Developing an English for Academic Purposes Course for L2 Graduate Students in the Sciences

Abstract

This project has been part of our lives for a long time. It began in 2011 when all the editors were working at the Michigan State University (MSU) Writing Center, Trixie Smith as the director and the rest of us as graduate students. Every day we found ourselves grappling with issues and ideas connected to graduate writers through our work at the writing center: working one-to-one with graduate writers, facilitating graduate writing groups, and offering workshops for graduate students, such as our Navigating the Ph.D. workshop series. The work was also personally relevant to most of us since we were graduate students at the time, frequently finding ourselves experiencing imposter syndrome and letting our identities as graduate students consume our lives. Little did we-excepting Trixie, perhaps-know then that our interest in graduate writing would intensify when we became junior faculty and found that we still faced many of the same writing-related concerns that we did as graduate students.Our motivations for developing this edited collection on graduate writing across the disciplines began when we turned from interacting with graduate writers to researching graduate writers and graduate writing. When the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures department at MSU began an initiative to create research clusters that bring faculty, staff, and students together to engage in conducting academic research and developing publications, we decided that a research cluster focusing on graduate writing would be ideal. We participated in this Graduate Writing Research Cluster for the two years that we were all still at MSU and continued to collaborate when we began moving into faculty positions outside of MSU. Our collaboration culminated in a special issue of Across the Disciplines and this edited collection. What

Poetic Inquiry as a Reflective Method for Instructors of Academic Writing

“…Writing has an essential role in graduate students joining the discourse community of their discipline (Badenhorst et al, 2015;Fredrick et al, 2020;LaFrance & Corbett, 2020). This development of novice scholars into expert academics occurs through learning the language, rhetoric, rules, and structure of the genres of their discipline (Bray, 2018;Douglas, 2020). However, graduate students are often left to navigate enculturation alone and unprepared (Fredrick et al, 2020), viewing their struggles as an individual deficit in skill instead of a socialization process (Badenhorst et al, 2015).…”

“…These problems are compounded by a misunderstanding of writing "problems" as simply related to proofreading and mechanics (Badenhorst et al, 2015;Turner, 2019). These challenges are even more difficult for non-traditional graduate students and those with English as an Additional Language, who must contend with larger cultural and language differences alongside academic enculturation (Douglas, 2020;Fredrick et al, 2020;LaFrance & Corbett, 2020).…”

Learning about research writing across the disciplines

“…Oklahoma State University (USA) an.cheng@okstate.edu multidisciplinary mix of students in the same writing class or in academic support centers is a phenomenon familiar to many LSP practitioners as described in Cheng (2018) and as more recently noted by Douglas (2020). The diverse disciplinary outlooks and the intersubjective responses to a shared task in such classes are valuable (e.g., Swales, 2019), but the challenges facing LSP practitioners are also considerable.…”

Chemistry Departments Should Facilitate Graduate-Level Second-Language Writing Instruction

“…A robust body of research has investigated chemistry writing pedagogies at the K-12 − and undergraduate − ,, levels, examining how writing can help students develop conceptual understanding of organic and physical chemistry, understand genre norms, and articulate the science behind their laboratory procedures. Other chemical education research has addressed the importance of explicitly teaching vocabulary and language in the chemistry classroom, especially in light of increasingly diverse academic environments with a growing population of international students. − Fewer studies have examined the impact of graduate level science writing interventions, − but those that have affirmed the need for L1 and L2 writers alike to develop technical writing skills and genre awareness through systematic and process-based writing instruction.…”