The increasingly dynamic terrain in which we operate presents both threats and opportunities for the sustainability of EAP provision. Instability in pre-sessional markets, questions over the purposes of internationalisation, and an intensified commitment to widen participation, all combine to produce ‘churn’ around what EAP is and who it is for. This talk reflects on potential responses to such issues through the lens of engagement with institutional power structures at the University of Edinburgh. Drawing on themes of internationalisation, widening participation, practitioner precarity, and the sustainability of our community of practice, I will share work so far to secure endorsement of our vision for embedding of academic language and literacies in the curriculum, reflecting on the affordances and perils of this engagement with the University.

58

6/17/2024

Normative academic writing often assumes a neutral, disembodied writer who is focused on product rather than process. Anchored in understandings of learning and writing as multimodal and embodied, this talk explores writing centre practices for access and inclusion in higher education. A multimodal approach examines how writing is re-configured in different media, focusing on the materiality of the media, the mobility of the media, the imagined audiences, the spaces and places of writing. Arlene will investigate ways of using a range of modes and embodied approaches to develop writing with multilingual and diverse students. Specifically, she will look at how embodied practice manifests in different forms of engagement and representational modes in a writing centre context. Here, the materiality and visual nature of writing needs to be considered alongside its cognitive dimensions.

40

5/29/2024

In this talk, Lena will draw on empirical data to explore subject tutors’ approach to feedback on student writing. She will start from the premise that writing is highly valued across academic disciplines, as evidenced by its inclusion in assignment-specific criteria and the frequency of subject tutor comments on student writing. She will challenge the notion that a deficit discourse frames subject tutor feedback and highlight the qualities that subject tutors appear to value in student writing, in particular, clarity. She will argue that expectations relating to concepts such as clarity are rarely given explicitly by subject tutors and add her voice to other scholars within the field who call into question the assumption that students understand the expectations relating to such concepts. She will discuss how writing developers can use their expertise to investigate subject tutors’ own understanding of these concepts and how we can help them communicate these expectations.

60

4/22/2024

‘Generative AI’ or synthetic text models have shone a challenging light on assessment, particularly the assessment of student writing. Despite well-known flaws and frailties, synthetic text can easily be taken for human writing. In fact, it has surface features that student writers are often advised to follow, such as structured arguments and hyper-correct grammar. This new technology arrives into an economy that already rewards ‘passing’ a set of instrumental norms, and in which students are anxious to ‘pass’ as credible in their production of text. Synthetic text shows up these ongoing problems with writing for assessment, while introducing new ones. For example, what is legitimate and what is helpful in digital writing support? How to design assignments that integrate the use of synthetic tools or, alternatively, how to ‘proof’ against their use? How to value student writing at all, if generative AI can produce scholarly and professional text?

215

4/16/2024

Academic writing tutorials are often at the heart of academic writing centre provision. However, such tutorials are a relatively unexplored area of EAP and Academic Literacies particularly within the UK HE context. They are private, often take place online and rarely form part of teaching development. Much of the theory and training that does exist focuses on the extent to which these tutorials should take a directive approach, telling the student what is expected of them, or a minimalist approach, making the student do all of the work. This seminar will instead examine the potentially transformative role these tutorials play in facilitating students’ growth and development as writers within the academic community. It will also highlight the scaffolding that takes place, both at the preliminary and during tutorial stage, to facilitate this. This talk will be delivered by Cathy Morand & chaired by Daphne Thomas, Head of Teaching and Learning at the UCL Academic Communication Centre.

136

3/4/2024

In this talk, I explain why some approaches to academic English writing instruction stymie rather than advance knowledge. I will argue that for academic writing to have epistemic value, it is best understood as a social practice and as a method of enquiry rather than as a ‘linear’, ‘neutral’, or ‘objective’ transferable skill. For this conceptual shift to occur, academic writing should be re-configured as ontologically stratified. Conceptualising academic writing as stratified, as opposed to flat, would afford writers agency in making rational textual choices in the interests of knowledge rather than of linguistic display. To exemplify, I will showcase academic discourses that differ significantly from standardised ‘transparent’ academic prose - which, inter alia, has ideological and colonial roots. To argue all this, I mobilise the socio-scientific theory of critical realism, a theory that helps foreground academic writing’s educative and epistemic purpose.

122

2/2/2024

While most practices learned in undergraduate academic writing are helpful for postgraduate writing tasks, there are some fundamental differences that are important for postgraduate students to understand. Written assignment task prompts and assessment criteria are not always clear or helpful for aligning students’ and tutors’ expectations. Too often, students misunderstand what key concepts such as ‘critical’ and ‘original’ mean for postgraduate writing, resulting in writing that describes knowledge gained through the module, rather than showing it. In this session, I will guide participants through a sample master’s module assignment prompt and talk about how it aligns with UCL’s standard assessment criteria, showing some different examples of how students responded to the prompt – both successfully and unsuccessfully. There will also be a chance to discuss current concerns participants may have with postgraduate writing.

158

4/28/2023

In this seminar, Sarah will share a well-established ‘storytelling’ pattern found in many texts, present her research on how this pattern is used in different disciplines and discuss how this might be applied in teaching or one’s own writing process. This will be an interactive seminar, and participants will be asked to write one (very short) story, using a task adapted from Julian Edge. Dr. Sarah Haas has been working with writers for over 30 years, teaching in Japan, the UK, Denmark, the US, and the Benelux countries. She currently works part time as a teaching fellow at Ghent and Copenhagen Universities, alongside starting up her own small business, where she works with and for writers, running writers’ workshops, writers’ groups, and guided writing retreats, and creating research-based tools for helping writers develop their skills, productivity, self-efficacy, and identities as writers.

147

4/4/2023