{"id":284,"date":"2010-03-01T10:00:36","date_gmt":"2010-03-01T08:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=284"},"modified":"2010-02-09T15:05:35","modified_gmt":"2010-02-09T13:05:35","slug":"analysing-academic-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=284","title":{"rendered":"Analysing academic writing"},"content":{"rendered":"
Analysing academic writing<\/strong>: Contextualized frameworks.<\/span> Ed. by Louise J. Ravelli<\/strong> and Robert A. Ellis<\/strong>. (Open linguistic series.) London: Continuum, 2004. Pp. 279. ISBN 0826488021<\/a>. $50.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Catherine Doherty<\/strong><\/a>, Queensland University of Technology<\/em><\/p>\n

This edited collection explores academic writing by comparing expert academic writing with that of novice writers, or of first language writers\u2019 choices with those of second language students, to make evident the necessary learning for academic success. Thus the theoretical analyses, predominantly built from M. A. K. Halliday\u2019s systemic functional linguistics (SFL), serve to resource pedagogic practice in academic and language support programs in higher education settings. There are three sets of chapters: the first looks at the writerly identities and interpersonal aspects of academic text; the second examines textual strategies; and the third more broadly addresses pedagogies for developing academic writing.<\/p>\n

In the first set, Ken Hyland<\/strong>\u2019s chapter explores students\u2019 control of rhetorical devices to build interpersonal engagement in academic text, and the intrinsic difficulty for students when it comes to negotiating such a peer-to-peer tenor in any assessment\u2019s simulation of the research report. Susan Hood<\/strong>\u2019s chapter explores how evaluations are encoded in experts\u2019 research papers as choices across the appraisal system to communicate the interpersonal semantics of an evaluative stance and the challenges this presents the novice writer. Helmut Gruber<\/strong>\u2019s analysis of Austrian business students\u2019 writing in German displays the tension between their role as students and their imagined futures as business consultants, evident in their different deployment of modals. Sue Starfield<\/strong> outlines the case study of a successful mature black student in South Africa positioned as a first-year student and his strategy in a sociology essay of suppressing his personal voice while drawing on his unionist life experiences. Brian Paltridge<\/strong> focuses on the genre of exegesis specific to art\/design studies and offers an ethnography of the production and the consumption of such texts in a New Zealand institution.<\/p>\n

The second set of chapters addresses how academic texts work as text. Louise Ravelli<\/strong> compares novice essays, graded and ranked by the subject lecturers, in the disciplines of management and history, with particular reference to the logico-semantic moves structuring the argument and signaling the relation between parts of the text, revealing significant disciplinary differences. Ann Hewings<\/strong> compares first-year and final-year undergraduate essays in geography to track the students\u2019 growing control of the meaning potentials of textual Theme towards the expectations of that particular discourse community and its factions. Using similar analyses of Theme with appraisal, Caroline Coffin<\/strong> and Ann Hewings<\/strong> reveal how the IELTS test\u2019s \u2018academic writing\u2019 task elicited and rewarded more personal arguments in a corpus of fifty-six essays by second language candidates. Mary Schleppegrell<\/strong> compares the choices of migrant students writing in their developing second language with that of other \u2018proficient\u2019 students studying chemical engineering in US colleges and their variable control of technical and scientific English, in particular the resource of grammatical metaphor. Youping Chen<\/strong> and Joseph Foley<\/strong> also analyze the use of grammatical metaphor as a resource to carry \u2018buried reasoning\u2019 in expository text, to make evident the interference Chinese EFL students experience when attempting such textual strategies in English.<\/p>\n

The third set of chapters features SFL-informed pedagogical responses to the challenges of academic writing. Robert Ellis<\/strong> describes an innovative genre-based pedagogy in an undergraduate science unit using an online database of scaffolding models and exercises to show how the technology weakened control of aspects of the pedagogy. Helen Drury<\/strong> is similarly interested in how open online environments might host rich genre-based pedagogy for academic literacies, and gives a mixed review of their potential. Finally, Janet Jones<\/strong> offers a summary of the variety of theoretical frameworks informing pedagogy around academic literacy\/literacies and then profiles how the metalanguage of SFL with its focus on language in social contexts has informed the teaching and research programs in the Learning Centre at the University of Sydney.<\/p>\n

The collection reflects a diversity of settings from Australia, New Zealand, Austria, China, the UK, Singapore, and the US, and a variety of disciplines, to demonstrate the changing yet unchanging context of higher-education settings: despite technology, internationalized student groups, and global knowledge economies, there remain resilient disciplinary conventions that continue to demand intricate, nuanced texts from its novices.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Analysing academic writing: Contextualized frameworks. Ed. by Louise J. Ravelli and Robert A. Ellis. (Open linguistic series.) London: Continuum, 2004. Pp. 279. ISBN 0826488021. $50. Reviewed by Catherine Doherty, Queensland University of Technology This edited collection explores academic writing by comparing expert academic writing with that of novice writers, or of first language writers\u2019 choices […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":285,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions\/285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}