28.338, Review: Applied Ling; Socioling: Göpferich, Neumann (2016)

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Subject: 28.338, Review: Applied Ling; Socioling: Göpferich, Neumann (2016)

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Date: Tue, 17 Jan 2017 10:25:38
From: Christopher Strelluf [cstrell at nwmissouri.edu]
Subject: Developing and Assessing Academic and Professional Writing Skills

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-1973.html

EDITOR: Susanne  Göpferich
EDITOR: Imke  Neumann
TITLE: Developing and Assessing Academic and Professional Writing Skills
SERIES TITLE: Forum Angewandte Linguistik - F.A.L. - Band 56
PUBLISHER: Peter Lang AG
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Christopher Strelluf, Northwest Missouri State University

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

Developing and Assessing Academic Writing and Professional Writing Skills,
edited by Susanne Göpferich and Imke Neumann, examines the effectiveness of
writing curricula in Austria, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland. It is
organized into three sections: “vocabulary and terminology in academic
writing,” “complex writing competence constructs,” and “subjective conceptions
of writing and how to foster it.” Each of the three sections includes two
articles.

In the first article, Chistine S. Sing examines the ability of business
students in an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) program to “technicalize”
within their writing. Technicalizing refers to naming phenomena and imbuing
names with meaning through elaboration (p. 18). She uses the self-compiled
Academic Business English corpus of student seminar papers in business,
economics, finance, and marketing, and mines the corpus for code glosses for
the discursive functions of “defining,” “exemplifying,” and “explaining.”
Students’ uses of defining discursive functions suggest that students are
“preoccupied with taxonomies rather than developing ideas” (p. 30).
Exemplifying functions also appear to be used for building taxonomies, but
“students opt for chains of reference in which ideas are loosely strung
together, enforcing a linear, associative structuring” rather than
hierarchical chain of reference, resulting in weak taxonomies (p. 34).
Explaining functions perform similarly to exemplifying functions, and may
particularly show students’ awareness of the generic requirements of the
seminar paper, in which students demonstrate to instructors that they
understand course concepts rather than try to build knowledge. Indeed, across
discursive functions students “demonstrate the ability to technicalize,” but
“do not seem to conceive of themselves as ‘knowledge-makers’ (p. 32). Sing
suggests that it would be useful for ESP teachers to call attention to
“different resources that can be used to technicalize in writing” (p. 39) to
help students develop conceptually into knowledge-makers.

Next, Hans Malmström, Diane Pecorari, and Magnus Gustafsson examine the
development of academic vocabulary in an English Medium Instruction (EMI)
context. They build a corpus of 80 English-language texts by Master of Science
students and analyze the corpus against terms in the Academic Vocabulary List
(AVL) developed by Dee Gardner and Mark Davies (2014). Approximately 20
percent of tokens in their corpus come from the AVL—a surprisingly high
proportion that exceeds the proportion of academic vocabulary in published
academic texts. The researchers observe similar proportions of AVL tokens in
(Swedish) home and international student texts, suggesting that the
international students are “able to take on EMI education on a level playing
field with their Swedish peers” (p. 58) and contradicting a perception among
Swedish faculty that international students are less well-equipped for EMI
than home students (p. 61). Of note, though, the researchers find only a small
increase in the proportion of AVL tokens in year-two student texts relative to
year-one student texts, indicating that EMI does not lead to an increase in
productive academic vocabulary. Optimistically, however, the researchers
suggest that their findings show that students in their study are well
equipped to employ academic vocabulary, meaning that teachers can concentrate
on exercises to build discipline-specific vocabulary. 

Liana Konstantinidou, Joachim Hoefele, and Otto Kruse begin the section
“complex writing competence constructs” by examining outcomes from
“process”-oriented writing instruction in three Swiss vocational schools.
Students completed instruction informed by “process,” which understands
writing as a non-linear, recursive activity, comprised of a series of
“activities such as idea generation, structuring ideas, planning, proposing
ideas, and translating ideas into word strings” (p. 77). The students’ scores
on writing tasks completed before instruction, shortly after instruction, and
several months after instruction were compared to those of students receiving
the school’s traditional curricula. Students completing the process-oriented
instruction showed greater improvements in their scores than the control
group, and showed longer-term retention of these gains. The researchers argue
that their findings--rather than commenting on process as a pedagogical
approach--show that, while “teaching writing in [vocational] schools is often
regarded as a field of pedagogy where deficits from earlier education prove to
be obstacles to substantial progress,” in reality writing instruction can
effect real gains in student writing abilities (p. 96).

Susanne Göpferich and Imke Neumann also examine development of student writing
before and after writing courses. They score pre- and post-class argumentative
essays for 26 L1 German and 35 L2 English students. Three raters annotated
errors in student writings according to a rubric with the categories “formal
errors,” “grammatical errors,” “textlinguistic errors,” and “other errors.”
Texts were also assessed holistically for argumentative rigor. Post-class
essays showed reduced errors relative to pre-class essays, especially in the
L2 English courses. Post-class essays also showed improvements in
argumentative rigor, with greater gains in L1 German texts. Improvements were
visible in aggregate and at the individual level, with by-student comparisons
of essay scores showing “that most students improved […] whereas only few
obtained poorer results at the end than at the beginning of writing courses”
(p. 125). At this individual level, Göpferich and Neumann identify greater
gains during L1 German writing courses for the weakest students, while in
English L2 courses, gains appear to be more generally distributed. These
comparisons show straightforwardly that writing courses in both L1 and L2 lead
to measurable gains in student writing competence.

In the collection's final section, which focuses on subjective conceptions of
writing, Sandra Ballweg tests a fundamental tool of process-oriented writing
pedagogy: the portfolio, which requires students to compile and consider
writing artifacts from various stages of their writing process. She reports
student and teacher perceptions of portfolio work. Ballweg finds that the
teacher emphasized cognitive and metacognitive outcomes for the portfolios and
devoted substantial time to students’ organization of portfolios. These
focuses “made students aware of the writing process and induced them to
reflect on writing strategies and text quality and to use peer feedback,” but
also reduced time actually devoted to writing (p. 160). Students generally
seemed to value portfolios affectively and metacognitively, rather than for
helping to learn L2 German or improve writing skills. Ballweg also finds that
weaker students tended to value the individualized assessment of portfolios,
but other students “were afraid of arbitrariness and unfair grades.” She
notes, too, that the personal nature of portfolios compromised the teacher’s
attitudes toward assessment and students’ feelings about being assessed. She
concludes that the addition of portfolios to pedagogy inherently requires
reductions in other teaching and assessment approaches, necessitating that
teachers develop approaches to portfolio-based instruction specifically
according to the developmental needs of their students. 

In the collection’s final article, Sabine Dengscherz and Melanie Steindl
analyze students attitudes toward planning and spontaneity as parts of the
writing process, and assess the usefulness of discussions of writing
strategies as an instructional approach. Students in writing classes
participated in online forums that required them to reflect upon and discuss
their writing processes and attitudes toward writing. Dengscherz and Steindl
find students describing a wide range of approaches to planning and
spontaneity. Student comments in the online forums occasionally led students
to initiate and cooperatively build planning strategies, which Dengscherz and
Steindl suggest exemplifies how the “discussions helped students not only to
become aware of their writing procedures but also to learn from each other”
(p. 188). They conclude that these meta-discursive forums may help students by
allowing them to adjust the ways they incorporate planning and spontaneity
into their writing processes, and may help writing teachers “address the
students’ current states of development and thus coach them more individually
and efficiently” (p. 196). Dengscherz and Steindl offer a series of exercises
from the literature to teach students different applications of planning and
spontaneous writing. 

EVALUATION

The studies collected for Developing and Assessing Academic and Professional
Writing Skills thoughtfully and accessibly offer ways to practice and 
theorize the teaching of writing. Malmström, Pecorari, and Gustafsson’s study
of academic vocabulary is illustrative of the layers of value that the texts
offer. From the purview of a writing program administrator, their finding that
student texts do not show an increase in productive academic vocabulary over
the course of an EMI curriculum challenges assumptions about the value of EMI
for teaching language skills. From the purview of a researcher interested in
the quantitative assessment of writing, their method of compiling a small
corpus of student texts and studying it for the presence and diversity of AVL
tokens offers a replicable research model. From the purview of a writing
instructor developing classroom activities, their use of Mark Davies’s (2015)
online interface to measure texts against the AVL suggests an activity where
students subject their own papers to AVL analysis, leading them to think
meta-discursively about their writing in relation to academic and disciplinary
writing. A similar set of multi-layered implications can be identified in any
of the six articles in the collection.

Researchers and teachers of writing will also appreciate the ways that authors
in this collection blend approaches and methodologies from several fields that
are often treated as separate. This will especially be the case for readers in
the United States, where interactions between compositionists and applied
linguists are probably less frequent than they should be--disciplinary
divisions reflected frequently in the structures of university departments and
in the proceedings of organizations like the Conference on College Composition
and Communication and the American Association of Applied Linguistics.
Ballweg’s qualitative analysis of teacher and student perceptions of the value
of writing portfolio-based assessment, for instance, studies the fundamental
pedagogical element of “third-wave” writing assessment (e.g., Yancey
1999)--the writing portfolio--which will be a centerpiece of many writing
classrooms, but does so in part to evaluate L2 acquisition outcomes, which
might be more generally the focus of second-language classrooms.

Readers from specific disciplinary backgrounds should anticipate that this
disciplinary blending may at times be initially jarring. Readers trained in
“rhetoric and composition” programs in the United States, for instance, may be
somewhat surprised by the book’s treatment of the central concept of
“assessment.” In many seminal works in the history of writing assessment in US
composition studies (e.g., Diederich 1974; White 1985; Belanoff & Dickson
1991), assessment is oriented to large-scale, programmatic concerns (e.g.,
assessment for purposes like placement, grading, and program evaluation) and
considerations of reliability and validity (plus underlying issues of cost).

Texts in this collection certainly take up programmatic concerns. In
particular, the articles by Konstantinidou, Hoefele, and Kruse and by Göferich
and Neumann explicitly frame their work in terms of questions over the kinds
of courses and instruction that should be offered to help students achieve
writing competencies. But the fundamental unit of assessment in this
collection is the writing classroom, rather than the writing program. This is
a more localized focus than readers disciplinarily accustomed to US
composition studies might expect. The approach to assessment in this
collection might generally be thought of as demonstrations of evaluations of
outcomes of writing classrooms (frequently in an L2 context), rather than
discussions of ways that writing should be assessed at the program level.

It is also important to note that, though the collection’s title refers to
“developing” and “assessing” and to “academic” and “professional” writing, the
balance leans in favor of assessment over development and academic writing
over professional writing. In the case of the former, most of the articles
focus on determining whether or not, based on analysis of student texts,
students were successful in achieving a specified outcome. Though several
articles recommend pedagogical strategies that might do better to achieve
outcomes, most do not actually examine the effectiveness of specific
instructional activities. Noteworthy exceptions here are Ballweg’s qualitative
examination of writing portfolios and Dengscherz and Steindl’s recommendation
of an online discussion forum to develop metacritical awareness among students
of their writing processes.

Their article is also an exception in that it focuses on professional, rather
than academic, writing--though even here professional writing is really
considered from the standpoint of academics versed in process-oriented
pedagogy (e.g., Belanoff & Dickson 1991) rather than non-academics who write
as part of their profession (who, ethnographic studies of writing like Selzer
[1983] sometimes show, engage in more planning and less “discovery” and
revision than process-based pedagogies suppose). 

Konstantinidou, Hoefele, and Kruse are also an exception, in that they assess
outcomes based on student artifacts of formal letters--a genre more closely
connected with professional than academic writing. This focus on professional
writing, though, is somewhat belied by the primary focus of the article, which
is whether writing pedagogies can effect improvements in vocational student
writing, rather than the development or assessment of professional writing.
Relatedly, Sing’s fascinating quantitative study of discursive functions in
business student writing evaluates student proficiency in knowledge-making
functions in subfields that are closely associated with professional writing,
but the writing tasks being evaluated appear to be primarily academic, and
analysis of individual student writing artifacts demonstrates that the
students themselves think of their writing as situated in an academic setting
rather than a professional context.

Readers who keep these qualifications in mind will be satisfied by the text. I
recommend it especially for teachers of college-level writing who recognize
that their pedagogy might benefit from the incorporation of a broader spectrum
of disciplinary tools and practices. Scholars versed in rhetoric and
composition will be interested in the application of corpus linguistic
analyses to student writing, as well as in the parallels they will recognize
between L2 acquisition and the development of academic literacies (i.e., in
the first-year composition classroom). Applied linguists and second-language
teachers will potentially find new tools in the compositionist mainstay of the
portfolio and other process-oriented pedagogies.

REFERENCES

Belanoff, Pat & Marcia Dickson (eds.). 1991. Portfolios: Process and product.
Portsmouth, MA: Boynton.

Davies, Mark. 2015. Word and Phrase [computer software]. Available:
http://www.wordandphrase.info/.

Diederich, Paul B. 1974. Measuring growth in English. Urbana, IL: National
Council of Teachers of English.

Gardner, Dee & Mark Davies. 2014. A new academic vocabulary list. Applied
Linguistics 35(3). 305-327.

Selzer, Jack. 1983. The composing processes of an engineer. College
Composition and Communication 34(2). 178-187.

White, Edward. 1985. Teaching and Assessing Writing. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. 1999. Looking back as we look forward: Historicizing
writing assessment. College Composition and Communication 50(3). 483-503.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Christopher Strelluf is Assistant Professor of Language, Literature, and
Writing at Northwest Missouri State University. He researches language
variation and change, language politics, and composition pedagogy.





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