Supervision at the outline stage: introducing and encountering issues of sustainable development through academic writing assignments
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Ann-Marie Eriksson
Ann-Marie Eriksson is MA with The Linnaeus Centre for Research on Learning, Interaction and Mediated Communication in Contemporary Society (LinCS), University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and the Division for Language and Communication, Chalmers University of Technology. Her research focus concerns academic writing in higher education, with a particular interest in text production as a communicative practice and socialization of knowledge.
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Åsa Mäkitalo
Åsa Mäkitalo is Professor in Education at the University of Gothenburg. She is co-director of LinCS, a Centre of Excellence conducting research on learning, interaction and IT. She is also Head of The University of Gothenburg LETStudio, engaging in issues of technologies and the transformation of expertise, on the social organization of learning and knowing, and forms of participation in knowledge practices across domains.
Abstract
Universities are responsible for introducing students to disciplinary fields and their knowledge traditions. A common way to cater for processes of this kind is to organize students’ work through the production of text in a genre common in their field. Previous research has pointed to the challenges involved as students appropriate disciplinary ways of reasoning through writing, yet further attention needs to be directed to the communicative challenges involved at the very beginning of the process. Based on 14 video-recorded face-to-face encounters between environmental experts and individual MSc Engineering students, this study focuses on supervision at the outline stage of producing a report, and explores it as a communicative practice. The results from our study show how the students’ outline documents functioned as resources for separating the performing of a study from the crafting of its textual presentation. The results also illuminate, in detail, how access points to disciplinary reasoning and arguing were introduced through verbal discourse.
About the authors
Ann-Marie Eriksson is MA with The Linnaeus Centre for Research on Learning, Interaction and Mediated Communication in Contemporary Society (LinCS), University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and the Division for Language and Communication, Chalmers University of Technology. Her research focus concerns academic writing in higher education, with a particular interest in text production as a communicative practice and socialization of knowledge.
Åsa Mäkitalo is Professor in Education at the University of Gothenburg. She is co-director of LinCS, a Centre of Excellence conducting research on learning, interaction and IT. She is also Head of The University of Gothenburg LETStudio, engaging in issues of technologies and the transformation of expertise, on the social organization of learning and knowing, and forms of participation in knowledge practices across domains.
Acknowledgments
The study has been conducted at The Linnaeus Centre for Research on Learning, Interaction, and Mediated Communication in Contemporary Society (LinCS), funded by the Swedish Research Council, and we would like to thank its members for their comments and support.
Transcript legend
- (.)
brief, untimed pause
- (..)/(…)
longer, untimed pause
- words
underlined word: emphatic voice
- word-
the speaker interrupts him-/herself
- [mhm]
brackets on two lines: overlapping talk by two speakers
- [aehm]
- ?
question intonation
- *okay*
giggles at the same time as “okay” is spoken
- e:h
prolonged syllable, for example, “e:h”, “a:h”
Appendix 2
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©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Supervision at the outline stage: introducing and encountering issues of sustainable development through academic writing assignments
- Bringing consumption reviews into relief by combining Appraisal and argumentation analysis
- Member accounts in the assessment of professional competence
- Stance taking in Japanese Newspaper discourse: the use and non-use of Copulas da and dearu
- Test taker-initiated repairs in an English oral proficiency exam for international teaching assistants
- Pragmatic verbal repetition: review and application of a new method of quantification
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Supervision at the outline stage: introducing and encountering issues of sustainable development through academic writing assignments
- Bringing consumption reviews into relief by combining Appraisal and argumentation analysis
- Member accounts in the assessment of professional competence
- Stance taking in Japanese Newspaper discourse: the use and non-use of Copulas da and dearu
- Test taker-initiated repairs in an English oral proficiency exam for international teaching assistants
- Pragmatic verbal repetition: review and application of a new method of quantification
