Literacy and disciplinary practices: opening and closing perspectives

Literacy and disciplinary practices: opening andclosing perspectives

Ann M. Johns*, John M. Swales

Department of Rhetonic and Writing, San Diego State University, San Diego, California, USA

Abstract

There are widespread (and correct) beliefs that the writing tasks that students are asked toundertake as they move through their undergraduate and graduate years show a broadly

upward progression in terms of length, complexity of resources utilized, and sophisticationexpected. Even so, we also suggest that a number of uncertainties persist: whether thesewritings are ‘‘real’’ or ‘‘school’’ products; whether there is a coherent audience, and if so, howbest can it be identified; and what role there might be for a personal voice. To support this

argument, we present two explorations of EAP practice. The first looks at the situation ofdissertation writers, explores their rhetorical and other difficulties, and suggests some ways ofmitigating them. The second deals with students at the opposite end of the spectrum of stu-

dent experience; that of entering undergraduates taking their first class in anthropology andassisted by a linked course designed to initiate them into disciplinary literary practices.Despite the huge differences between these two sets of circumstance, we conclude that the

writers’ problems are surprisingly similar, as are the strategies for rendering them assistance.# 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

It seems to us that the EAP researchers who view disciplinary practices in terms oftheir published products, and who concomitantly interview the producers and targetedreceivers of such discourses, have a relatively straightforward research life. Thesetexts, such as research articles, are already valorized and ratified by the very fact ofbeing published; they have typically undergone an arduous and laborious reviewprocess; and they are easily available, indeed increasingly available for corpus-and-concordance analysis (e.g. Hyland, 2000). Although Paul et al. (2001) have recently

Journal of English for Academic Purposes

1 (2002) 13–28

www.elsevier.com/locate/jeap

1475-1585/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

PI I : S1475-1585(02 )00003 -6

* Corresponding author.

E-mail address: [email protected] (A.M Johns).

questioned whether this type of valorization is really sufficient, there is no doubtthat, vanity products aside, publication offers a reasonable level of quality assur-ance. Further, the literature suggests that published disciplinary specialists havemuch to say in response to such questions as ‘‘What counts as a solid contribution inyour field?’’, ‘‘What changes in publications are occurring and why?’’, and ‘‘How isexpertise realized in texts and other practices?’’.Once, however, we enter the world of student texts, matters are not so simple.

Indeed, we argue that surprisingly similar complexities emerge across all levels ofstudent expertise. At the beginning of a university career (the ‘‘opening perspective’’of the title), US undergraduates, especially those from so-called ‘‘disadvantaged’’backgrounds, may need EAP-type help as they begin to enter disciplinary terrain. Adecade of university experience later, a select few of those entrants will be attempt-ing to close out their student lives by completing doctoral dissertations (the ‘‘closingperspective’’ of the title), and again, at least for some, benefit may derive from thekind of instructional assistance that EAP support services are increasingly able toprovide. Despite the palpable differences between these two situations, some com-munalities remain. In both, the issue of the relation between ‘‘school genres’’ and‘‘real genres’’ (Johns, 1997) persists. In both questions of audience and hence ofrecipient design continue to perplex many participants and protagonists. And inboth, an appropriate role for the authorial persona—as personified by the use/non-use of ‘‘I’’—requires reflection and negotiation.As it happens, the opening perspective represents Johns’ major area of educational

endeavor (Johns, 1997, 2001, 2002), while the closing perspective that of Swales’primary teaching interests, at least in recent years (Swales & Feak, 2000). In thispaper, therefore, we present profiles of our current thinking in these two contexts,and then pick out some similarities and differences between them. We begin witha shorter reprise of the situation of the senior international graduate student,which is then followed by a more extensive discussion of that of the enteringundergraduate.

2. The doctoral dissertation and the international dissertation writer

Although Dudley-Evans (1999) can still claim that the doctoral dissertation orthesis1 remains a ‘‘neglected’’ genre, the amount of discoursal attention directed atthis genre has markedly increased in recent years. There have been studies of itsstructure (e.g. Dong, 1998; Ridley, 2000; Thompson, 1999; Paltridge, 2001); on theimportant role of metadiscourse in such long texts (Bunton, 1998); on citationalpatterns (Thompson, 1998); and on disciplinary variation (Parry, 1998). Case studyresearch into the struggles of individual dissertation writers, beginning with James(1984), now includes Belcher (1994), Dong (1996) and Sung (2000). Pedagogicalimplications and applications have been taken up by Shaw (1996) and Paltridge

1 Terminology is conflicted here; basically, dissertation is the US term with thesis tending to be used

elsewhere.

14 A.M. Johns, J.M. Swales / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 1 (2002) 13–28

(1997), among others. Since this body of work as a whole has investigated British,Scandinavian and Australian ‘‘traditions’’ in dissertation work in addition to thoseprevalent in the US, one useful early conclusion from surveying this literature wouldbe that the dissertation (very much unlike its oral defense) shows rather little in theway of distinct national characteristics. Instead, cross-nationally, disciplinary fieldor subfield emerges as the strongest determinant of structure and rhetorical shape.In fact, the structure of the dissertation genre appears from this research to be

quite variable, but to basically fall into three patterns. Although there is a wideperception that there is standard or traditional format for the dissertation (Dudley-Evans, 1999) consisting essentially of a ‘‘blown up’’ version of the IMRD structureof research articles (plus a separate Literature Review chapter following the intro-duction), only about 15% of the recent exemplars analysed actually adopt this for-mat. A second variant is the anthology-type ‘‘article compilation’’ format with eachof the main chapters itself following IMRD. Of the 100 dissertations cumulativelydiscussed in the recent literature, 44 adopt this model, this pattern being favored in‘‘hard’’ fields. However, there is considerable area-internal variation: for example,Ridley (1999) found that while 13 out of 19 ‘‘pure science’’ dissertations werearticle-compilations, only five of her 13 engineering texts had this structure—indeed another five were ‘‘traditional’’. The third pattern is most often called‘‘topic-based’’ and is thus more reminiscent of the chapter features found in aca-demic books; these chapter-length analysis-discussions may variously deal withtexts, computer models, or various kinds of empirical research including that basedon fieldwork.2

Paltridge (2002), among others, warns us that there is no simple correlationbetween discipline and dissertation structure; further, Thompson (1998) shows cleardifferences in structure between two contiguous departments within the same schoolof agriculture. It looks as though even the basic outline of the dissertation is acomplex issue to be negotiated among advisors and candidates, wherein sub-fieldselected or choice of methodology or choice of theory may emerge as strong deter-mining factors.As we have seen from the available evidence, the article-compilation format is

marginally the most popular. Dong summarizes the rationale for this option asfollows:

The article-compilation format gives graduate students on-the-job training,preparing them for what they will be expected to do in their fields after theyreceive the PhD degree. In addition, the article format reduces the time forpublication if dissertation chapters can be submitted directly for journal pub-lication, without requiring extensive pruning and reformatting; therefore, itmeets the need for timely knowledge dissemination and it starts to accumulatecredits for the students professional career. (Dong, 1998:p.371).

2 Ridley divides this type of dissertation into three patterns, but the patterns seem basically the same

even though the content is different. We have therefore consolidated these three into one.

A.M. Johns, J.M. Swales / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 1 (2002) 13–28 15

She further notes, based on her survey results, that graduate students felt theaudience for the traditional format was the advisor, the committee and close studentcolleagues, while in the new format this perception broadened to include a widerdisciplinary community. Secondly, and not unexpectedly, she found that in theanthology format, advisors tended to be more fussy (by requiring more drafts) andmore involved (by doing more of the writing themselves).However, this account somewhat disguises the difficult rhetorical problems that

the new format engenders. These include:

(a) A bibliography consolidated at the end, at each chapter’s close, or even both?(b) Metadiscoursal references to chapters or to papers?(c) Using ‘‘I’’, or recognizing co-authorship by using ‘‘we’’?

A random survey (Swales, in preparation) of post-1992 dissertations from threescience departments at the University of Michigan reveals considerable hybridityand considerable variation in response to the underlying issue as to whether a dis-sertation should be a monograph or a loose anthology. Of the eight Physics dis-sertations examined, five had a consolidated bibliography, one had the references atthe end of each chapter, while the remaining two had both! The author of the onewith no closing bibliography opted for the article terminology and had no difficultyin pluralizing the authorship; for example, she opens her fourth chapter with, ‘‘Inthis paper we study. . .’’. However, in the other texts, there were general preferencesfor the label chapter and the singular pronoun I. Similar uncertainties were alsoapparent in the biology dissertations. A 1994 text by an international student has thereferences only at the end of each paper, but recognizes that in their current statesand formats they are still chapters, even though they exist or will exist in anothergenre. Here are three of the chapter openings:

Chapter 3: ‘‘This chapter has been published as. . .’’Chapter 4: ‘‘Parts of this chapter will be published. . .’’Chapter 5: ‘‘This chapter will be published as. . .’’.

Given the pressures on doctoral students in nearly all programs in the US (andoften elsewhere) to establish publication profiles before graduation, the rhetoricalcomplexities imposed by hybridization are only likely to spread and deepen.An equally intractable but more fundamental issue that underlies the format

question is whether the dissertation is au fond that ‘‘original contribution to knowl-edge’’ which university authorities worldwide always claim it to be, or is it merelythe final examination in a long student career. Of course, it can be immediatelyobjected—and rightly—that such an either/or dichotomy will turn out to be unsus-tainable; as Woolgar (1989: xix) notes, there is ‘‘the play between thesis-as-argumentand thesis-as-an-occasioned academic product’’. However, this kind of observationis of no comfort or consolidation to the poor dissertation writers as they struggle toconceptualize and then complete their long and exhausting texts, often under severedeadline pressures. In an early but important paper, Shaw (1991) concluded, based


on interviews conducted with science doctoral students at the University of New-castle, that the dissertation represented something of a ‘‘pseudo communicative’’task. He explains: ‘‘They were often required to do something rather unnatural likepretending that they were writing to inform sophisticated nonspecialists, while beinguneasily aware that really the aim is to persuade an expert that they were worthy tojoin a community of scholars’’ (ibid.: p.194). Just like all students, both under-graduate and graduate, they were still caught between ‘‘knowledge-display andinformation-transmission’’ (ibid.: p.193).Today, it has become something of a truism to say that all genres are embedded in

their socio-historical contexts. Whether this is as generally true as its many advo-cates claim is somewhat doubtful, but it is certainly true of the US doctoral dis-sertation. There are several layers of shaping context that impinge on theconstruction and creation of a particular instance of the genre.The outermost, as it were, of these layers is that created by the scholarly expecta-

tions of the university as a whole, and as ratified by its official forms and proceduresfor approval. Next, we find the constraints and opportunities provided by theestablished expectations of a department or a discipline and what that collectivityconsiders to be appropriate topics and appropriate claims for novelty and innova-tion. A third set of factors that influences our attempts to repurpose the genre(Askehave & Swales, 2001) resides in the subfield chosen, in the methodologies andapproaches used, and in the rhetorical options to be explored. There is today much‘‘in the air’’ here including more personal or narratological treatments (see Chang &Swales, 1999, for the discomfort caused by these trends for non-native speakers ofEnglish). Last but by no means least, there are situated localities of advisor-adviseerelationships (as ably discussed by Belcher, 1994, Prior, 1998, and others), the needto take into account different expectations among committee members, the existence(or otherwise) of support groups, workshops or dissertation writing classes, theavailability and type of financial support, and so on.The larger point to be made is that these four types of influence are unstable in the

force of their effects, having variable impact from one individual case to another.Sometimes, institutional effects prevail as when a student just wants ‘‘the piece ofpaper’’ and then get on with his or her life. In such cases, the dissertation doesindeed turn out to be little more than an ultimate exercise in slogging drudgerydesigned to placate the examiners. At the other extreme, there is the dedicated andsuccessful researcher, with a string of publications to her name, with a good aca-demic or research job lined up, and for whom putting the dissertation together is asmuch a distraction as anything else. For another group of doctoral candidates, thedissertation will present itself to them as a draft of a subsequent scholarly book thatwill itself form the basis of an academic career.3 Finally, there are those doctoralstudents who love the social and intellectual life of being doctoral students in aculturally-attractive city and for whom completing the dissertation will most likelybe nothing but a ticket out of paradise. And of course for many, several of these

3 Unlike in northern Europe, it is uncommon for US dissertations to be actually published, rather than

being made available through Proquest Co (the latest name for the old UMI).


attitudinal stances combine in order to add psychological confusion to an alreadydemanding intellectual and rhetorical task.It turns out then, as we might have expected, that there is no simple or no one

answer to the initial question of whether the dissertation and its associated defenseare ‘‘school genres’’. Dissertations are sometimes more and sometimes less ‘‘occa-sioned academic products’’; sometimes more and sometimes less ‘‘significant con-tributions’’ to their specialisms; sometimes more and sometimes less collaborativeco-authored enterprises; and sometimes more and sometimes less waystages in aca-demic careers.Given all these complexities and uncertainties, it would seem obvious that more

might be done to help doctoral students, especially those from other cultures andwith some remaining limitations in their English-language proficiency, to betterunderstand their situations so as to realize their dissertational objectives with greaterdispatch and lesser angst. A few outline suggestions follow, which are premised onthe expectation that appropriate dissertation classes will not (yet) be available:

(a) Reduce isolation by persuading students to seek and utilize social support,such as organizing themselves into writing groups. In so doing, as Connorand Mayberry (1996: p.249) pertinently note: ‘‘It is important then to teachstudents strategies to use respondents and other social responses well’’.

(b) Raise rhetorical consciousness by helping students conduct their own dis-coursal analyses of texts germane to their own, including previous disserta-tions from their departments.

(c) Suggest ways of how to make best use of any one-on-one writing con-sultancies available.

(d) Give advice on the strengths and weaknesses of the various manuals andguides available. Ask them to contribute to this database by soliciting cri-tiques.

(e) Offer workshops on using corpora and concordances, particularly as a sup-port for (b) above. Thompson and Tribble (2001) have excellent advice onhow to use these for checking out citational forms and patterns in the chosendiscipline.

3. Initiating the undergraduate

Those of us who work from the bottom-up (as it were), with novice undergraduatestudents, are faced initially with a broader question, about how we should approachthe teaching and learning of disciplinary practices—even before we begin to considerhow these practices begin to influence the uninitiated. This teaching and learningquestion is especially daunting in the United States where post-secondary studentsare required to take classes for breadth (‘‘general education’’) before they begin theirmajor concentrations, often delayed until their third year of university. As a result,there is considerable discussion in the literature about what we should teach in ourfirst year literacy classes, such as whether integrating our writing classes with


disciplines without critique of the textual hegemony of the university is advisable(see, e.g. Spack, 1988; Benesch, 2001).However, from a pragmatic perspective, exposure to a discipline and analysis of

its texts and practices would seem essential to university success everywhere in theworld; and with students like those at San Diego State, whose university drop-outrates can reach 60%, learning about and negotiating university cultures and class-rooms is particularly important for their continuation and motivation. So this sec-ond story is about attempts to assist in this domain—and how the students interpretemergent pedagogies and disciplinary practices.Elsewhere Johns (1997, 2001, 2002) has described in some depth the integrated

curriculum (Freshman Success) program that she helped to establish in the mid-80sand has been teaching in ever since, so a brief overview here will suffice. In thisprogram, first year post-secondary students (17 and 18-year-olds) enroll in a four-class cluster which includes a breath-class (biology, sociology, psychology, etc.), astudy group for that class, an academic writing class, and a university orientationcourse. During the past four years, Johns has been teaching the ‘‘remedial/ESL’’writing class integrated with the cultural anthropology cluster in this program. Thestudents are all from the first generation in their families to attend university, andabout two-thirds are relatively new immigrants. All of the students, except theAfrican –Americans, come from bilingual families.4 Because these students havecome from underserved secondary schools with student-counselor ratios of over1:200, and because their parents know very little about higher education, most of thestudents are ‘‘clueless’’ about university and have not chosen a major concentration.The standard answer to ‘‘What is your major?’’ is ‘‘Business,’’ because they havebeen told that business majors make money5

Teaching cultural anthropology to these students – and teaching the writing classthat explores disciplinary literacies through anthropology—requires a number ofimportant decisions about course focus and assignments. Although there is someconsensus among faculty in the local Anthropology Department about topics in thisbreadth course (e.g. kinship systems), there seems to be little agreement about con-cepts and tasks that should be introduced at this level. In addition to this lack ofconsensus on campus, there are major, open methodological and values quarrels inthe field. Anyone who has read Marcus and Fischer (1986) about the crisis inapproach and methodology in cultural anthropology, or has followed the ‘‘adven-tures’’ of Napoleon Chagnon and the Yamamano (1968) knows that there is openwarfare among the various academic clans in anthropology.Fortunately for these novice students, the anthropology instructor took a fairly

conservative approach. She selected a standard textbook, in its twelfth edition, andshe and this paper’s first author co-constructed the major literacy tasks that would

4 She also teaches a university orientation class for another group of students, also in the cluster.5 Some business majors make money, but the SDSU career center observes that in terms of being

employed, students might be better off to select a major that requires a considerable amount of writing,

e.g. history or English.


lead, eventually, to an IMRD (Introduction, Methodology, Results, Discussion)paper, incorporating research on human migration and cultural persistence fromstudent and family interviews, the WEB, and print texts. They chose the IMRDbelieving that it represents a general, and generative, framework for many of thesciences and social sciences, one which students might be able to apply, with revi-sions, to other courses.6 This text structure also provided opportunities to ‘‘scaffold’’(see Vygotsky, 1986) the writing process by addressing the various sections of thepaper individually, thus, for example, assisting students to separate methods fromresults, and results from discussion. Decisions were also made about the literacy anddisciplinary foci:

� Because methodology (and its critique) is central to anthropology and all thesocial sciences, and the ‘‘hard’’ sciences, as well, this became basic to thediscussions of the values of the discipline and its literacies. Reading about thetraditional methods of cultural anthropology (see e.g. Scheper-Hughes, 2000)and analyzing and describing methods for the final IMRD paper becamecentral to student success.

� One method with which students were familiar was the interview. Thus, theywere asked to investigate their family histories through interviews in an initialpaper whose basic information was integrated into the final IMRD piece,both of which centered around a ‘‘Human Migration and Cultural Persis-tence’’ topic. Constructing this first interview paper about their families wasfor many of the students the most interesting and enjoyable task for theirhighly intertextual final paper

� Another element of the assigned papers was citation. We discussed why cita-tion is used, how to effectively draw from sources, what language signals acitation, and, because the students had had so little practice, how to writeinternal citations and produce a references page. Because most of the uni-versity uses the APA style sheet, we insisted that they learn this style, despitethe fact that the MLA is much preferred in the secondary schools. [SeeHyland (2000), from which some ideas for this part of the instruction weredrawn.]

� In addition to introducing the IMRD paper in stages, an experience thatstudents found puzzling and difficult after the five-paragraph essay of theirsecondary school years (see Johns, 2002), we attempted to teach other generalfeatures of academic writing, described by Geertz (1988) in his discussion of‘‘author-evacuated’’ prose. By asking students to read and analyze the lan-guage of research studies in anthropology, we also hoped to encourage asophisticated understanding of the rules of and reasons for ‘‘hedging’’described by Hyland (1998).

6 At this level, and perhaps at any level, this was an attempt to balance what Berkenkotter and Huckin

(1995), after Bakhtin (1981) refer to as the centripetal forces that contribute to text prototypicality and the

centrifugal forces in a rhetorical situation that require revision and variation.


Lea and Street note, quite appropriately, that in academic classrooms:

. . .students are seldom given support in conceptualizing the epistemo-logical frameworks within which [disciplinary genres] are constructedor in recognising that they consist of contestable knowledge claimsrather than given truths. (1999, p. 64)

Overall, these pedagogical choices were attempts to make potential textual fra-meworks and their purposes more explicit and to encourage students to use a lan-guage that demonstrated their recognition that all research findings are contestable.In this way, it was hoped that the students would also learn to ask the right questionsof their future instructors about their academic subjects and tasks (e.g. Johns, 1997).Much of this curriculum was overwhelmingly new to the students (‘‘and hard!’’)

who came to university with no conception of faculty disciplinary orientations, noidea that faculty have ‘‘implicit conceptions of what constitutes writing’’ (Lea &Street, 1999, p. 63) or that these conceptions vary across and among disciplines, nounderstanding of the differences between pedagogical genres (e.g. an assigned’’research paper’’) and disciplinary genres, and very little understanding of academiclanguage and values. However, they did have remarkable life experiences and per-sonal insights, and in many cases, these experiences plus their high motivation toprove themselves in university succeeded in compensating for any lack of informa-tion about those foreign tribes and clans to which we in university belong (Becher,1989).

3.1. Findings

So what did the students make of all this? At the end of the term, what did theynow believe about the values and practices of cultural anthropologists? What didthey understand about the various methods used by researchers to triangulate theirqualitative studies? How did they perceive of textual practices and registers of cul-tural anthropology? And finally, what topics did they find to be of most interest fortheir own research?What follows is a selection of some of the most insightful student reflections made

during the Fall Semester, 2001, to shed the best light on essentially non-general-izable results. (Corrected for sentence-level errors.)First, students were asked: ‘‘What is an anthropologist? Define this term to a

friend.’’ Though most of the students responded with something they had memor-ized for the examinations in anthropology, a few were much more analytical. Hereare their comments:

For a cultural anthropologist, studying the way a culture affects its people isimportant. (Stevan)

Stevan has identified the heart and soul of the discipline: the basic foundationsof its research. No matter what their particular emphasis (symbolic, linguistic,


archeological), anthropologists focus upon the relationships between a culture andthe behavior and beliefs of people within that culture.

Anthropologists study cultures’ world views and try to understand why people in aculture do what they do. They are interested in studying the meanings of whatpeople do, the motives in each culture. (Vicky)

Vicky’s answer leans toward the work of the symbolic anthropologist. But it alsoidentifies the kinds of syntheses that all anthropologists must complete in order toexplore the meanings of certain beliefs or rituals within a culture.

They look at things that we would not necessarily look at or write about. Theyhave a more complex way of putting things and analyzing people’s actions. Theyanalyze things like language and marriage rituals. (Jennifer)

Jennifer singles out some of the subject matter of anthropology (language andmarriage customs) as unusual; that, in addition to the ‘‘complex way of puttingthings’’ sets anthropologists apart from ‘‘what we would write about.’’ She does notbelieve that she has been initiated and still sees herself as a student, outside of theexpert culture.

Anthropologists’ work is important because it’s important to understand the simi-larities and differences among people so that we can understand the ways they adapt.With the understanding of other cultures, ethnocentrism will diminish. (Marysol)

Decreasing ethnocentrism among the students is a major goal of this course, per-haps the most important of all the goals. Marysol has identified it and spoken of itsimportance.A second reflection question related to the purported stance of the professional

anthropologist both in his/her research and writing. I asked ‘‘What do the methodsthat anthropologists use, and their ways of writing, tell you about the rules for beingan effective researcher and writer in this discipline?’’ Here are some of the bestresponses:

You have to be able to analyze the data in a holistic perspective, making sure notto have your biases or feelings interfere. (Phi Ha)They tend to put their own beliefs and morals into play when living with a culture,but they can’t do that. They have to do everything the people do, whether they likeit or not. (Sherisee)They must leave personal opinions out and morals behind when they write about acertain culture. Unlike other writers, anthropologists actually must undertakeparticipant observation. This allows them to make much stronger conclusionsabout what a culture is like. (David)Assimilation, like culture, is an extremely subjective word. What may seem likeassimilated behavior to one person may be perceived as traditional to another. (Alfred)


As these reflections show, the students understood several of the anthropologist’smajor dilemmas: researchers cannot escape who they are, both personally and culturally,but they must try to be ‘‘objective’’ as they conduct their research. Even the basic con-cepts such as ‘‘assimilation’’ are subject to interpretation. But David, who is una-ware of the methodological crisis in anthropology, argues that methodology may bea saving factor: participant observation enables anthropologists to make strongconclusions.Another question was fruitful in terms of response, principally because the stu-

dents had not only read about the problems in conducting research but had experi-enced these problems when attempting to interview their relatives and the studentsin the secondary schools for their IMRD papers. The question was: ‘‘What are someof the problems that researchers, including you, face when attempting to get infor-mation from consultants? What are some of the measures that you took to over-come these problems?’’

The difficulties that anthropologists encounter are lack of information. A con-sultant (the person from the culture being interviewed) may refuse to cooperatewith me. He could also be unfocused on the purpose of the research and not take thequestions seriously. Another difficulty could be that a family would be unwilling for mechange to attend their festivities and rituals of their daily lives. (Carolina)Time is also a problem—and difficulty with language. (Annette)

For these novice students, problems that researchers face had become a reality.Throughout the semester, they complained about how difficult it is to obtain inter-esting data.How did students approach their interviews for their IMRD papers with a group

of secondary students, whom they hardly knew? Here, they were past masters—experts in discovering and organizing the small bits of information that the youngstudents (most were 14 years old) gave them. The answers to this question appear inthe students’ methodology sections of the IMRD paper:

Before I got to the school, I went over the questions and I made sub-questions sothat I could get as much as possible. (Jennifer)I couldn’t just ask the questions for my paper. I had to kind of make con-versation and then give a question. I tried to show the students that we hadsomething in common so I went into detail about where I grew up and myschool. (Steven)To take notes, I divided my paper in half because I had two students and I wantedto make sure that I recorded their answers right. (Phi Ha)

A very important question for their understanding of the ways in which dis-ciplinary texts relate to practices was the following: ‘‘How do anthropologists write?What do their research papers look like? Why?’’ We know from the dissertationdiscussions outlined in this paper that the answers to these questions are remarkablycomplex. Here are some sample responses:


In anthropology, you write in a different style, very detailed and analytical. Most(of our) papers are about what you think, but anthropologists try to prove orinvestigate something. Then they express their feelings (in the discussion).(David)You have to be open-minded. Careful, meaning do not just write what people dobut explain why they do them and what event caused them to think the way theydo. (Marysol)Anthropologists take themselves out of the paper completely. They write every-thing down in steps and use a lot of detail. Mostly facts are used, and when theywrite their thoughts, it is separated from the facts in writing. In English classes,the writer is usually included in the paper. Most of their thoughts and beliefsreflect a point of view. (Shannon)Anthropologists write in a different format/style. I wasn’t familiar with the IMRDformat until I enrolled in this class. I also found it interesting that the writershould not let her own feelings get the best of them when writing in scientific style.They pretty much just write what they did, how they did it, and what they foundout. As for me, I have always written in the five paragraph style and let my feelingtake the best of me when I write because I thought this helped me get my pointacross. (Phi Ha)

This last group of comments represents an important beginning, an attempt by thestudents to distinguish between the ubiquitous, personal five-paragraph essay oftheir secondary school English classes (see Johns, 2002) and the ‘‘rules’’ of the aca-demic textual game. Particularly interesting perhaps, is Phi, who was impressed bythe fact that different sections of texts serve different functions. This last featurebecame increasingly prominent as the class sessions attempted to convince the stu-dents that they needed to divide their methods from results and results from dis-cussion, divisions that they thought odd, to say the least.Hyland (1999: p.115) notes that ‘‘. . .researchers typically conceal their rhetorical

identities behind a cloak of objectivity, masking their involvement with an array oflinguistic detachment..’’ Although the students could not express this argument inquite the same way (yet), they certainly managed to gain some inkling of Hyland’s‘‘cloak of objectivity.’’ What they failed to understand, of course, is that all texts areconstructed, and that this involvement (as well as personal identity and committedargument) can persist even when couched or cloaked in what outsiders will perceiveas staid, dry, voiceless academic language.In the final writing examination, the students were asked to discuss what they

would like to pursue in anthropological research if they had the time. What emergedis quite similar to what might be found among more experienced researchers, such asdissertation candidates: that their research interests mirrored their own humaninterests at this stage of their development. So Marysol, an apostolic Christian,wanted to pursue her student consultant’s religious conversion from Catholicism:‘‘How has Cindy’s apostolic views changed her family’s attitudes toward traditionalMexican culture?’’ Thai, whose family speaks Vietnamese exclusively in her home,was very interested in investigating the code-switching that her Somali secondary


student consultant had mentioned: ‘‘What are the differences between the languageshe uses at home [where his father dominates the discourse] and the language he useswith friends at school?’’ Carolina wanted to investigate meaning: ‘‘When I asked thegirl about rituals, I would need to know what they mean.’’ Shannon focused on theinfluence of migration on the cultural mix, the hybridization of cultures: ’’ I wouldhave to figure out what parts of the culture were borrowed from other cultures asthe people migrated.’’

3.2. Pedagogical implications

So what do the students’ comments tell us about what we should be teaching fromthe very beginning of a post-secondary education and perhaps earlier? These studentcomments suggest that:

� Faculty in all classes need to encourage student awareness of the texts, lan-guage, research questions, and methodologies of the discipline that the classrepresents. If possible, the pedagogical genres of these classes should be moredisciplinary than school-based (see Dudley-Evans, 2002).

� Students should be assigned to research texts, practices, language, and otheraspects of academic disciplines. They should learn to observe, analyze, askquestions, and if possible, negotiate their tasks to enhance their success.

� Within literacy classes, students should be assigned a variety of writing tasks,requiring a number of intertextual and formal textual experiences. Studentsshould be encouraged to write in different genres and under different conditions.

� We should encourage student meta-awareness of the social nature of genres.Periodically, students should be asked to reflect upon their literacy experi-ences and to compare these experiences with those in other classes or otherschools.

3.3. Final considerations

In this paper we have explored two backgrounds to contemporary EAP practice inUS universities. These two backgrounds could not, of course, be more different sinceone is grounded in the first two years of a decade-long university student experienceand the other deals with its final two years. There is, in consequence, a huge‘‘excluded middle’’ wherein a majority of students reside, especially when we recog-nize the increasing role of Masters degrees in post-secondary education.Despite the huge differences between the two populations, in age and maturity, in

specialization and sophistication, and in writing and reading experience, their edu-cational experiences and educational needs turn out to be different in degree ratherthan in kind. Both groups are encouraged to undertake ‘‘real’’ research and to writeit up with a professional stance, but for both, more obviously for the junior under-graduates and more insidiously for the senior graduates, the role of school genresand its examinable trappings intrudes. Both groups, at their different levels, areengaged in ‘‘pseudocommunicative tasks’’ because of confusion as to whom precisely


they are writing for. While, on one level, the answer may be obvious (for aninstructor and for a dissertation committee), this does not itself clarify what thoseinstructors and those committees are actually looking for—especially as all toomany academics remain rather ‘‘cagey’’ about their expectations.For both groups, isolation (within a class or within a graduate program) and

subsequent failure to ask the right questions or get the right kind of help can be (forall but the most exceptional) a major threat to academic progress and success. Sung(2000) investigated the experiences of over a hundred Taiwanese doctoral students ata major research university, and found very different levels of what she calls ‘‘roun-ded academic success’’. Here is an interview extract from a third year doctoral stu-dent in Industrial Health who was not doing well, and indeed still taking classes:

Typically, I eat, sleep, spend time with my wife, and study. I don’t socialize withAmericans. . .I went out of class after class is dismissed. . .. We attend Chinesechurch. . .This is the primary social activity I have. I don’t attend departmentalactivities. I don’t have a sense of belonging because of my English and stutter. . .

The dividing line between isolation and alienation can be disturbingly thin. Moregenerally, one of Sung’s major conclusions is that her cohort (with some exceptions)seek primary help from their co-nationals when their spoken English proficiency islimited, and only approach their advisors when their English competence and self-confidence is higher. There is a clear role for EAP mediation services of variouskinds when we are confronted with these uncomfortable findings.Finally, Spack (1988) is right, of course. We cannot prepare students for all

eventualities in academic classrooms or in other situations (such as proposal defen-ses), nor do we understand other disciplines or other pedagogical practices wellenough to give our students templates for success. What we can do, across theboard, is raise students’ awareness, give them a variety of experiences and exposures,encourage their analyses and critique of texts and contexts, and motivate them to seethe university, like all institutions, as human and constructed, rigid, fluid, hegemo-nous and negotiable—all at the same time.

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Literacy and disciplinary practices: opening and closing perspectives