An investigation of the disciplinary expectations of postgraduate writing in UK HE: A case study of applied linguistics students’ writing

Abstract

The literature on academic writing in HE often approaches the issues in the field by focusing on challenges that students face in academic writing based on students’ and tutors’ perceptions (Shaheen, 2012) or by examining the linguistic, socio-cultural features, or rhetorical moves in students' writing (Gardner and Nesi, 2012, Javadi-Safa, 2018, Hyland, 2016, Matsuda, 2003). Little research examines the use of knowledge forms that relate to integrating theoretical and practical knowledge to achieve knowledge building. This research addresses this problem by examining the valued practices in postgraduate academic writing in a discipline that requires students to relate to theory and practice. The main aim is to find out how students use theoretical and practical knowledge forms in their writing and how their tutors value and assess those practices. The research was more interested in providing an in-depth analysis of tutors’ disciplinary expectations of academic writing. Students’ perspectives were used for triangulation purposes and were not intended to be examined in-depth. The specific context of the study is an Applied Linguistics and TESOL module from a postgraduate degree programme in the UK. The module is titled Modern Language Teaching Methods (MLTM). The field of Applied Linguistics and TESOL and the MLTM module have been chosen as the context of this study because Applied Linguistics is a field that typically connects theoretical knowledge to practical and personal experiences of teaching and learning a language. To examine the underlying principles that relate to theory and practice in students’ texts, I used the theoretical lens of LCT Semantics gravity, which traces the relative strengths of context dependence and context-independence or the use of theoretical and practical knowledge forms in students’ texts. I used the same lens to examine tutors’ disciplinary expectations of valued knowledge forms and academic practices in students’ texts as they relate to theory and practice. Semantic density from LCT, which examines the condensation of meanings was also used to offer insights into the complexity of students’ texts and tutors’ expectations. ESP genre theory analysis was carried out before conducting an LCT Semantics analysis to gain a better understanding of the genre of students’ texts and its social function.
The use of LCT Semantics and especially the tool of semantic gravity allowed me to examine academic writing in HE in the disciplines and offered me a different consciousness about some of the underlying principles of academic writing practices in the discipline of Applied Linguistics. It also offered me a different perspective on actors’ semantic codes, or the beliefs actors bring to the field. The use of this tool revealed important information about high-scoring student writing versus low-scoring student writing. A high-scoring text showed a higher semantic range, better semantic flow, more abstractions, successful movement from the theoretical to the practical, and higher epistemological condensation. By analysing assessors’ disciplinary perspectives, the tool of semantic gravity and density offered me a different consciousness of the role of assessors’ semantic codes in the assessment and evaluation of student’s texts. Tutors sometimes appeared to have different semantic codes from one another, which made them evaluate students’ texts differently. The students also appeared to have different semantic codes from those of their tutors, which could result in a code clash and learning challenges for tutors and students. Additionally, the findings of this present study showed that semantic profiles of successful students’ texts can also differ within the same module and the same writing task. Likewise, tutors’ semantic profiles of valued academic writing practices in student texts differ from one another and the same tutor can value more than one semantic profile.

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