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The purpose of this paper is to illuminate for social studies teachers and teacher educators the ways in which students' disciplinary writing is scaffolded within the context of the inquiry design model; trends in such scaffolding are called “the learner's pathway,” since it leads students to more abstract levels of historical argumentation. The author argues that engaging historical writing genres is a necessary component of historical thinking and that understanding the ways that teachers support students' historical writing capacities can help them to make more intentional choices when building inquiries.

To study genre-related scaffolding across inquiries, this study draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL)-based genre theory as an analytical structure and seventy-four history-focused secondary social studies inquiries to determine any patterns in the ways that teachers scaffold students' writing genres through an inquiry.

Findings suggest that there is a learner's pathway that teachers use to develop students' argumentative writing capacities; however, there is also evidence to suggest that notetaking and source synthesis are not valued instructional products, limiting the potential impact of historical thinking work within the inquiry process.

The existence of this learner's pathway has implications for the ways that teachers and preservice teachers can be professionally developed to leverage this pathway. Rather than the often-used methods of support students' generic writing capacities, professional development should focus on the ways social studies teachers can guide students to more abstract reasoning through their writing. This study's findings also have implications for the ways that social studies teachers assess students' summative arguments. Assessment practices should focus on the genre-features of “argument” rather than just the stages of the argumentative essay.

This piece is original because genre-based research is missing from much of the social studies education research. This study's findings present an additional paradigm through which social studies teachers and teacher leaders can explore the purposes of historical writing tasks and assessment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the interface between high-stakes testing, disciplinary knowledge and teachers’ pedagogy in English. The most prevalent standardized assessment form in the current Australian context is the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) undertaken each year by students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in all Australian States and Territories. Understood in the context of the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM) (Sahlberg, 2011, pp. 100-101) – the NAPLAN tests serve as a bi-partisan governmental response to a perceived need to improve the quality of teachers and schools in Australia.

The authors draw on the key sociological constructs of Pierre Bourdieu (1995) to analyze the ways in which the writing component of the suite of NAPLAN tests serves to legitimize and idealize particular kinds of writing, writers and teachers of writing.

The authors suggest that in the absence of current literacy policy and curriculum instability, this national test shapes the literacy field, influencing the direction of writing practices and pedagogy, and, therefore, subject English itself, in Australian classrooms.

This assessment intervention is considered in the context of the history of writing, and addresses accordingly fundamental questions concerning the changing nature of the writing/writerly field, the impact of assessment on teachers’ conceptions of disciplinarity and pedagogical content knowledge and students’ experiences of writing and thinking in subject English.

With growing concerns about an academic literacy crisis plaguing the education system in South Africa, tertiary institutions have to find ways to strengthen the academic literacy skills of underprepared students transitioning into higher education. This is more pressing for low socioeconomic status students who are linguistically marginalised and face historically poor graduation prospects. In response, this chapter offers a snapshot of two studies conducted in South Africa that sought to test the efficacy of a purposefully designed academic literacy intervention (Reading to Learn (RtL)). The intervention sought to address inequitable academic literacy skills development of linguistically marginalised students, who are also socioeconomically disadvantaged. Two small-scale, longitudinal studies were run in two separate educational contexts in South Africa – a senior secondary school context and a tertiary context with largely first-generation undergraduate students. Results of both studies showed the RtL intervention to be successful at raising the level of academic writing skills of the research participants. Furthermore, similar to other RtL studies conducted globally, the two studies found weaker-performing students made the greatest gains in their academic writing skills, showing evidence of a convergence effect – more equitable learning outcomes being exhibited in the English classroom.

Though contemporary Genre Studies, and especially American Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), has made great progress through prioritizing the functional aspect of genre, there is now much to be gained by giving renewed space to the formal and thematic sides of genre as well, granting the concrete utterances, making up particular genres, equal weight in the theory and analysis of genre. The purpose of this shift is emphatically not to take anything away from current Genre Studies; I admire what is being done in genre research today and want to add to it and expand it by demonstrating some of the possibilities enabled by a modified approach.

Current Genre Studies, as encountered in RGS, is an impressive and highly organized body of knowledge. By re-introducing literary and high rhetorical subject matter, which has been under-studied in RGS, into it, the chapter demonstrates some of the complexities involved when Genre Studies confront genres whose utterances are more complex than the “homely discourses” usually discussed in RGS. Formal and thematic features play a far too significant role in literary works to be explicable simply as derivations from function alone. But this is not limited to works of literature. The chapter finds that though more complex genres, literary and high rhetorical, most consistently invite utterance-based interpretations, other genre-based studies can benefit from them as well.

The chapter offers a perspective on genre which gives renewed weight to formal and thematic interpretations of genre, by allowing the utterances themselves to re-enter center stage. This enables an improved understanding of complex genres. It also revives close reading as a viable approach to understanding genre and thus to inform the rhetorical, linguistic, and sociological perspectives dominant in current genre scholarship. Finally, it improves our understanding of genre in both a systematic and a historical perspective. The chapter demonstrates, thus, that an understanding which puts as much weight on a genre’s utterances, as it does on its function is viable as an interpretation of genres, and is fruitful as an approach to them.

This chapter presents a discussion of innovations in pedagogic approaches for high-achieving, pre-degree pathway program students at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

The question under discussion in the academic language classroom is the extent to which dynamic cohorts of multi-lingual, multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary students are being enabled to fulfill individual learning goals as well as the institution’s expectations of pathway learners and academic language users. Wingate (2015) argues that in the absence of an epistemological and socioculturally embedded literacy instruction, students are not equitably prepared for success in the discipline or the wider institution. The chapter reviews critiques of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and Academic Literacies by addressing “the best of both worlds” (Wingate & Tribble, 2012, p. 492) approach.

The chapter continues with a case study into the Academic Vocabulary in Literacy strand of the Foundation EAP course on the International Foundation Programme at Edinburgh University. There then follows close analysis of innovation by course designers to adapt the “best of both traditions” model (Wingate & Tribble, 2014, p. 2) into an integrated academic language and literacy approach. It is posited that this approach could enable attempts at transition for high-achieving foundation students by experiencing language in dynamic and multi-modal genres.

This paper, which originates in an English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) classroom activity in Hong Kong, aims to explore English learners’ expressive and creative potential in writing by studying their work in the literary narrative genre.

A group of upper secondary students (15-16 years of age) with limited English resources and competence was enlisted to remake a folktale with visual and written prompts.

The writing samples demonstrate that these low-level EFL writers are able to refashion the narrative elements, and to communicate meanings for their own purposes. They exhibit logicality and problem-solving skills in their attempts to challenge and transform idea and to include themes of interest to them. There is also evidence of creative play with language in their use of dialogues and figures of speech.

These writing outcomes suggest the need to re-vision English language arts practices in increasingly diverse education systems. Genre-based instruction, with its emphasis on “writing to mean” as a social activity supported by learning to use language, could lead to widening EFL learners’ access to genre knowledge and to greater life chances.

A linguistics-based pedagogy scaffolding less able EFL writers while they learn to build effective narratives is identified as a way forward.

Although the idea of using narratives to engage EFL learners in writing is not entirely new, this paper contributes to the field by responding to low-level learners’ writing that goes beyond linguistic “correctness”, and developing strategies for supporting creativity and language play.

Building on the proposition that Bernstein's ideas are due for a revival in higher education research, the call for studies in which theory is put to use and for policy studies to engage in textual analysis, this chapter argues for the affordances of the theoretical underpinnings of Bernstein's pedagogic device and critical discourse studies in investigating connections between policy and practice. Drawing on the sociology of pedagogy and applied linguistics, this chapter aims to explore the theoretical complementarities of the chosen approaches for exploring how policy ideas move through time and space. A focus on the notion of recontextualisation enables an understanding of how influences beyond the discipline itself, including policy discourses, can shape learning, teaching and assessment practices. The illustrating case examines policy on learning and teaching and how these ideas are recontextualised from national policy through to institutional policy and individual practices. The critical or questioning angle of both approaches in seeing ideas, including policy, as never value-free but as situated within their sociopolitical context can shed light on how policy ideas make their way into universities and in whose interests.

This vignette reports on a range of implementation models for an approach dubbed Collaborative Interdisciplinary Publication Skills Education (CIPSE). CIPSE aims to develop the skills of early-career researchers, including higher degree by research students, to write about their research in ways that meet the expectations of external assessors – editors and referees of international journals. CIPSE involves expert researchers from a specific field, in this case scientists, and English language specialists with specific expertise in research communication working together on the planning, design and implementation stages of education programmes adapted to fit local contextual constraints. It combines the knowledges and skills of scientists/reviewers/editors, matched to the research discipline of students, and the skills of language educators experienced in genre analysis and language-based elements of English writing. The programme develops skills in three interwoven components: genre analysis, the deconstruction of the scientific journal article genre into functional steps and learning of skills required for each identified component of the genre; gatekeeper awareness, understanding and anticipating the role of reviewers, and developing strategies for presenting quality research and negotiating the acceptance phase of publishing; and story development, packaging and value-adding to data, analysis and information to present and discuss the most important and novel findings of research to the chosen audience. The vignette presents an analysis of CIPSE implementation in two types of higher education contexts, in order to draw out principles of general relevance to the sector: three science disciplines in a research-intensive Australian university and three sites beyond Australia where English is used as an additional language – one in Spain and two in China. Implications are presented for curriculum design and interdisciplinary practice.

This chapter discusses textography as a strategy for researching academic writing in higher education. Textography is an approach to the analysis of written texts which combines text analysis with ethnographic techniques, such as surveys, interviews and other data sources, in order to examine what texts are like, and why. It aims to provide a more contextualized basis for understanding students’ writing in the social, cultural and institutional settings in which it takes place than might be obtained by looking solely at students’ texts. Through discussion of the outcomes of a textography, which examined the written texts submitted by visual and performing arts doctoral students at a number of Australian universities, we reflect on what we learnt from the study that we could not have known by looking at the texts alone. If we had looked at the texts without the ethnographic data not only are there many things we would not have known, but many of the things we might have said would likely have been right off the mark. Equally, had we just had the ethnographic data without the text analysis, we would have missed the insights provided by the explicit text analysis. The textography enabled us to see the diversity of practices across fields of study and institutions as well as gain an understanding of why this might be the case, all of which is of benefit to student writers and their supervisors.