scholarly journals Student voices in academic writing: PsychLiverpool a community for meaning making

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Forsythe ◽  
Emir Demirbag ◽  
Jasmine Warren
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Academic Language ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Student Writing ◽  
Learning Networks ◽  
Student Voices ◽  
The Social ◽  
Peer Network ◽  
Academic Communication ◽  
The Impact

The practice and expectations of academic communication are changing, and blogging provides a socially liberating mechanism by which to support the development of student writing and literacy. The study reported here examines the impact of an academic–student partnership in supporting the development of student discourse. Anonymous feedback gathered from both the contributors and readers of the student blog, PsychLiverpool was analysed using automated text analysis. The analysis identified that high levels of positive emotion were associated with PsychLiverpool. Students valued its capacity to trigger thinking and insight, and the social and networking relationships the blog offered. PsychLiverpool empowered students to expand their learning networks outside of their classroom and peer network by connecting them with like-minded students and academics.  By providing students with safe opportunities to develop their skills and networks, it fulfilled their needs for affiliation and achievement, power and reward. The particular advantage of PsychLiverpool was that in operating outside of traditional university processes of assessment and feedback, students were more motivated to write about and engage with academic language on their own terms.

scholarly journals How recorded audio-visual feedback can improve academic language support

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 71-90
Author(s):  
Michelle Cavaleri ◽  
◽  
Satomi Kawaguchi ◽  
Bruno Di Biase ◽  
Clare Power ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Visual Feedback ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
English Language ◽  
Academic Language ◽  
Language Support ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
Quality Feedback ◽  
The Impact

Providing effective, high quality feedback that students engage with remains an important issue in higher education today, particularly in the context of academic language support where feedback helps socialise students to academic writing practices. Technology-enhanced feedback, such as audio and video feedback, is becoming more widely used, and as such, it is important to evaluate whether these methods help students engage with the feedback more successfully than conventional methods. While previous research has explored students’ perceptions of audio-visual feedback, this paper seeks to fill a gap in the literature by examining the impact of the audio-visual mode on undergraduate students’ engagement with feedback compared to written-only feedback. Evidence from an analysis of feedback comments (n = 1040) and corresponding revisions as well as interviews (n = 3) is used to draw conclusions about the value of providing audio-visual feedback to help students revise their writing more successfully. In line with multimedia learning theory (Mayer 2009), it is argued that the multimodal format, conversational tone, verbal explanations and personalised feel of audio-visual feedback allows for a more successful engagement with the feedback, particularly for students with a lower level of English language proficiency.

scholarly journals Digital Writing, Word Processors and Operations in Texts: How Student Writers Use Digital Resources in Academic Writing Processes

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-58
Author(s):  
Sofia Hort
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Student Writing ◽  
Digital Writing ◽  
Student Writers ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Writing Processes ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
Academic Genre ◽  
Word Processors

This study explores the use of digital technologies in the writing of an academic assignment. Fine-grained studies on student writing processes are scarce in previous research. In relation to the increasing demands on students’ writing, as well as the debate on students’ poor writing (Malmström, 2017), these issues are important to address. In this study, screen captures of five students’ essay processes are analyzed. The results show that students handle text at different levels: they make use of one or more word processors, arrange texts spatially on screens and use resources to operate directly in texts. Above all these actions seem to meet the need to move and navigate within one’s own text, an aspect that could be especially important in relation to the academic genre and for handling texts as artifacts in activity (Castelló & Iñesta, 2012; Prior, 2006). The results of the study point to the importance of making digital writing practices visible, especially those that could create possibilities to intertwine digital texts, thereby enhancing potentials for academic writing and meaning-making.

scholarly journals The Development of Academic Vocabulary in International Foundation Students’ Assessed Academic Writing

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Therova
Keyword(s):  
United Arab Emirates ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
University Student ◽  
Student Writing ◽  
Academic Vocabulary ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Foundation Programme ◽  
Written Assignments ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Academic Year

Despite extensive research into academic vocabulary in university student writing, little is known about academic vocabulary in international foundation-level students’ assessed academic writing. Considering that academic vocabulary is regarded as a key element of academic writing style and written assignments are one of the main forms of assessment in university contexts, this is an important omission. This study addresses this gap by employing a corpus-based approach to investigate the development of academic vocabulary in assessed academic writing produced by international students (N=193) in a foundation(gateway) programme over an academic year in the context of a British university based in England and its overseas campuses in the United Arab Emirates and Mauritius. The findings show an increase in the usage of academic vocabulary over the course of the foundation programme and highlight the impact of the assignment topic and brief.

scholarly journals Cohorts as collections of bodies and communities of persons: insights from the SEARCH010/RV254 research cohort

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 584-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail E Henderson ◽  
Stuart Rennie ◽  
Amy Corneli ◽  
Holly L Peay
Keyword(s):  
Longitudinal Research ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Acute Infection ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Meanings ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Early Phase Clinical Trials ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Longitudinal research cohorts are uniquely suited to answer research questions about morbidity and mortality. Cohorts may be comprised of individuals identified by specific conditions or other shared traits. We argue that research cohorts are more than simply aggregations of individuals and their associated data to meet research objectives. They are social communities comprised of members, investigators and organizations whose own interests, identities and cultures interact and evolve over time. The literature describes a range of scientific and ethical challenges and opportunities associated with cohorts. To advance these deliberations, we report examples from the literature and our own research on the Thai SEARCH010/RV254 cohort, comprising individuals diagnosed with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) during acute infection. We reflect on the impact of cohort experiences and identity, and specifically how people incorporate cohort participation into meaning making associated with their diagnosis, the influence of cohort participation on decision making for early-phase clinical trials recruited from within the cohort, and the impact of the relationships that exist between researchers and participants. These data support the concept of cohorts as communities of persons, where identity is shaped, in part, through cohort experiences. The social meanings associated with cohorts have implications for the ethics of cohort-based research, as social contexts inevitably affect the ways that ethical concerns manifest.

scholarly journals ‘Academic literacies’: sustaining a critical space on writing in academia

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theresa Lillis
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Literacy Practices ◽  
Academic Language ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Language And Literacy ◽  
Academic Literacies ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Field Of Inquiry

In this paper, I briefly track the emergence and foci of academic literacies as a field of inquiry, summarising its contributions to understandings about writing and meaning making in academia. Writing from my specific geohistorical location in the UK, I foreground the importance of early key works that encapsulated concerns about deficit orientations to students’ language and literacy practices (e.g. Ivanič, 1998; Lea and Street,1998). I also underline the transnational dimension to the development of academic literacies which has helped drive forward intellectual debates about the relationship between academic language and literacy practices, and participation in academia. I argue that academic literacies provides an important space for critically exploring what are often taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature and value of academic writing conventions, and the ways these (both assumptions and conventions) impact on opportunities for participation in knowledge making. This critical thinking space continues to serve as an intellectual resource for researchers, teachers and students in contemporary neo-liberal higher education, where regimes of evaluation are super-normative, even in (or because of) a context of super-diversity, that is increased mobility of peoples and semiotic practices. Academic literacies as praxis necessarily involves straddling both normative and transformative orientations (Lillis and Scott, 2007) or what Hall (1992) refers to as the ‘academic’ and ‘intellectual’ dimensions to academia. 

Shifting Literacy Instruction

2017 ◽  
pp. 129-150
Keyword(s):  
Digital Literacy ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Writing Workshop ◽  
Literacy Learning ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Instructional Decisions ◽  
Student Voices ◽  
Existing Structures ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
The Impact

Five years-worth of research combines to provide an overview of findings as reported from each of the studies. The value in this chapter rests with the emphasis on student voices and their perspectives about digital literacy learning given the students are faced with curriculum mandates and stressed educators every day in classrooms. Therefore, we must listen to children, in order to recognize the impact of instructional decisions. Overall, students report a sense of agency, or control, as being essential in the meaning making process. This includes making decisions about tools and collaborating with others. This chapter contains suggestions for modifying existing structures like writing workshop and linguistic-based assessments. The conclusion focuses on future research questions that continue the quest to better understand the multimodal work of diverse students.

scholarly journals The Academic Writing Skills Programme: A model for technology-enhanced, blended delivery of an academic writing programme

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
Jennifer Boyle ◽  
◽  
Scott Ramsay ◽  
Andrew Struan ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Academic Language ◽  
Student Assessment ◽  
Writing Skills ◽  
Widening Participation ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Diverse Student Body ◽  
Diverse Student ◽  
Short Essay ◽  
The Impact

Recognising the varied challenges presented by an increasingly diverse student body at our UK university (a research-intensive institution with a high proportion of international and widening participation students), an online and blended writing programme was developed. The Academic Writing Skills Programme (AWSP) is a fully online, compulsory writing diagnostic, consisting of a range of multiplechoice questions on grammar and a short essay. Run centrally by a department of multidisciplinary academic writing advisers, the programme was taken from a small, discipline-specific writing programme and transformed into an institution-wide, fully-funded technology-enhanced academic language course. This paper details and evaluates the process through which this development was achieved; it discusses the challenges encountered, explores the pedagogical justification and background of our approach, provides student assessment and feedback on the impact and efficacy of the programme, and offers guidance for practitioners in academic language support.

scholarly journals Pedagogical applications of academic literacies theory: a reflection and case study

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wrigglesworth
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Writing Pedagogy ◽  
Student Writing ◽  
Academic Literacies ◽  
Methods Of Evaluation ◽  
Learning Journey ◽  
Uk Higher Education

The development of the academic literacies approach has provided learning developers with a range of powerful tools to help all students to progress through higher education. Twenty years ago, Lea and Street’s (1998) report on student writing initiated a debate which encouraged the transformation of writing pedagogy in UK higher education. The goal of the transformation was, and remains, to develop an education system which is expanding, inclusive and accessible.This paper focuses on the use of the meaning-making resources that students bring to their learning journey and the ones they encounter throughout their study. It outlines the documentation that enacts the rules that govern university practice at task, module, course and institutional level. The paper draws on academic literacies tools to help to clear away misunderstandings about students’ use of language. It then outlines Lea and Street’s (1998) classification of institutional approaches to the pedagogical challenges of improving student writing.The case study describes an optional credit-bearing Introduction to Academic Language module on a UK degree course. By conducting a series of analytical tasks, the undergraduates who elected to take the module developed their use of aspects of academic writing including genre, argument and intertextuality. Students were assessed by analysing their own assessment scripts from other disciplinary modules. The academic writing module was evaluated in ways that could evidence recommendations for change at multiple levels. The methods of evaluation follow practices regarded as standard in many university quality processes but were used to transform provision along inclusive, academic literacies lines.

The Impact of Endorsing the Belief in a Just World on Social Judgments

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benoît Testé ◽  
Samantha Perrin
Keyword(s):  
Social Desirability ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Social Utility ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Social Judgments ◽  
Just World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Main Effect ◽  
The Impact

The present research examines the social value attributed to endorsing the belief in a just world for self (BJW-S) and for others (BJW-O) in a Western society. We conducted four studies in which we asked participants to assess a target who endorsed BJW-S vs. BJW-O either strongly or weakly. Results showed that endorsement of BJW-S was socially valued and had a greater effect on social utility judgments than it did on social desirability judgments. In contrast, the main effect of endorsement of BJW-O was to reduce the target’s social desirability. The results also showed that the effect of BJW-S on social utility is mediated by the target’s perceived individualism, whereas the effect of BJW-S and BJW-O on social desirability is mediated by the target’s perceived collectivism.

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