consequences of the translation/translanguaging strategy. Those who have written about it in the GCC, such as Al-Musawi (2014) and Ghobain (2015), have tended to point out the benefits. Where the chief concern is with the mastery of disciplinary concepts or information alone this seems wholly reasonable. The problem comes where the aim of teaching is not just to teach disciplinary content but to foster the students’ abilities to construct and share knowledge through the medium of English. This remains one of

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the aims of English-medium instruction in the GCC and it makes the translation/translanguaging strategy profoundly problematic. As a strategy, translation is, of course, only open to academic staff who speak the first language of their students. What happens in classes where academics and students do not share this language? Although I have found no description in the literature, my experience in Oman has indicated one alternative strategy. Despite the anecdotal nature of these observations, it seems to me that they are worth mentioning. The strategy I observed was adopted by some international staff who did not speak Arabic and is what I would characterise as ‘textualisation’. What I mean by this term is the transformation of the content of a class—its ideas, information and so on—into a text. Typically what happened in the classes I observed was that a lecturer would teach a class through the medium of English but with little attempt to check for, or apparent expectation of, understanding. The lecture would be supported by a PowerPoint presentation, and to a large extent, the lecture would be an explanation of the PowerPoint slides. At the end of the class, the lecturer would hand out photocopies of the slides for students to take away and work on. These copied slides formed the basis of subsequent assessment, so what students did was simply to memorise the slides. This suggests a very superficial kind of learning, lacking in the deeper processing real learning requires (Marton and Säljö 1976). On the occasions when I had opportunities to both observe and discuss the classes with the lecturers, I got the very strong impression that they fully recognised the problem of low English proficiency and that what they were doing was the only thing they felt they could do to overcome it: to reduce the linguistic burden by making the students focus on a specific linguistic artefact, the PowerPoint slides.

4.3 Scaffolding Academic Literacies with Students with Low English Language Proficiencies In Chapter 3, I discussed mainstream approaches to scaffolding academic literacies, and in the first part of this chapter, I have indicated a specific problem not faced in those higher education contexts where the bulk of theorisation has taken place: the problem of students entering Englishmedium higher education with markedly lower English language proficiencies than their counterparts in the UK or elsewhere. In this section,

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I would like now to draw on relevant theory to suggest an approach to scaffolding academic literacies that will take account of the specific literacy problems encountered by students with low English language proficiencies. As I have already indicated, the scaffolding of academic literacies has been approached theoretically from a wide range of perspectives and it can at times seem difficult to understand quite what lessons to draw. However, with regard to the scaffolding of literacies with low English language proficiency students, there are two specific lessons that must be considered. The first concerns the integration of disciplinary and literacy curricula, or perhaps more properly, the expansion of disciplinary curricula to include a systematic literacy thread, with all that that implies for the roles of disciplinary academics and the skill sets they must possess. The second also concerns an integration of disciplinary and literacy curricula but with a very specific purpose, which is to facilitate a form of instruction which seeks to make cognitively unsimplified disciplinary content accessible to students with low English language proficiencies, through a systematic process of linguistic and interactional modification. I shall discuss these two developments below. The first development represents a confluence of different theoretical streams including many of the approaches we have already discussed, English for Specific Purposes (Wingate 2015), Rhetorical Genre Studies (Bawarshi and Reiff 2010) and Academic Literacies (Lea 2004) but also the Writing in the Disciplines and Writing across the Curriculum movements in the USA (Bazerman et al. 2005) and the Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education movement (see, for example, Gustafsson et al. 2011; Gustafsson and Jacobs 2013; Bergman et al. 2013; Murray and Nallaya 2016). The development is the recognition that rather than attempting to bridge the separation of disciplinary study from literacy instruction, higher education institutions might be better advised to try to eliminate it. In the USA, the role of writing in the primary, secondary and tertiary education curricula has come under sustained scrutiny over the last 20 years. Two contrasting but complementary approaches to writing in the classroom have emerged and their influence has spread internationally. Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) (Bazerman et al. 2005) emphasises the role of writing as a tool for the construction and sharing of knowledge and seeks to bring writing into disciplinary classrooms. This is what might be denoted as ‘writing to learn’. Writing in the Disciplines (WID) theorists (see, for example, Clughen 2012; Deane and O’Neill 2011) are

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concerned with disciplinary differences in writing and with the way novice writers can be supported to understand them by integrating literacy work with content teaching and devoting curricular space to explicit discussions of literacy practices. This is what may be summed up as ‘learning to write’. Although seemingly aiming at opposite objectives, WAC and WID practices actually have much in common: both see writing in higher education as central to the construction and sharing of knowledge, both emphasise the importance of affording classroom time to modelling, exemplifying, critiquing discussing and practising writing, and both emphasise the role of the disciplinary tutor in facilitating this. As Mitchell and Evison (2006) write, in their report of a series of WAC/WID initiatives at Queen Mary University in the UK, strongly influenced by Cornell University’s writingintensive courses: ‘Teaching writing should … be part of the responsibility of disciplinary academics and should occur within the discipline’s curriculum’ (2006: 72). In Australia, Rose and his colleagues (e.g. Rose et al. 2008) have developed an approach to scaffolding academic literacies through precisely this kind of curricular expansion, embedding literacy work within disciplinary teaching. The ‘Scaffolding Academic Literacy’ pedagogy subverts the archetypal university practice of requiring solitary, unsupported reading in preparation for a lecture, by bringing reading and writing and the discussion of texts into the disciplinary classroom. For example, a set reading text will be approached in stages which help students both to engage with the text and to learn about reading through doing so. Typically, reading starts with a ‘Preparing before Reading’ phase in which a tutor provides background information about the text. This is followed by a ‘Paragraph-by-Paragraph Reading’ phase which Rose et al. (2008: 169) describe as follows: Paragraph-by-Paragraph Reading entails reading aloud a key section of the article. Before reading, each paragraph is prepared with a general summary of what it is about in terms that all students will understand, but including some of the academic terms of the paragraph. After reading, this general understanding forms a basis for elaborating key elements of the paragraph, including definitions of technical terms, explanations of new concepts, or discussion building on students’ field knowledge.

These kinds of activities enact a scaffolding directed at learner selfregulation (Woods et al. 1976; Mercer 1995). Rose et al. (2008) describe

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the application of the pedagogy with 25 Indigenous Australians undertaking undergraduate studies in health sciences and conclude that the intervention had a significant impact on the participants’ academic literacy levels, measured by tailored assessments permitting comparison with other standardised measures: The most rapid improvements were in Years 1 and 2 of the Bachelor course, with each range (low, average, high) improving approximately 30 points. In Year 1 this represented an improvement from a mean junior secondary level below 30 points, to matriculation level above 50 points. In Year 2 the improvement was from a mean middle secondary level below 40 points, to a mean 70 points, an academic literacy standard expected at first year undergraduate study. (Rose et al. 2008: 177)

Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education (ICLHE or just ICL) theory (see, for example, the special issue collections co-edited by Gustafsson, Gustafsson and Jacobs 2013; Gustafsson et al. 2011) emerged as a development of Content Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) (Coyle et al. 2010; Llinares et al. 2012). This movement was originally inspired by Immersion Education programmes particularly in Canada (Johnson and Swain 1997) and aims primarily at improving language learning in secondary schools through the use of a comprehension approach. ICLHE theorists have generally taken a broader view reflecting concerns with enhancing both literacy and content learning. The movement has many parallels with WAC/WID but differs in emphasis. Where WAC/WID practice generally emphasises the role of writing in the classroom, ICLHE theorists have generally taken a broader, multi-modal view of literacy practices. Further, where reports of WAC/WID practice in the UK have tended to focus on curricular expansions by disciplinary teachers, as in the Mitchell and Evison study mentioned above, much of the ICLHE literature has focused on collaborative interventions between disciplinary and literacy specialists, as in the collection edited by Gustafsson et al. (2011). So, for example, Leibowitz et al. (2011) and Harran (2011) each describe collaborations in South African contexts between literacy specialists and social work, occupational therapy, and mechanical engineering academics, respectively. Thomas (2013) describes such a collaboration in the UK in the field of Art & Design. These collaborations have much in common with the team-teaching and collaborations discussed in Chapter 3 (Dudley-Evans 2001; Bharuthram and McKenna 2006) and

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along with positive gains in literacy and content learning they tend to highlight the complex and uneasy nature of such collaborations (Harran 2011), and the vital importance of institutional support (Leibowitz et al. 2011). Whatever their differences of emphasis, these pedagogic approaches all seek to bring issues of academic literacy within the frame of disciplinary teaching: to expose disciplinary literacy practices to scrutiny, analysis and discussion. In my view what is required is curricular expansion within the disciplines to enable class discussion to focus not just on the what of knowledge construction but also the discoursal how: to bring issues of academic writing into the frame of classroom debate and explanation. This might be achieved by a disciplinary lecturer working alone or with the support and guidance of a literacy practitioner. Arguably, as I have written elsewhere (Green 2016) such approaches to scaffolding academic literacies would have two clear advantages over academic literacy support that is not integrated with the disciplinary curriculum. The first is authenticity. Academic literacy instruction interwoven with disciplinary study, in which, for example, a disciplinary tutor helps students in his/her class reflect on the way knowledge has been constructed and communicated in a particular paper or explicitly models the way a particular disciplinary genre text might be constructed will automatically be demonstrating authentic disciplinary literacy practices. Unlike the EAP/ESP teacher working from a discrete unit and struggling to make his/her instructional content relevant and representative (despite his/her own status as a disciplinary outsider), a disciplinary tutor, working on literacy issues within his/her classroom, will always be able to demonstrate authentic practices. The second is timeliness. Academic literacy instruction that is interwoven with the normal course of disciplinary teaching and which is responsive to the emerging needs and concerns of students has a better chance of meeting students’ needs when they experience them. These two features are highlighted in Thomas’ account of the collaborative Art & Design literacy interventions he reports (Thomas 2013: 53): The interventions appear to have been broadly transformative in relevant, sustainable and structural ways. In terms of relevance, the fact the interventions were products of collaboration helped us to situate them epistemologically, temporally, physically and pedagogically: Epistemologically, I

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drew on approaches and priorities from the studio. Temporally, the interventions took place at key moments in the schedules of the projects. Physically, we led almost all of the interventions in studios. Pedagogically, all the interventions were embedded within specific studio projects, so they addressed issues within them: co-teaching by lecturers from different disciplinary backgrounds brought dialogue between pedagogies to bear on these issues.

The second development is a comprehension-based approach to subject teaching at secondary level, drawing much of its inspiration from Krashen’s theorisation of the role of comprehensible input in second language acquisition (Krashen 1982, 1985, 1989) and the experience of Immersion Education in Canada and with parallels with CLIL. Two variants of this are Sheltered Instruction (SI) (Echevarría et al. 2008; Short et al. 2011, 2012) and Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE) (Cline and Necochea 2003). Sheltered Instruction and Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English share a view that it is possible to make cognitively unsimplified academic content in English accessible to students with low English proficiencies through the strategic modification of linguistic input and classroom interaction, and the systematic organisation of teaching and learning in specific ways. The Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) model advanced by Echevarría et al. (2008) emphasises making clear links between course content and student experience, so students always have a sense of relevance and their own concrete experience as a reference point; making explicit links between past and present learning so students have a sense both of progression and of cumulative construction; facilitating the negotiation of meaning and the interactive construction of comprehensible input through a range of linguistic and interactional modifications; the exploitation of visual aids and realia; maximising opportunities for students to use problem solving and other strategies; facilitating interactions between peers and between students and tutors; and finally by providing a balance between input activities and activities where students apply knowledge in practical ways. The literature evaluating SI is not extensive and what there is offers a mixed picture. Knoblock and Youngquist (2016) report a small-scale comparative study of the reading development of ESL students undertaking freshman reading and composition in a US university. They compared the progress of 14 ESL students in a SI section and 24 learners

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with similar proficiencies in mainstream classes. Overall, the SI students made greater progress: Eight out of 14 students, or 57%, showed gains in overall scores, one student (7%) did not change and five (36%) declined. At the same time, in mainstream sections, only 9 out of 24 students (37.5%) showed gains, 3 did not change (12.5%), and 12 (or 50%) scored lower. Additionally, nine international students in mainstream reading classes who took the test at the beginning of the semester did not take it the second time, at the end. That tells us that they most likely dropped the class. Since all of those cases occurred in mainstream sections of Engl 103, and none happened in the sheltered section, it may support the view that the sheltered section served NNESs better. (Knoblock and Youngquist 2016: 60)

The largest scale evaluations appear to be those reported in Short et al. (2011). The paper reports three successive projects, growing in scale. Of these, the third and largest focused on the teaching of middle school science to 1021 ESL students in 10 US schools comparing SI and mainstream sections. Although this study indicated higher performance on the part of the SI students on measures of science content and language, these gains were not at statistically significant levels. The authors suggest this may reflect implementation factors as the scale of the study meant the researchers were unable to control how faithfully the SIOP model was implemented in the SI sections nor to what extent the mainstream sections might also have been using SI techniques. More positive were the two preceding, smaller-scale studies. The first study was a quasi-experimental study involving 19 SI teachers, 4 control teachers and 318 10- to 14-year-old US ESL middle school students with mixed but low English language proficiencies. Comparisons of entry and end-ofyear writing tests showed that the SI students ‘made greater gains during the school year, increasing an average of 2.9 points between pre-test and post-test administrations compared to an average gain of 0.7 points for the comparison group, based on adjusted post-test means’ (Short et al. 2011: 366). The second project scaled up the original research to include 4 middle schools and 2 high schools and 580 treatment and control students and gathered data over two school years. The results for English language proficiency on speaking, reading and writing measures indicated that by the end of the second year, the SI students were outperforming the control students on all measures. Although the picture is complicated

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by constraints on the testing procedure, the SI students were also outperforming control students on measures of maths, reading, science and social studies. A broadly similar approach is suggested by SDAIE. Cline and Necochea (2003) suggest eight key components of an approach to scaffolding disciplinary study for English language learners. As in the SIOP model, SDAIE emphasises the need to make links between present and past learning; to provide a cooperative and dialogic learning environment in which students can actively co-construct knowledge with their peers and teachers; and to use supportive visuals, realia and appropriate technology. They stress also the affective dimension of learning and the need to provide a safe, stress-free and inclusive learning environment in which students feel accepted. Two other features which overlap to some degree with the SIOP model but are given prominence in SDAIE are ‘webbing and chunking’, the complementary breaking down of information into manageable chunks and the location of those chunks within a web of interconnections, and the deployment of ‘multiple access points’ or different ways of getting into a topic. Cline and Necochea (2003: 21) illustrate how multiple access points may be created as follows: [T]he teacher’s objective for each of the students remains the same—all will have a deep understanding of the core nucleus of the lesson. However, the activities, assignments, and practices will build on student strengths, needs, and abilities. The teacher will facilitate a deep understanding of the core curriculum by incorporating a multitude of strategies and techniques into the lesson design. These strategies and techniques will include, but not be limited to, oral presentations, collaborative group projects, graphic illustrations, skits, storytelling, dramatizations, research reports, puppetry, inquiry and discovery, scaffolding, integrated thematic instruction, and other instructional practices.

One final element of SDAIE is the emphasis it places on nurturing the students’ first languages and where possible bringing these into the classroom to scaffold English-medium learning. Both Sheltered Instruction and Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English concentrate heavily on what happens in the classroom and how cognitively ungraded input may be made accessible through linguistic and interactional modification of many kinds. There is evidence, however, of a broader institutional approach to supporting students lacking ‘college-ready’ English. Hirano (2014) who looked at the way seven

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refugees, ‘not college-ready’ according to their SAT scores, and with ‘stilldeveloping English proficiency’ (Hirano 2014: 47), coped with first year studies at a liberal arts college in the USA. According to Hirano, they coped because ‘the college assumed responsibility by preparing a network of support to provide these students with the help they needed’ (Hirano 2014: 47). This support network included elements put in place specifically for the refugees, like a writing tutor and a summer bridging programme, but also elements available to any other student, chief of which, it would seem, was a network of knowledgeable, sympathetic people—course tutors, classmates, roommates—willing to engage in sustained social and academic interaction with the refugees in class or on campus. What appears to distinguish this institutional context was an institutional commitment to expanding the enabling context to provide the levels of literacy support actually needed. Taken together, I think these two developments represent the best chance we have of developing an instructional design that will begin to meet the needs of students with low English language proficiencies thrust into English-medium disciplinary studies. These two broad approaches to teaching and learning share an explicit recognition of the role of language and literacy in the construction and sharing of knowledge and a systematic attempt to provide a visible pedagogy that will support learners in understanding and acquiring the language and literacy practices that will enable them to participate within academic literacy communities. There are, however, a number of significant obstacles in the way. Chief amongst these is the fact that the separation of disciplinary and literacy instruction in the GCC as elsewhere is institutionalised. From the organisation of faculties and schools, to the respective job descriptions of disciplinary and literacy staff, to the perceptions of disciplinary staff as to their roles and duties, the separation between disciplinary and literacy teaching is radical. Overcoming this means change at every level: institutions need to see the need to build literacy instruction into disciplinary teaching and to make this possible through structural and systemic innovation; and disciplinary staff need to see that they are acculturators and literacy teachers as much as they are disciplinary content teachers. They need to develop an explicit awareness of the nature and peculiarity of their own literacy practices, to recognise that these practices may be opaque to many students and finally to recognise that they, rather than ESP teachers, are best placed to help their students understand and master these practices.

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4.4

Summary

In this chapter, I have raised the problem that faces higher education institutions in the GCC that students enter English-medium undergraduate studies with levels of English proficiency markedly lower than their counterparts in the UK or elsewhere. I have drawn on contemporary theoretical approaches to the scaffolding of academic literacy to suggest an approach based on an integration of disciplinary and literacy curricula and the adoption of a language-aware pedagogy that systematically modifies both linguistic input and interaction in order to make cognitively unsimplified academic input accessible to students with low English proficiencies. In my view, it is an approach worthy of consideration for higher education systems in the GCC.

References Al-Musawi, N. (2014). Strategic use of translation in learning English as a foreign language (EFL) among Bahrain University students. Comprehensive Psychology, 3, 1–10. Arrigoni, E., & Clark, V. (2015). Investigating the appropriateness of IELTS cut-off scores for admissions and placement decisions at an English medium university in Egypt. IELTS Research Reports Series, 3, 1–29. Bachman, L. F. (1990). Fundamental considerations in language testing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bachman, L. F., & Palmer, A. S. (1996). Language testing in practice: Designing and developing useful language tests. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bachman, L. F., & Palmer, A. S. (2010). Language assessment in practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bawarshi, A., & Reiff, M. J. (2010). Genre: An introduction to history, theory, research and pedagogy. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press. Bazerman, C., Little, J., Bethel, L., Chavkin, T., Fouquette, D., & Garufis, J. (2005). Reference guide to writing across the curriculum. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press. Belhiah, H., & Elhami, M. (2015). English as a medium of instruction in the gulf: When students and teachers speak. Language Policy, 14(1), 3–23. Bergman, B., Eriksson, A.-M., Blennow, J., Groot, J., & Hammarström, T. (2013). Reflections on an integrated content and language project-based design of a technical communication course for electrical engineering students. Journal of Academic Writing, 3(1), 1–14.

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Green, S. (2016). Teaching disciplinary writing as social practice: Moving beyond ‘text-in-context’ designs in UK higher education. Journal of Academic Writing, 6(1), 98–107. Gustafsson, M., Eriksson, A., Räisänen, C., Stenberg, A.-C., Jacobs, C., Wright, J., et al. (2011). Collaborating for content and language integrated learning: The situated character of faculty collaboration and student learning. Across the Disciplines, 8(3), 1–11 [Online]. Available from: http://wac.colostate.edu/ atd/clil/gustafssonetal.cfm. Accessed 5 June 2018. Gustafsson, M., & Jacobs, C. (2013). Editorial: Student learning and ICLHE— Frameworks and contexts. Journal of Academic Writing, 3(1), ii–xii. Harran, M. (2011). Engineering and language discourse collaboration: Practice realities. Across the Disciplines, 8(3) [Online]. Available from: https://wac. colostate.edu/docs/atd/clil/harran.pdf. Accessed 5 June 2018. Harrington, M., & Roche, T. (2014). Identifying academically at-risk students in an English-as-a-Lingua-Franca university setting. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 15, 37–47. Hirano, E. (2014). Refugees in first-year college: Academic writing challenges and resources. Journal of Second Language Writing, 23, 37–52. Hymes, D. (1972). On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride & J. Holmes (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: Selected readings (pp. 269–293). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ingram, D., & Bayliss, A. (2007). IELTS as a predictor of academic language performance: Pt 1. IELTS Research Reports, 7, 1–68. Johnson, R. K., & Swain, M. (1997). Immersion education: International perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kerstjens, M., & Nery, C. (2000). A study of the relationship between IELTS scores and students’ subsequent academic performance. In R. Tulloh (Ed.), IELTS research reports 2000 (pp. 86–108). IELTS Australia: Australian Capital Territory. Knoblock, N., & Youngquist, J. (2016). College-level sheltered instruction: Revisiting the issue of effectiveness. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 16(5), p49. Krashen, S. D. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon. Krashen, S. D. (1985). The input hypothesis: Issues and implications. London: Longman. Krashen, S. D. (1989). Language acquisition and language education: Extensions and applications. New York: Prentice Hall International. Lea, M. R. (2004). Academic literacies: A pedagogy for course design. Studies in Higher Education, 29(6), 739–756. Leibowitz, B., Bozalek, V., Carolissen, R., Nicholls, L., Rohleder, P., Smolders, T., et al. (2011). Learning together: Lessons from a collaborative curriculum

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design project. Across the Disciplines, 8(3) [Online]. Available from: https:// wac.colostate.edu/docs/atd/clil/leibowitzetal.pdf. Accessed 5 June 2018. Llinares, A., Whittaker, R., & Morton, T. (2012). The roles of language in CLILl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marton, F., & Säljö, R. (1976). On qualitative differences in learning: Outcome and process. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 46, 4–11. Mercer, N. (1995). The guided construction of knowledge: Talk amongst teachers and learners. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Mitchell, M., & Evison, A. (2006). Exploiting the potential of writing for educational change at Queen Mary, University of London. In L. Ganobscik-Williams (Ed.), Teaching academic writing in UK higher education (pp. 68–84). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Moore, T., & Morton, J. (2005). Dimensions of difference: A comparison of university writing and IELTS writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 4(1), 43–66. Murray, N., & Nallaya, S. (2016). Embedding academic literacies in university programme curricula: A case study. Studies in Higher Education, 41(7), 1296– 1312. Rose, D., Rose, M., Farrington, S., & Page, S. (2008). Scaffolding academic literacy with indigenous health sciences students: An evaluative study. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 7, 165–179. Sedgwick, C., Garner, M., & Vicente-Macia, I. (2016). Investigating the language needs of international nurses: Insiders’ perspectives. IELTS Research Reports Series, 2, 1–38. Short, D. J., Echevarría, J., & Richards-Tutor, C. (2011). Research on academic literacy development in sheltered instruction classrooms. Language Teaching Research, 15(3), 363–380. Short, D. J., Fidelman, C. G., & Louguit, M. (2012). Developing academic language in English language learners through sheltered instruction. TESOL Quarterly, 46(2), 334–361. Thomas, P. (2013). Transformation, dialogue and collaboration: Developing studio-based concept writing in art and design through embedded interventions. Journal of Academic Writing, 3(1), 42–66. Wingate, U. (2015). Academic literacy and student diversity: The case for inclusive practice. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Woods, D., Bruner, J., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17, 89–100.

CHAPTER 5

A Case in Point: The University of Leeds/Omani Ministry of Education BA Educational Studies Programme

Abstract Green discusses the ways in which the disciplinary learning and academic literacy of cohorts of Omani students with entry proficiencies of CEFR B1 were scaffolded on an undergraduate programme run jointly by the University of Leeds and the Omani Ministry of Education, in Oman, from 1999 to 2008. The programme was characterised by an integration of disciplinary and literacy study and a language-aware pedagogy enabling linguistic and interactional modification. This pedagogic approach enabled tutors to deliver cognitively unsimplified content in linguistically accessible ways and to carefully scaffold assessed student output. Keywords Oman · Undergraduate entry · Low-proficiency users of English · Teacher education

5.1

Introduction

In this section, I shall discuss the ways in which learning and literacy were scaffolded on an undergraduate programme run jointly by the University of Leeds and the Omani Ministry of Education, in Oman, from 1999 to 2009. Data used in this chapter were collected for an unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Some of the data have already appeared in Green (2013) and are © The Author(s) 2020 S. Green, Scaffolding Academic Literacy with Low-Proficiency Users of English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39095-2_5

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reproduced here with kind permission of the editors of Journal of English for Academic Purposes.

5.2

Background to the ‘Leeds BA Project’

In the mid-1990s, the Omani Ministry of Education embarked on an ambitious reconstruction of primary and secondary education, characterised by a move towards a learner-centred curriculum. English Language education was an important strand in this and central to the success of the reform was the education of Omani English teachers. To meet this challenge, the University of Leeds was commissioned, through competitive tender, to design and co-deliver with the Ministry of Education, the BA Educational Studies, a three-year undergraduate degree programme, concerned with the teaching of English to Young Learners (Atkins and Griffiths 2009). The programme ran for nearly a decade (1999–2008), served nearly 900 Omani teachers (Lamb and Borg 2009), and remains to date the largest international teacher education collaboration in the GCC (Wedell and Atkins 2009). The programme was also relatively successful, academically: over the six cohorts, of the 845 students who completed the programme, 1% achieved Honours Class I, 13% Class II Division I, 45% Class II Division II, 32% Class III, 5% achieved Ordinary, and 4% achieved an award lower than a degree (diploma or certificate). Although these figures may seem unimpressive in a UK context, they do impress when local circumstances, and the educational and linguistic starting point of the students, are taken into account. Firstly, the participants entered Level II of their degree directly so they missed out on the ‘grace year’ afforded students in the UK, and all of their marks counted towards their final degree classification. Secondly, the participants were not full-time students. They were all serving teachers and continued to teach throughout the programme, studying in the evenings, at weekends and during vacations. The only concessions made were an additional year to complete Levels II and III, and release from their schools for one day a week during term time to attend BA sessions at regional training centres. Thirdly, the great majority of the participants entered the programme with the equivalent of IELTS 4.5 or CEFR B1 (Lamb and Borg 2009). Few British universities would admit such students to a pre-sessional language course, let alone a degree programme. Further, although all of the participants held a diploma-level qualification from a teacher training college, few of them had ever been required

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to write more than a paragraph in English. They were unfamiliar with research reading, unused to the critical writing they were expected to produce, and unfamiliar with the values of the academic community within which they were to study. There was, for example, very little understanding of issues such as plagiarism (Gracey 2009; Lamb and Borg 2009). Given these serious challenges, the University and the Ministry recognised that the programme would have to be delivered in a way different from mainstream teaching in a UK university. The nature of this organisation of teaching and learning forms the main matter of this chapter. Before addressing it, however, I need to indicate how the data for this chapter were gathered.

5.3

Methodology

The data drawn upon in this chapter were collected and analysed for a Ph.D. thesis submitted to the University of Leeds in 2011 (Green 2011), a work which contains a very much fuller discussion of the methodology used. The aim of that Ph.D. research project was to identify and to understand the textual and interpersonal interactions three Omani students engaged in as they wrote their first three undergraduate assignments over the course of an academic year. My focus in that project was thus very much on the three students and their practices. My concern in this chapter, in contrast, is with the way the students’ practices were shaped and scaffolded by the support provided to them in their teaching and learning context. I am therefore concerned principally with what was in the background in my Ph.D. The research was undertaken while I worked for the Omani Ministry of Education as a ‘Regional Tutor’ (RT) (see below). The approach adopted to investigate the participants’ textual and interpersonal interactions was longitudinal case study. The former term indicates a study tracking development over time, and the latter, ‘a specific instance that is frequently designed to illustrate a more general principle … the single instance is of a bounded system, for example a child, a clique, a class, a school, a community’ (Cohen et al. 2000: 181). The study sought to provide a ‘thick description’ (Geertz 1973), or perhaps better, a ‘thick narrative’, of a specific bounded context developing over time, through the use of multiple research tools and the exploitation of multiple sources of data. Like all case studies, it aimed not to represent a larger population but to offer findings relatable to those in other analogous contexts (Bassey 1981, 1983). The chief virtue of the case study approach

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adopted was that the small-scale focus permitted triangulation—corroboration and convergence—through the exploitation of multiple methods and data-streams. There were four data-streams. The first was textual material. I collected all textual material available relating to the completion of the assignments. This included the completed assignments, drafts of the assignments, outlines, correspondence, e.g. email queries and responses, miscellaneous tools such as schedules and planning sheets created by the participants, and University of Leeds feedback sheets. It was not anticipated that these data would be directly useful in analysing process but it was considered likely to be important for cross-referencing and checking. The second was recordings of routine tutorials, selected to show the participants interacting with their tutor and thus some of the ways in which the participants were working. The third was a set of nine spoken journals or audio-logs (three per participant) maintained by the participants during the periods in which they were working on their assignments. A spoken journal was selected for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was felt that asking the participants to keep a written log detailing their writing process risked making the log a chore, especially as the participants were relatively low-level language users for whom regular writing, as opposed to speaking, was not an ordinary part of their routines. Secondly, it was felt that the spoken monologue format might encourage the participants to think aloud in a somewhat freer way than they might have done in writing. The final data-stream was a set of recorded semi-structured interviews (Drever 2003) which were used to clarify and discuss issues raised in the audio-logs. Data analysis was carried out as a process of reduction and display following Miles and Huberman (1994). Data reduction is ‘the process of selecting, focusing, simplifying, abstracting, and transforming the data that appear in written-up field notes or transcriptions’ (1994: 10). This chiefly is the purpose of coding and labelling and necessitates an interactive process in which the researcher shuttles back and forth between textual fragments and a progressively refined sets of categories, the ultimate aim being to construct a set of categories (just) complex and specific enough to account for all of the data (Dörnyei 2007). Data display aims ‘to assemble organized information into an immediately accessible compact form so that the analyst can see what is happening’

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(Miles and Huberman 1994: 11) through the use of tables or charts, for example. The three primary sources of data, the logs, the interviews and the tutorials, were treated separately, reflecting their different roles in the research process but in all cases an interactive process of category derivation and coding was carried out. The results of these analyses were subject to standard reliability measures: repeated coding by me after a period of six months and rating by another coder. In carrying out the study, I worked to standards of validity and reliability as understood within traditions of qualitative research (Holliday 2002; Silverman 2000) and to the ethical standards required by the University of Leeds. For example, with regard to validity, Holliday (2002) reconstructs the notion that a method must be shown to be measuring what it purports to measure, as a requirement to demonstrate step by step the procedures at work in a piece of the research: Whereas in quantitative research the source of validity is known, qualitative research has to show its workings every single time… This concept of ‘showing one’s workings’ reminds me of doing maths problems at school. One was never allowed just to give the right answer: this was not valid unless the steps taken to get to it were very clearly and properly laid out. (Holliday 2002: 8)

If the procedures can be described and explained (why, for example, the specific case was selected, how feasible it is, how substantial it is in terms of duration, depth and breadth, why the research activities were chosen and how they fit the social setting), we can say that they possess relative validity. Specifically, Holliday argues that a qualitative researcher needs to explain: the choice of social setting (how it represents the research topic in its role in society, how feasible, e.g. accessible it is, how substantial it is in terms of duration, depth and breadth); the choice of research activities (how they suit the social setting, how appropriate they are to researcherparticipant relationships, how coherent they are as a strategy); and the choice of themes and focuses (how they emerged, why they are significant, how far they represent the social setting).

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5.4

The Organisation of Teaching and Learning on the BA

One notable feature of the BA was the very low priority afforded discrete EAP instruction. The sole preparation afforded the students for their entry into Level II of a UK undergraduate degree programme was a two-week pre-sessional course covering basic reading and writing strategies, such as previewing, using indexes, skimming, close reading (Wallace 1992), and outlining, drafting, editing (Hedge 1988). This culminated in a 1500-word essay (Gracey 2009; Lamb and Borg 2009), which was followed up in the first intensive ‘winter school’ (see Appendix, Table A.1 for a plan of the first year of the programme), when the participants completed two 2.5 hour sessions on using source materials, referencing, summarising and using evidence in writing. They completed one further session, on outlining, during the course of the first ‘day-release’ block (see Appendix, Table A.1). They also undertook some General English training during the first day-release block (six 2.5 hour sessions), using published ELT textbooks. This was the sum total of the discrete language/literacy provision for the first year of the programme. However, modular teaching and learning were organised so as to compensate for this limitation, enacting an integrated content-literacy model in which key aspects of academic literacy work were interwoven with content studies. The features of this organisation of teaching and learning relevant to the scaffolding of emergent literacies may be considered under two headings: (a) making input accessible (i.e. the way modular content was taught in [winter/summer school] lectures and worked through and consolidated in subsequent [day-release] seminars) and (b) the scaffolding of assessed written outputs, partly in intensive winter/summer schools but chiefly during day-release blocks (see below). 5.4.1

Making Input Accessible

Teaching and learning on the BA were organised at both session and module level, to enable modular input to be presented, negotiated and appropriated by the students through application to local contexts and in terms of their own experience. At the level of the module, the BA offered two distinct and complementary modes of teaching and learning, the intensive and the extensive. The intensive winter and summer schools were two-week or six-week residential courses. Participants studied for

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5 hours per day, 5 days per week, in inter-regional groups of around 30, and were taught by University of Leeds Language Education lecturers, supported by ‘Regional Tutors’ (RTs), EAP-trained teachers employed through the Ministry of Education (Gracey 2009; Lamb and Borg 2009). Teaching in these intensive courses focused on introducing, explaining and demonstrating key concepts within the modular field. The extensive day-release mode, in which participants were released from their schools for one day a week to attend regional training centres, was concerned with consolidating understanding of concepts introduced during the winter and summer schools, chiefly by applying them to the local context. These blocks were taught by RTs alone, and over the course of a block, concepts would be reconstructed through elicitation, discussion and reading, and then applied to the participants’ own teaching contexts through class discussion and through a school visit programme in which RTs would observe and discuss lessons with regard to modular concepts. Where intensive blocks concentrated on initial input, and the construction of preliminary understandings, extensive blocks concentrated on consolidation, and support for the students’ assessed writing. There was thus a clear shift at the level of the module from an input/clarification phase to a consolidation/output phase (see Table 5.1). The teaching was supported in both intensive and extensive mode by libraries purchased by the Ministry of Education providing core books for each module and supplemented with selected journal articles in reading files. A similar distinction structured the way teaching sessions were organised in both intensive and extensive modes. In intensive mode, each modular session consisted of two parts, a plenary input part lasting 75 minutes, led by a Leeds tutor, supported by a RT, followed after a break by Table 5.1 Input to output on the BA Mode Input Clarification Consolidation Output

Intensive

Extensive

Winter/summer school Lectures Seminars

Day-release

Seminars and school visits Split-group discussions and tutorials

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split-group seminars of 75 minutes in which the input was reconstructed and clarified. These seminars were not spaces in which to introduce new ideas but rather spaces to clarify what had been introduced in the plenary session. Typically seminar tasks would require participants to apply concepts to their own learning and teaching contexts through, for example, analysing teaching material. A sample winter school lecture/seminar plan, showing this movement from input to clarification, is given in Table A.2 (Appendix). The input session consisted of a video-stimulated exploration of the role of context in the construction of meaning, a discussion of the kind of contexts familiar to Grade 1 Omani primary school children, followed by tutor input on the way children use contexts to read intentions. The clarification session, after a 15-minute break, consisted of a review of ideas and terms, an activity in which participants created contexts and communicative purposes for specific language items, an activity in which participants analysed how contexts and purposes were constructed in their Grade 1 English textbooks, and then a summary activity at the end. Similarly, in day-release a session would typically commence with a plenary phase in which participants would work through tasks together, often doing similar kinds of tasks to those in the intensive mode seminars in order to consolidate understanding of course concepts. This would be followed by a second, split-group phase. One half of the group would work independently in the regional centre library, usually on their assignments, while the other half either had individual assignment-related tutorials with the RT, or worked with the RT as a small group discussing modular or assignment issues. In both intensive and extensive mode, the success of teaching depended on the ability of course tutors to modify both input and interaction in order to make the negotiation of meaning possible. They did so firstly, by grading language, repeating and paraphrasing, using comprehension checks, and eliciting clarification checks, the kinds of naturally occurring input and interaction modifications widely highlighted in the second language acquisition literature (e.g. Gass et al. 2013). Secondly, they balanced input and clarification activities, controlled the length of input sections, interspersed input sections with buzz-group activities to allow students to share and check understandings and to ask questions before moving on, and facilitated group discussions to clarify, plan and rehearse.

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Some insight into the impact of this organisation of teaching and learning is given by Green (2011). Although data collection for this study was restricted to the periods in which the participants were working on their assignments, so unfortunately excludes the intensive winter and summer schools, the data do offer insight into the ways input was made accessible during day-release. Appendix, Table A.3, for example, shows a sequence of six sessions devoted to reviewing the first module (EDUC 2031, Methodology of Teaching English to Young Learners ) and scaffolding the writing of the first assignment, in one regional group. The first reviewed modular concepts that would feature in the assignment such as presentation, practice, children’s characteristics as learners, criteria for effective presentation and practice, the second and third sessions deepened the consolidation through discussion of two sets of teaching materials, the fourth through extended analysis of a video clip of a lesson. These sessions were clearly of benefit in clarifying ideas. For example, in her log covering the writing of the first assignment, Miad, one of the three focal participants, commented on the opportunities day-release gave her for asking questions and clarifying issues: our second week of day-release + well I like day-release because always I ask so many questions + you know that I am asking you so many questions but when you answer me I feel that my self-confidence + sometimes the questions I am asking you I know the answers but I want to feel confident. (Miad, Assignment 1, Log, Entry 17)

It is also clear that the library resources afforded during day-release were central to this consolidation of understanding, as Miad, again, indicates: today I decided to read again ‘Children Learning English’ by Jayne Moon I read it before and I like it today I was reading ways of supporting children’s language learning oh I like it this book I really love it because it is very clear and I understand a lot + there are things like teachers + pupils + you know + commentary also I like it + I am gaining so many things. (Miad, Assignment 1, Log, Entry 19)

5.4.2

Scaffolding Output

Assignment support was carefully regulated through a set of support guidelines to ensure RTs across the regions provided a roughly equal

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amount of support. Typically, the kinds of things RTs would do to support students would include: helping students consolidate their understanding of modular concepts through class discussion of various kinds, often focusing on something concrete such as a set of materials or a video clip of a lesson, and often with the intention of helping participants frame their own local experience using these concepts, as discussed above; analysing and unpacking the assignment question to identify sub-tasks; constructing and revising outlines; modelling specific elements or practices in the assignment such as going through reading lists or note-taking; responding individually to pedagogic extension material (i.e. teaching materials the participants had selected, designed or adapted), to plans/outlines and drafts; scaffolding the process of planning and completing the assignment, through, for example, the use of process checklists; and finally discussion/ mediation of feedback on marked assignments provided by markers. This support achieved both authenticity and timeliness. It was authentic because the support focused on the students’ actual assignment writing: the support was targeted at the specific challenges posed by the writing of the specific modular assignments. The modelling of note-taking practices, for example, took place in the context of looking at one of the sources for the first assignment. The work on planning writing processes took place in the context of the planning of the first assignment. There was no generic input and therefore no question of irrelevance. Support was also appropriately timely because the work was undertaken when the students needed to do it: input was provided to tackle specific challenges as they arose over the course of the assignment-writing period. Support for assignment writing in all regions started with a very close and comprehensive scaffolding which covered all areas of content/concepts, genre, process and register, but which became progressively looser as the students built up tacit knowledge of assignment writing and were able to do more for themselves. Appendix, Table A.4 shows a plan for the scaffolding of the first three assignments (which formed the focus of the first year’s work) from my own regional group, showing how scaffolding became progressively looser and less prescriptive over the year. For example, where support for all three assignments contained a review of concepts from the winter and summer schools, only for the first assignment was there plenary class activity to apply modular concepts to concrete examples, e.g. teaching materials, video clips of lessons. Perhaps more significantly for the first assignment, I prescribed a framework for

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tutorials and each student was obliged to attend all three and to submit work for each one. For the second and third assignments, this framework was loosened and students were relatively free to attend tutorials or not. The second was to help the students clarify their representations of the assignment task and in particular to help them ‘unpack’ it as a set of interacting, inter-dependent sub-tasks, for example, to construct a theoretical framework drawing on the modular literature, to design a lesson plan, to evaluate it using the framework and so on, each of which could then be further analysed into sub-sub-tasks, such as finding literature, notetaking, note-making to develop ideas and so forth. For example, Thikra, the second of the three focal participants, writes in her log: today after the class I have a good idea how to organise the main body of my assignment and I am going to explain what does a meaningful and purposeful situation mean + from the theory part I will start with the theory part with the definition and give some examples and explain why we should use a meaningful and purposeful situation in our activity and also I am going to discuss what other writer has said and if I am agree with what they have said or not and then I am going to give my opinion with examples from my experience + I am going to discuss also why young learners have to have a reason to communicate and how does a meaningful and purposeful situation support their learning. (Thikra, Assignment 1, Log, Entry 5)

It is also clear that central to the benefits was the opportunity to share and exchange ideas with colleagues both informally and in structured discussion. As Thikra reported in her log: today from early morning we went to the library I and my colleagues + we spent there some time to complete our assignments to discuss ideas together to reorganise the assignment again, to reorganise the ideas of supporting children’s learning, of meaningful and purposeful of presenting and practice + we can see if we are missing an idea from each other + I found out from this discussion that I am missing a very important thing which is my own definitions of meaningful situation and purposeful situation so this discussion was really useful for me + we also discussed the introduction what we are going to do in the introduction, if what we did in our introduction was right or if we have to change something in it but thank God it was nearly the same maybe the organisation is different but nearly the same ideas we have got in the discussion + we also discussed how many references should we have how we are going to organise the

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references and what we are going to put in them. (Thikra, Assignment 1, Log, Entry 19)

The third was to help with the process: firstly at the level of management, i.e. planning what needed to be done and scheduling a sequence of actions. The first session introduced some aspects of the process and the fifth session made use of a checklist. Secondly, the sessions were aimed at helping with the process at the level of practices through, for example, modelling working through a reading list, locating sources on the library shelves, previewing a book, using the contents pages and the index to locate key information, taking notes, taking down citation information, using sources in a way that avoids plagiarism (first session, fifth session). A process was in fact imposed on the students by the sequence of tutorials. I insisted that each participant first show me their pedagogic application and I gave feedback by email and in a tutorial on this. The next tutorial was given over to an outline in which the participants had to show the structure and content of their paper. This meant that the students had to work out in detail what they wanted to say before starting to write. The final tutorial was given over to commenting on a section of a draft. Writing after her first tutorial, Miad said: day three of our day-release in our individual discussion today I felt really happy when I discussed my activity with you + you showed me I am on the right lines + in my mind I am going to write at least half the first draft but the only thing that I didn’t start it the outline planner + I don’t know why I feel it should come first from pre-session because now we don’t have time anymore. (Miad, Assignment 1, Log, Entry 22)

Very clearly, each of the participants benefitted from this individualised feedback. For example, Thikra: today I showed Simon my draft and he said it’s ok fine but he advised me that the second part should be in paragraphs not in steps and refer them to the appendix and he also told me to name the sections not just call them ‘Section 1’, ‘Section 2’ but call them like ‘Children’s Characteristics’, ‘Description of the Activity’ and all these things.

However, they all found the feedback in tutorials or by email posed them with further problems. For example, Miad received fairly critical feedback on her outline to which she responded below:

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well I received your reply on my outline and I am shocked + really I didn’t like that + so many comments + you know Simon with your comments you push me back twenty steps back + oh I don’t know I am upset again + ok I know I have a problem in introduction from the pre-session I am expecting that but the only thing I don’t understand you are telling me that would usually be considered a request and the shop-keeper would be expected to produce a teddy-bear not just yes I have + well it is in the question + I am following the question of the assignment + how can you tell me that? + oh I am not going to look at anything about BA until next Tuesday and then you tell me don’t worry + of course I will worry. (Miad, Assignment 1, Log, Entry 27)

However, she reworked her outline and received a more positive response in due course: I received the reply of my outline my second outline ok thank you I am happy you know when I read it I felt if I am going to follow this maybe I will not get lost like when I was reading there and I felt I was in the desert it’s like a map yes so today I am going to start to write my introduction I am happy because of that reply and I am going to start to write it + I have to go back again to the pre-session about introduction. (Miad, Assignment 1, Log, Entry 32)

However, the process imposed by the sequence of required outputs did not suit everybody. Each of the participants found outlining a challenge but none more so than Tattoo, the third of my focal participants, who spent the best part of a month trying to write her outline. As noted in Green (2013) when freed from the framework I imposed, Tattoo chose to engage in minimal pre-draft planning preferring to invest her time in iterative recursive drafting. This suggests that although close scaffolding was necessary, greater flexibility was required. Two final aspects of the scaffolding were, firstly, the provision of a sample assignment which the participants looked at under rather restricted conditions and secondly the feedback they received with their grades. The sample assignment was welcomed, and in fact, all three participants said that if they lacked anything in the scaffolding of their assignments, it was the chance to see more examples. As Tattoo noted:

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I hope at one point we can judge ourselves with native-speakers from Leeds doing the same programme how their assignments is I mean one maybe one from A and one from B I hope to see that next.

The feedback was also well received and generally deemed to be useful. For example, Miad noted: I want to see this time those areas that I did went wrong the feedback sheet gave me a clear picture what markers looking for in the assignment + and the feedback feedback er sheet it has taught me + to think like a lawyer.

Tattoo, however, had mixed feelings about this, expressing the feeling that although the feedback had pointed out problems, it had not shown her how to improve: yes and no … yes because there were some points that maybe I wasn’t aware of it maybe organization … no it’s not helpful + because the things that erm I mean the things you feel yourself as I mean you have done your best then you find out no you haven’t done your best I don’t know how much … it’s not demotivating I mean I can’t find the word I don’t know how to express it that’s why I said I don’t know we are mature students I myself I understand what she is doing is for our benefit she wants us to write better but the thing is you come to the point to think I don’t know how to make it better I mean what should I do more?

5.5

Discussion

In the preceding pages, I have tried to show how the problems posed by cohorts of students entering first year undergraduate studies with CEFR B1 levels of English, rather than the CEFR B2 level required of ESL undergraduates in the UK, were addressed through the development of a particular organisation of teaching and learning. On the BA programme, teaching was structured in ways that facilitated a progression from initial input and clarification in intensive study mode, to consolidation and output in extensive study mode. In intensive study mode, lectures presented modular concepts which were then clarified through discussion and application in seminars. These preliminary understandings of modular concepts

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were deepened and consolidated in extensive mode through day-release sessions and school visits in which students had the opportunity to discuss their teaching with their tutors in the light of modular concepts. This sequence permitted a degree of analysis and application to real-life contexts and problems that could foster a deep processing (Marton and Säljö 1976) of ideas. It also facilitated the integration of literacy support instruction with disciplinary study. Discrete EAP instruction on the BA was extremely limited, especially compared with the intensive study offered ESL international students on a UK university pre-sessional course (typically between 5 and 10 weeks of intensive study). On the BA, literacy support was interwoven into the work undertaken by regional tutors in extensive study mode in the weekly day-release sessions. In these sessions, work on the consolidation of disciplinary concepts was interwoven with work on the literacy practices required to address the students’ assessed assignments. Literacy practices such as searching for literature using reading lists, electronic search engines, contents pages and indexes were modelled in the context of scaffolding the writing of specific assessed assignments. Writing strategies such as outlining, drafting and editing were modelled and supported through the process structures imposed by tutors and their feedback. There was thus no distinction between disciplinary study and literacy support. This meant that literacy instruction had two critical features: it was always authentic, that is it always modelled and supported exactly the literacy practices the students needed to master, and it was always timely, that is it was always directed at meeting students’ needs when they experienced those needs. The integration of disciplinary and literacy study in the extensive mode of the BA has much in common with ideas advanced by Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education theorists such as Gustafsson and Jacobs (2013) and Writing in the Disciplines theorists such as Deane and O’Neill (2011) and Clughen (2012). The practical experience of tutors and students, which I have tried to illustrate in the discussion above, has parallels with the experiences reported by, for example, Mitchell and Evison (2006). The integration of disciplinary and literacy study facilitated the careful, authentic and timely scaffolding of output: it enabled tutors to provide appropriate literacy input when it was needed to help

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students meet the challenges they faced with their disciplinary assignments. This, it would seem to me, is the chief value of an integrated literacy and disciplinary pedagogy: it enables tutors to address literacy problems, to make literacy practices transparent, to discuss and model solutions and to do so when students experience those problems and are seeking solutions. Classroom input in lectures and seminars, in intensive and extensive study mode, was made accessible to ESL undergraduates with CEFR B1 levels of English by language-aware tutors who were able to modify both their linguistic input through conscious grading of language and pacing of delivery, and classroom interaction. This facilitated negotiation of meaning through a structure in which input stages were kept brief and focused, and interspersed with buzz-groups to permit peer-checking and question and answer phases. This systematic modification of input and interaction by language-aware tutors has many parallels with the kinds of pedagogic practices systematised in the SIOP model (Echevarría et al. 2008, 2011; Short et al. 2011). These practices make it possible to present unsimplified disciplinary input to students who lack the levels of English typically required by universities in the UK. Further, through the provision of comprehensible input (Krashen 1985; Krashen 1982) and ample opportunities for interaction and output (Swain and Lapkin 1998), these practices create an enabling context (Freedman 1993) in which linguistic development can take place. The experience of the BA project does offer support to organisations of teaching and learning such as ICLHE and WID which seek to integrate disciplinary and literacy curricula and to SI and SDAIE which seek to make unsimplified disciplinary input accessible through linguistic and interactional modification. More importantly, the experience shows that in a GCC context such as Oman, with students entering Englishmedium undergraduate studies with CEFR B1 English and severe academic literacy deficits, it is possible to construct an organisation of teaching and learning which does not overwhelm students with linguistic input far above their level or force them to intuit appropriate literacy practices largely alone. Clearly, the BA was a unique response to an unusual situation and I am not suggesting that the specific organisation adopted by the Ministry of Education and the University of Leeds could or should be replicated. I am not doing so because this would be unnecessary:

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what really seemed to be critical in the success of the BA was the provision of accessible disciplinary input and the careful, gradated scaffolding of output. These two things could be provided within a very wide range of institutional structures and systems. They could in fact be provided relatively easily within the existing higher education institutions of the GCC. What is required on the part of institutions and academic staff in the GCC is a recognition of the interdependence of disciplinary and literacy study and a willingness to act upon the implications of that interdependence. In practical terms, two things are required. Firstly, higher education institutions need to provide language-awareness training for disciplinary lecturers and systematic training in simple techniques for grading linguistic input and modifying classroom interaction, along broadly the lines indicated in the SIOP model, to make classroom discourse accessible to students with CEFR B1 English. This may well involve a role for translanguaging but if GCC higher education institutions wish to sustain their commitment to English-medium instruction, this translanguaging has to be enacted skilfully in such a way that Arabic does not replace English. The second is to permit an expansion of disciplinary curricula to permit space for literacy instruction arising organically from the disciplinary work at hand.

5.6

Summary

In this chapter, I have discussed the experience of the University of Leeds/Omani Ministry of Education BA Educational Studies programme, with regard to the organisation of teaching and learning. I have argued that the integration of disciplinary and literacy study and the language-aware pedagogy made possible the provision of accessible disciplinary input and the scaffolding of output. These two features I have argued were critical to the success of the programme. Further, I have suggested that the integration of disciplinary and literacy instruction and the delivery of classes by language-aware disciplinary academics capable of linguistic and interactional modification could be achieved within existing GCC higher educational institutions and together, represent a viable solution to the problems posed by low levels of English language proficiency in entrants to undergraduate study in the GCC.

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References Atkins, J., & Griffiths, D. (2009). Background to the BA (TESOL) programme and project. In J. Atkins, M. Lamb, & M. Wedell (Eds.), International collaboration for educational change: The BA project (pp. 1–10). Muscat: Ministry of Education, Sultanate of Oman. Bassey, M. (1981). Pedagogic research: On the relative merits of search for generalisation and study of single events. Oxford Review of Education, 7 (1), 73–94. Bassey, M. (1983). Pedagogic research into singularities: Case-studies, probes and curriculum innovations. Oxford Review of Education, 9(2), 109–121. Clughen, L. (2012). Writing in the disciplines: Building supportive cultures for student writing in UK higher education. Bingley: Emerald. Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2000). Research methods in education. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Deane, M., & O’Neill, P. (2011). Writing in the disciplines. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dörnyei, Z. (2007). Research methods in applied linguistics: Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methodologies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drever, E. (2003). Using semi-structured interviews in small-scale research: A teacher’s guide (Rev ed.). Glasgow: Scottish Council for Research in Education. Echevarría, J., Richards-Tutor, C., Canges, R., & Francis, D. (2011). Using the SIOP model to promote the acquisition of language and science concepts with English learners. Bilingual Research Journal, 34(3), 334–351. Echevarría, J., Vogt, M. E., & Short, D. (2008). Making content comprehensible for English language learners: The SIOP model. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Freedman, A. (1993). Show and tell? The role of explicit teaching in the learning of new genres. Research in the Teaching of English, 27 (3), 222–251. Gass, S. M., Behney, J., & Plonsky, L. (2013). Second language acquisition: An introductory course. New York: Routledge. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books. Gracey, C. (2009). Being a regional tutor on the BA Educational Studies (TESOL) programme. In J. Atkins, M. Lamb, & M. Wedell (Eds.), International collaboration for educational change: The BA project (pp. 60–69). Muscat: Ministry of Education, Sultanate of Oman. Green, S. (2011). The construction of academic literacy: Process case-studies from a TESOL context in Oman (Unpublished PhD thesis). University of Leeds. Green, S. (2013). Novice ESL writers: A longitudinal case-study of the situated academic writing processes of three undergraduates in a TESOL context. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 12(3), 180–191. Gustafsson, M., & Jacobs, C. (2013). Editorial: Student learning and ICLHE— Frameworks and contexts. Journal of Academic Writing, 3(1), ii–xii.

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Hedge, T. (1988). Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holliday, A. (2002). Qualitative research. London: Sage. Krashen, S. D. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon. Krashen, S. D. (1985). The input hypothesis: Issues and implications. London: Longman. Lamb, M., & Borg, S. (2009). The design and evolution of the BA Educational Studies (TESOL) programme: Perspectives from Leeds. In J. Atkins, M. Lamb, & M. Wedell (Eds.), International collaboration for educational change: The BA project. Muscat: Ministry of Education, Sultanate of Oman. Marton, F., & Säljö, R. (1976). On qualitative differences in learning: Outcome and process. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 46, 4–11. Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook. London: Sage. Mitchell, M., & Evison, A. (2006). Exploiting the potential of writing for educational change at Queen Mary, University of London. In L. Ganobscik-Williams (Ed.), Teaching academic writing in UK higher education (pp. 68–84). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Short, D. J., Echevarría, J., & Richards-Tutor, C. (2011). Research on academic literacy development in sheltered instruction classrooms. Language Teaching Research, 15(3), 363–380. Silverman, D. (2000). Doing qualitative research. London: Sage. Swain, M., & Lapkin, S. (1998). Problems in output and the cognitive processes they generate: A step towards second language learning. Applied Linguistics, 16(3), 371–391. Wallace, C. (1992). Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wedell, M., & Atkins, J. (2009). The BA project as an example of large-scale educational change. In J. Atkins, M. Lamb, & M. Wedell (Eds.), International collaboration for educational change: The BA project (pp. 2001–2011). Muscat: Ministry of Education, Sultanate of Oman.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

Abstract Green concludes the book, drawing together the threads of the argument and discusses its implications for policy-makers and academics in higher education institutions in the GCC. Green suggests that to make English-medium instruction work for students with low English language proficiencies higher education institutions need to consider an integrated content and literacy curriculum and to facilitate the introduction of a language-aware pedagogy. Green also considers the wider implications, for higher education in the UK and other countries where English remains the majority first language. Although problems may be less acute, an integration of literacy and content instruction might also benefit higher education in the UK. Keywords Higher education in the GCC · Higher education in the UK · Disciplinary academics · EAP/ESP teachers

In this short, final chapter, I shall draw together some of the threads of the discussion so far and then outline what I see as the principal implications for policy-makers and academic staff in the GCC, and beyond. In this book, I have tried to sketch out what ‘academic literacy’ means (Chapter 2), how higher education institutions in both the UK and the GCC may and typically do respond to the problems posed by the construction of academic literacies (Chapter 3), and I have tried to indicate the particular academic literacy problems facing English-medium higher © The Author(s) 2020 S. Green, Scaffolding Academic Literacy with Low-Proficiency Users of English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39095-2_6

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education institutions in areas such as the Gulf Cooperation Council, where students enter English-medium undergraduate studies with English language proficiencies markedly lower than their counterparts in universities in the UK or other countries where English remains the dominant first language. British, North American and other universities rarely admit students with less than CEFR B2 proficiencies in English, but GCC universities must admit students with B1 and often at the lower end of that band. While GCC universities admit students with markedly lower proficiencies in English, they replicate closely the organisational systems, hierarchies and academic divisions of Western universities. In particular, GCC universities replicate the structural division between disciplinary or subject teaching and language/academic literacy instruction that characterises universities in the UK, USA and elsewhere. The teaching of credit-bearing degree courses remains the province of physics, maths, sociology or other disciplinary academics, who concentrate on teaching ‘content’, while all matters to do with the language of study, and the literacy practices involved in constructing and sharing knowledge in those disciplines, are devolved to disciplinary outsiders based in language centres, foundation skills units, study skills units, writing centres, lifelong learning units or other discrete academic support units. This separation means that the discussion of language and literacy has no place in the disciplinary classroom. If students encounter language difficulties or find the literacy practices of sociology opaque, these are not perceived as matters for the disciplinary academic to solve: they are understood as deficiencies the student must overcome with the support of the language and literacy affordances their university provides. The upshot of these two facts is that in higher education institutions in the GCC, the great majority of students entering first year undergraduate studies experience a structural mismatch between the English language proficiencies they command and the linguistic challenges posed by the lectures they attend, the books they have to read and the assignments and exams they have to write. In Chapter 4, I have tried to suggest some of the ways in which academics in higher education institutions respond to the contradictory situation in which they find themselves: the need to teach specific disciplinary content, through the medium of English, to students who lack (what they perceive to be) the requisite levels of English. One is the systematic use of translation or translanguaging in which Arabic is used either to scaffold the comprehension of English, or

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in which English is effectively replaced as the medium of instruction by Arabic. As I have argued, there are obvious attractions to the use of Arabic as a medium of instruction in an Arabic-speaking country, and a skilful translanguaging policy might achieve results. However, unless GCC governments are prepared to invest the resources that would be needed to introduce Arabic medium of bilingual higher education, and accept the consequences for the participation of young Arabs in international scientific discourse communities, they are obliged to make English-medium instruction work. To be precise, they have to work out how disciplinary content can be taught through the medium of English to students with low proficiencies in English. Arabic-English translanguaging may be one scaffold that might be deployed, but this does not alter the basic reality that it is English-medium instruction that needs to be scaffolded. In the remainder of Chapter 4, I drew on a number of contemporary theoretical movements within higher education such as Writing in the Disciplines (WID) (Bazerman et al. 2005), Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education (ICLHE) (Gustafsson and Jacobs 2013), Sheltered Instruction (SI) (Echevarría et al. 2008; Short et al. 2011) and Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE) (Cline and Necochea 2003) to offer what I believe to be a viable way forward. I have argued that the integration of literacy instruction with disciplinary study suggested by each of these movements and the systematic modification of linguistic input and classroom interaction advocated by SI and SDAIE offers a way of addressing the disciplinary and literacy learning challenges posed by low English language proficiencies in English-medium higher education in the GCC. The embedding of literacy instruction within disciplinary instruction suggested by WID and ICLHE theories brings discussion of language and literacy practices back into the disciplinary classroom as a valid shared focus of attention and offers students literacy support that is both authentic and timely: it relates to their literacy needs, when they experience those needs. The systematic provision of comprehensible input (Krashen 1982, 1985) and the modification of classroom interaction suggested by SI and SDAIE theorists offer a way in which disciplinary academics, perhaps advised by or even working with EAP/ESP teachers, might teach unsimplified disciplinary content in accessible ways. In Chapter 5, I discussed one recent large-scale example of an undergraduate programme for students with a CEFR B1 English proficiency, a teacher education programme delivered in Oman from 1999 to 2009, which adopted an organisation of teaching and learning which enacted

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many of the key practices advocated by WID, ICLHE, SI and SDAIE. Specifically, the programme integrated literacy instruction with disciplinary teaching so literacy instruction was always contextualised, relevant and timely and the programme was taught by language-aware tutors who were able to modify interaction and input systematically. The consequence of this approach was that input was made accessible and output (student assignments) was carefully scaffolded. The experience of the Leeds/Oman BA demonstrates that such an approach is both practicable and relatively effective. In Chapter 1, I indicated that I believe this book has relevance for a number of different audiences, both in the GCC and beyond. The first audience consists of higher education policy-makers in the GCC nations in ministries of higher education and in individual higher education institutions or groups of institutions. The approach I have suggested requires both a curricular expansion to permit the integration of literacy instruction within disciplinary teaching and the adoption of a systematic, language-aware approach to disciplinary/literacy teaching. Rather than devolving academic literacy responsibilities to discrete units outside disciplinary studies, higher education institutions would relocate literacy instruction to the disciplinary classroom and weave it into the disciplinary curriculum and disciplinary assessment. Further, higher education institutions would seek to develop an academic staff sufficiently language-aware and sufficiently pedagogically skilled to be able to make the input and interaction modifications necessary to make disciplinary content accessible to students with low English language proficiencies. These are major structural innovations with wide-reaching implications for university organisation, recruitment and staff development policies, for academic job and role specifications and for wider and local academic cultures within universities. Such innovations could only be initiated and carried into effect by the executive management teams of faculties or universities mobilising the support of academics and administrators throughout the university. This would be a major undertaking, and as Macaro et al. (2018) indicate in their review of studies of staff perceptions of the implementation of English-medium instruction, GCC higher education institutions have rarely shown great willingness to consult and engage with staff. However, such are the problems posed by English-medium instruction as presently organised and such the dearth of solutions, that forward-looking institutions may yet grasp the nettle. Further, I would argue that were higher

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education institutions in the GCC to consider such an innovation, their most important task would be educational: raising the awareness of disciplinary and literacy academics of the interconnection of content and language and so of disciplinary and literacy education, and investing sufficient amounts of time in training, mentoring and monitoring staff in delivering integrated curricula and language-aware pedagogies. There is nothing intrinsically difficult about the kinds of linguistic and interactional modification enacted on the Leeds BA, or systematised in the SIOP and SDAIE models. There is no intrinsic reason why an academic engineer should not achieve a level of awareness of the impact of word-choice or grammatical complexity on the understanding of his/her students, and similarly, there is no reason why a medical lecturer should not come to understand the possible effect of techniques such as chunking input into short bursts followed by ‘buzz-groups’ to permit students to share understandings and then ask clarificatory questions. Further, there is no reason why an academic geologist might not achieve an explicit level of understanding of the literacy practices of geology to be able to offer feedback on written assessed work that will give students insights into the kind of writing expected, develop skills of judgement and acquire strategic writing skills. All that is really required is a willingness on the part of GCC institutions to invest in staff training and the willingness of staff to embrace new understandings of their working responsibilities. For disciplinary teachers in the GCC, the implications are also fairly clear. Even if institutional policies do not change, there are practices that any teacher could adopt in order to make English-medium instruction accessible. These are developed fully in the SIOP model (Echevarría et al. 2008, 2011). Techniques such as ‘flipped input’ (Bergmann and Sams 2012) whereby input is given in advance of a class and then clarified and discussed in class, the breaking of streams of input into time-limited chunks (Cline and Necochea 2003), the use of ‘buzz-groups’ to permit students to share understandings (Brookfield 2015), the systematic use of questions to check understanding, the conscious pacing of delivery, of word-choice, of grading syntactic complexity are all open to any teacher regardless of discipline. All that is really required is that disciplinary teachers first acknowledge the linguistic dimension of their work and then commit to exploring it and acting upon what they discover. Further, disciplinary teachers need to reflect on the way they write and communicate in their discipline and how these ways might appear to students new to disciplinary communities.

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For ESP teachers in the GCC, there are also important implications. The approach to literacy instruction I am suggesting would entail a changed and expanded role for EAP/ESP teachers. Theirs is an expertise that is and will remain essential to understanding academic communication but the way they use this expertise would change. The site of literacy instruction would move from the EAP/ESP class in a language centre to the disciplinary programme and the work students do for, and in their disciplinary classes. The chief role of the literacy tutor would be to work with, advise and support a disciplinary tutor and to be a literacy resource upon which the disciplinary tutor could draw. In the initial to intermediate stages of a curriculum reform, it is likely that collaborations of the kind described by Thomas (2013), Leibowitz (2005), Leibowitz et al. (2011), and Harran (2011) would be the norm. To what extent it would ever be possible to move beyond such partnerships would depend on the ability and willingness of disciplinary tutors to manage the literacy aspect of their teaching. As Harran (2011) and others have shown, collaborations are complex, often uneasy, difficult to initiate and more difficult to maintain. Nevertheless, I would argue that initiating and sustaining such collaborations are the most useful things EAP/ESP teachers can do to foster an integrated content/literacy approach to the organisation of teaching and learning in the GCC. The aim, I would argue, is to reach a point in a collaboration when literacy and content tutors no longer define themselves in those terms but instead, as Marshall et al. (2011) have argued, define themselves first of all as disciplinary ‘discourse tutors’. To move towards this, I would argue that EAP/ESP teachers in the GCC need to begin to challenge the institutional separation of disciplinary and literacy instruction. I think the evidence from the literature and the online professional fora suggests a growing awareness amongst ESP professionals, that language and literacy teaching are not separable from disciplinary teaching and that attempting to divorce the two does violence to the teaching of both. Consolidating and deepening this understanding amongst EAP/ESP practitioners is a necessary first stage but beyond that practitioners need to make it their mission to challenge this separation through initiating systematic discussion with their disciplinary colleagues. For example, instead of running TESOL conferences attended exclusively by EAP/ESP teachers who pass back and forwards the same kinds of understandings and perspectives, language centres or foundation studies units in GCC universities should instead initiate disciplinary

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literacy conferences, set up and attended by both literacy practitioners and disciplinary academics. Instead of a TESOL conference, a university might set up an engineering literacy conference to bring engineers and ESP teachers together to exchange, and change, their understandings, and to develop shared policies and practices. In suggesting such innovations, I in no way underestimate the obstacles posed by disciplinary academic cultures and institutional inertia. However, I believe it to be the only real way forward. One has to start somewhere. As I have indicated, the principal implications of this book are for academics and educational leaders in higher education institutions in the GCC. However, I believe the implications ripple out some way beyond the GCC. Most of the research into SI, SDAIE, WID and ICLHE has been carried out in secondary or higher education in the USA, the UK and other English-majority-first-language countries, and there are strong grounds for considering their application in disciplinary programmes and classrooms in universities in those countries. Such universities may be in the privileged position of being able to admit only those international students who have a relatively high level of English but as much of the literature on literacy learning in UK universities shows, the construction of academic literacies by both international and home students poses persistent challenges. The issue here may not be as acute as in the GCC because no UK university admits undergraduates with IELTS 4.5 English. However, the persistent problems faced by international students, nontraditional students and indeed many traditional home students in understanding what is required of them in terms of academic communication suggest that the ideas discussed in Chapter 4, that literacy instruction may be made relevant, timely and contextualised by embedding it within expanded disciplinary curricula and that students’ understanding of lecture content and discussion might be facilitated by adoption of some of the techniques associated with SI and SDAIE, might have relevance for UK universities too. Again the implications are probably clearest for policy-makers within UK higher education institutions but as in the GCC, disciplinary academics and EAP/ESP teachers have much to gain from considering these ideas. As discussed in Chapter 4, ideas derived from WID are already being tried out in some UK contexts and pedagogic practices similar to those adopted in SI and SDAIE are already considered good practice.

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References Bazerman, C., Little, J., Bethel, L., Chavkin, T., Fouquette, D., & Garufis, J. (2005). Reference guide to writing across the curriculum. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press. Bergmann, J., & Sams, A. (2012). Flip your classroom: Reach every student in every class every day. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education. Brookfield, S. (2015). The skillful teacher on technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Cline, Z., & Necochea, J. (2003). Specially designed academic instruction in English (SDAIE): More than just good instruction. Multicultural Perspectives, 5(1), 18–24. Echevarría, J., Richards-Tutor, C., Canges, R., & Francis, D. (2011). Using the SIOP model to promote the acquisition of language and science concepts with English learners. Bilingual Research Journal, 34(3), 334–351. Echevarría, J., Vogt, M. E., & Short, D. (2008). Making content comprehensible for English language learners: The SIOP model. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon. Gustafsson, M., & Jacobs, C. (2013). Editorial: Student learning and ICLHE— Frameworks and contexts. Journal of Academic Writing, 3(1), ii–xii. Harran, M. (2011). Engineering and language discourse collaboration: Practice realities. Across the Disciplines, 8(3) [Online]. Available from: https://wac. colostate.edu/docs/atd/clil/harran.pdf. Accessed 5 June 2018. Krashen, S. D. (1982). Principles and practice in second language acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon. Krashen, S. D. (1985). The input hypothesis: Issues and implications. London: Longman. Leibowitz, B. (2005). Learning in an additional language in a multilingual society: A South African case study on university-level writing. TESOL Quarterly, 39(4), 661–681. Leibowitz, B., Bozalek, V., Carolissen, R., Nicholls, L., Rohleder, P., Smolders, T., et al. (2011). Learning together: Lessons from a collaborative curriculum design project. Across the Disciplines, 8(3) [Online]. Available from: https:// wac.colostate.edu/docs/atd/clil/leibowitzetal.pdf. Accessed 5 June 2018. Macaro, E., Curle, S., Pun, J., An, J., & Dearden, J. (2018). A systematic review of English medium instruction in higher education. Language Teaching, 51(1), 36–76. Marshall, D., Conana, H., Maclons, R., Herbert, M., & Volkwyn, T. (2011). Learning as accessing a disciplinary discourse: Integrating academic literacy into introductory physics through collaborative partnership. Across the Disciplines, 8(3) [Online]. Available from: https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/atd/ clil/marshalletal.pdf. Accessed 5 June 2018.

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Short, D. J., Echevarría, J., & Richards-Tutor, C. (2011). Research on academic literacy development in sheltered instruction classrooms. Language Teaching Research, 15(3), 363–380. Thomas, P. (2013). Transformation, dialogue and collaboration: Developing studio-based concept writing in art and design through embedded interventions. Journal of Academic Writing, 3(1), 42–66.

Appendix

See Tables A.1, A.2, A.3, and A.4.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 S. Green, Scaffolding Academic Literacy with Low-Proficiency Users of English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39095-2

125

Pre-sessional course

Winter school

First Day-release block

December 2005

January 2006

February–April 2006

Phase

Working days, 5 hours/day

10 working days, 5 hours/day

10 working days, 5 hours/day

Duration Taught by RT Regional group Whole group Co-taught by [University] staff + RTs, whole-group lecture followed by split-group seminar, working in inter-regional groups Taught by RT Regional group Working in split-groups

Mode

Assignment support for Purpose and Meaning in Teaching English to Young Learners; Advanced Communication Skills 1

Generic academic reading and writing skills Two core modules: Methodology of Teaching English to Young Learners and Language Description for Education 1

Focus

Table A.1 The structure of the first year of the BA programme, showing the interweaving of intensive and extensive modes of teaching and learning

126 APPENDIX

Second Day-release block

September–November 2006

Adapted from Lamb and Borg (2009: 26)

Summer school

June–July 2006

Phase

Working days, 5 hours/day

30 working days, 5 hours/day

Duration

Taught by RT Regional group Working in split-groups

Co-taught by [University] staff + RTs, whole-group lecture followed by split-group seminar, working in inter-regional groups

Mode Six core modules: Tasks and Lessons in Teaching English to Young Learners; Language Acquisition and Learning; Initial Literacy in English; Discourse for Professional Purposes 1; Stories and theme-based Learning; Discourse for Professional Purposes 2 Assignment support for Tasks and Lessons in Teaching English to Young Learners; Initial Literacy in English; Advanced Communication Skills 1

Focus

APPENDIX

127

128

APPENDIX

Table A.2 Sample intensive mode lecture/seminar plan

Reproduced from University of Leeds (2006) Module Materials, EDUC 2031 Methodology of TEYL

APPENDIX

129

Table A.3 Day-release sessions devoted to consolidating understanding of modular concepts and scaffolding the writing of the EDUC 2031 assignment Assignment 1: EDUC2031 Methodology of Teaching English to Young Learners Module taught in winter school. Final session included setting of the assignment and a preliminary briefing on its scope 1. 13/14 February 2006 This session reviewed the EDUC 2031 module, looking at key concepts that would feature in the assignment such as presentation, practice, criteria for effective presentation and practice. It also included a guided discussion of the assignment rubric and the principal demands of the assignment. The session also included some advice on planning the process of completing the assignment report. The three-hour plenary session was followed by work in the library in which a library search and note-taking procedures were modelled 2. 20/21 February 2006 This session explored the same conceptual areas as the previous but through the reading and discussion of a set of teaching materials. The three-hour plenary session was followed by small-group tutorial work in which the participants shared their ideas for the pedagogic material they had to create for the assignment 3. 27/28 February 2006 This session continued the exploration of concepts through a discussion of another set of teaching materials. This led into a session on the nature, value and construction of outlines. The three-hour plenary was followed by the first round of individual tutorials in which participants discussed with their tutor their plans for their pedagogic material 4. 6/7 March 2006 This session again explored key concepts such as communicative purpose, children’s characteristics as learners, through the analysis of a video clip of a classroom. It also continued the work on outlining begun in the previous session using support material provided by the University. The three-hour plenary was followed by the second round of individual tutorials in which participants either discussed with their tutor their plans for their pedagogic material or outlines 5. 13/14 March 2006 This session focused firstly, on a checklist for completing the assignment, secondly on gathering information from the literature and synthesising it in notes and then paragraphs and thirdly, on avoiding plagiarism 6. 20/21 March 2006 This session was not related to the assignment or the module but it did include a final opportunity for individual tutorials, focusing on sections of draft text Adapted from Green (2011), Appendix D4

130

APPENDIX

Table A.4 The scaffolding of assignment writing in one regional group Assignment support activities, Assignments 1–3, Day-release blocks 1 & 2 Modular concepts Guided, plenary class discussion to review WS/SS sessions Guided, plenary class discussion to apply modular concepts to concrete examples e.g. teaching materials, video clips of lessons Individualised discussion of observed lessons with regard to modular concepts Assignment rubric Guided, plenary class discussion to analyse and ‘unpack’ rubric Non-guided small-group discussion of the rubric Reading practices Guided plenary class review modular reading list Guided plenary/individual literature search Guided plenary/individual note-taking Managing the process Guided plenary discussion of a process checklist Non-guided small-group discussion of a process checklist Individual completion of a process checklist The pedagogic extension Guided, plenary analysis of sample pedagogic extension Not-guided, small-group discussion of pedagogic extension Individual tutor feedback on pedagogic extension: email Individual tutor feedback on pedagogic extension: tutorial Writing the assignment Non-guided individualised reading of a sample assignment Guided plenary class discussion to construct possible outlines Guided plenary discussion of plagiarism and strategies to avoid this Individual tutor feedback on outline: email Individual tutor feedback on outline: tutorial Individual tutor feedback on draft: email Individual tutor feedback on draft: tutorial Feedback Individual reading and reflection on feedback sheets from the university Individualised discussion of feedback: tutorial Adapted from Green (2011), Appendix D4

Ass. 1 EDUC 2031

Ass. 2 EDUC 2032

Ass. 3 EDUC 2033

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X X X X X X X

X X

X X

X

X

X X

X X

X X

X X X X

X X X X

X X X X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X X X

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Index

A Academic literacy, 3, 5, 7, 11–13, 16, 20, 27, 31, 36, 41, 48, 50, 51, 56, 63, 64, 66, 78, 84, 85, 110, 115, 118

B BA Educational Studies, 96, 111 British Academic Written English corpus (BAWE), 20

C Cognitive genre, 60 Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), 3, 72, 76, 77, 96, 108, 110, 116, 117 Communicative language ability, 4, 72, 73 Communities of practice, 22, 23, 28 Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), 84, 86

D Declarative knowledge, 28, 29, 36, 42, 53, 56 Disciplinary academics, 14, 48, 49, 52, 54, 56, 64, 77, 82, 111, 116, 117, 121 Discourse communities, 22, 28, 41, 51, 80, 117 E Enabling context, 25, 45, 89, 110 English for Academic Purposes (EAP), 6, 7, 14, 53, 54, 56, 60, 63, 72, 77, 85, 96, 100, 109, 117, 120, 121 English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP), 45, 51, 53 English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP), 45, 51 English for Specific Purposes (ESP), 57, 60, 62, 72, 77, 78, 82, 85, 89, 117, 120 English language proficiency, 3, 5, 7, 42, 72, 81, 82, 87, 111, 116, 118

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 S. Green, Scaffolding Academic Literacy with Low-Proficiency Users of English, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39095-2

145

146

INDEX

English-medium, 1, 6, 31, 42, 47, 72, 74, 77, 78, 80, 81, 88, 110, 115, 117

M Multi-modality, 12, 15, 16, 18, 76, 84

F Freshman composition, 49, 75

N Negotiation of meaning, 86, 102, 110

G Genre, 12–14, 17–19, 22, 25, 30, 36, 42, 44, 47, 49, 53, 54, 56–65 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), 1–7, 42, 48, 50, 51, 54, 72, 77–79, 89, 110, 115–117

O Oman, 2, 50, 56, 78, 79, 81, 95, 110 Orchestration of voice, 32–34

H Heteroglossia, 33 Higher education, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 13, 16, 20, 36, 42, 45, 48, 50–52, 54, 57, 65, 71, 72, 77–81, 111, 115–117

I Immersion Education, 84, 86 Insider-outsider problem, 54, 66 Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education (ICLHE), 5, 82, 109, 110, 117 Interactional modification, 82, 86, 88, 110, 119 International English Language Testing System (IELTS), 2, 3, 50, 72–75, 96, 121 Intertextuality, 32, 33

L Literacy knowledge, 27 Literacy practices, 12, 13, 16, 26, 29, 36, 49, 50, 54, 55, 83, 109, 116

P Pedagogic genres, 19, 20, 30 Procedural knowledge, 28, 30, 36, 42, 56, 63

R Register, 30, 31, 36, 54, 56, 104 Rhetoric, 17–19, 30, 32, 34, 46, 53, 54, 56–58, 60, 63 Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), 17, 60, 62, 82 Rhetoricity, 14, 54

S Scaffolding, 4, 6, 12, 42, 44, 45, 48, 50, 62, 65, 66, 76, 81, 85, 88, 100, 104, 107 Sheltered Instruction (SI), 5, 42, 73, 86, 110, 117 Situated learning, 23, 24, 45 Social genre, 19, 60 Social practice, 12, 13, 17, 24, 63, 66 Specially Designed Academic Instruction in English (SDAIE), 86, 110, 117 Systemic Functionalist Linguistics (SFL), 57, 59, 62, 63

INDEX

147

T Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), 3, 74, 77 Textualisation, 81 Translanguaging, 80, 111 Translation, 80, 116

Writing in the Disciplines (WID), 5, 82, 109, 110, 117 Writtenness, 14, 26, 31

W Writing across the Curriculum (WAC), 82

Z Zone of proximal development (ZPD), 44, 45