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This thesis examines senior secondary English in New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, assessing almost 80,000 students per annum via externally-set examinations, and, at the time of writing, transitioning from an old to new senior English syllabus. Previous research (e.g., Christie 1999, 2016; Christie & Derewianka, 2008; Christie & Macken-Horarik, 2011; Macken-Horarik, 2006; Rosser, 2000) has investigated subject English at various stages of its history by examining the development of curriculum documents, classroom discourse, and assessment practices; however, these three elements have not been considered concurrently. This thesis builds on this prior research by comparing the most recent NSW syllabi, from 2009 and 2018, and examining how syllabus requirements are realised through assessment practices and classroom discourse to provide a mutually informing account of subject English in theory and practice.Drawing on three data sources – the Rationale of the Stage 6 English syllabus, five student examination responses, and classroom and interview data – the linguistic and epistemic requirements of subject English are explored, using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) as theoretical frameworks. Analysis revealed that subject English values both knowledge (of language and literature) and knowers (as sensitive and appreciative readers), and that students are required to demonstrate both knowledge and dispositions through carefully controlled writing in the essay form. These findings were generally congruent with earlier research into the nature of the discipline (e.g., Davison, 2005), emphasising the importance of the duality of both knowledge and knower structures, rather than one or the other.Analysis of classroom data suggested that students appear to be cognisant of these requirements but were often resistant to dominant readings of texts, and struggled to demonstrate their knowledge in the required ways. Classroo

This critical action research study with Iranian nursing students examines how the innovative use of formative assessment changed the nature of learning and teaching in an academic writing class over the summer of 2012. The study draws on three sets of literature, namely critical academic writing, democratic systems of assessment including critical testing, and critical emotion theories to examine how the participants experience formative assessment, the impact of formative assessment on their writing development and on their attitudes towards and perceptions of assessment, teaching and learning academic writing and teaching and learning in general.Drawing on the analysis of varied sources of data, including lesson plans, the writing samples and the narratives of the 12 participants including myself, the research findings show that the use of formative assessment went beyond merely forming and informing learning and teaching including the associated assessment processes, to re-forming and transforming them. The findings also suggest that, besides key characteristics of formative assessment enumerated in the literature, there are other contributing factors to the complexity of assessment, as a situated and power-oriented process, and accordingly to teaching and learning academic writing. The findings reveal the complexity of participants‘ responses to the program, partly shaped and re-shaped by the comfort and discomfort associated with the past experiences and by the development of ‗critical hope‘. The praxis of formative assessment demands that learners and teachers acknowledge and embrace the role of power and emotion through dialogic reflectivity and criticality. It also demands a close attention to time and the interplay of the past, present and future which shape and re-shape the context and the participant‘s experience in this context. The findings from this study demonstrates that attending to power, emotion and time opens up productive ways to teaching and a

The globalization and commodification of higher education have brought contextual changes to Australian universities such as a substantial growth in international student numbers and increased publication pressure on doctoral scholars and academics. Experiencing these changes, in the Australian Higher Degree Research (HDR) context, increasing attention is being paid to support for students’ scholarly writing such as writing groups or group writing conferences. Despite the growing demand for this type of support, little is known about how the group activity enhances students’ genre knowledge development. Drawing on sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 2012), the study investigates HDR students’ genre learning - namely their thesis writing - through the exchange of oral feedback in group writing conferences at an Australian university. The study takes an ethnographic case study approach and investigates twelve students’ participation in three writing groups over a ten-week period. In these groups, students and a facilitator from the university’s learning centre meet fortnightly for two hours to discuss each other’s writing. Data were collected through observation and audiorecordings of meetings, written drafts, and interviews with the students and facilitators. The study focuses on underexplored areas in the previous studies on oral peer feedback in L2 writing classrooms: group oral interactions as tools for learning and the influences of social contexts inside and outside the classroom settings. Using the sociocultural concepts of mediation (Vygotsky, 1978), activity systems (Engeström, 2001) and Vygotsky’s concept of perezhivanie (lived experience) as analytical lenses, I examined participants’ motives and perspectives, and the groups’ emerging rules and divisions of labour. The findings include (1) the beneficial discursive features of oral interactions (e.g. giving and responding to feedback) and their relationships with oth

The study seeks to gain an understanding of the extent to which the geopolitical context affects the international academic publication practices of Indonesian academics, an under-researched population of academia in South East Asia which belongsto one of the largest country by population in the world, yet peripheral economicallyand linguistically, and which is in its inaugural process of escalating its publication performance internationally. By drawing on the concept of Communities of Practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998), this thesis understands the international academic community as a community of practice. This thesis enquires the engagement of Indonesian scholars to the international academic communities through their publications in English-medium international journals. By adopting a mixed-method design as the methodological framework, which combines a questionnaire with 3 qualitative case studies, this thesis investigates the endeavour, the motives and the circumstances that affect these scholars’ ability to publish in English-medium international journals. The main findings of the study show that publication was constrained by: a.) shortages of material resources, such as online journals and; b.) lack of knowledge of specific strategies for research and the writing and publication for international journals. The strategies used include joint-publication, proofreading, and literature review research. Despite these findings most academics privileged publication in English/international journals compared to publication in national journals. Their motives were mainly scholarly recognition and career advancement rather than enriching the available theory in the disciplines. Another finding was that the participants who did achieve publication in international journals were those with active networks of overseas scholars; in particular, those engaged in joint-publication with Anglophone scholars were able to publish in higher-rank centre journals, while

The paper draws on a series of Australian Research Council (ARC) projects aimed at understanding better the process of doctoral examination. The early phase focussed on the Australian doctorate, which functions without a Viva, while the later phase was concerned with comparing the earlier findings with analysis of the United Kingdom (UK) and New Zealand (NZ) systems that include a Viva. Results showed some strengths and weaknesses of both systems and so the paper explores the desirability of drawing on the strengths of both examination models to minimize the weaknesses against a backdrop of escalating pressures on universities.

Evaluation of research is a core function of academic work, yet there has been very little theoretical development about what it means to ‘know’ in relation to judgements made in examination of doctoral research. This chapter addresses the issue by reflecting on findings from three projects aimed at enhancing understanding of doctoral examination. In order to progress understanding about knowledge judgements in the doctoral research context, the chapter draws on two key contributions in the field of knowledge and knowing, namely, Habermas’ cognitive interests and Chinn, Buckland and Samarapungavan’s notion of epistemic cognition. It examines the common ground between the two bodies of theory, drawing illustratively on empirical work in the field of doctoral examination. The comparison of the Habermasian theory of cognitive interests with Chinn et al.’s notion of epistemic cognition led to the conclusion that there were areas of overlap between the two conceptual schemas that could be utilised to advance research into doctoral examination in higher education. Habermas’ cognitive interests (which underpin his ways of knowing theory) offer a conceptual lens that facilitates analysis of the interaction of ontological and epistemic components of knowledge production. Chinn et al.’s notion of epistemic cognition allows for finer grained analysis of aspects of the cognitive work involved in knowledge rendition. This work is particularly pertinent in an era that sees the boundaries of the disciplines being challenged by the need for new perspectives and crossdisciplinary approaches to solving complex problems.

To date, research into learning transfer in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), particularly in Englishfor Academic Purposes (EAP) writing contexts has focused on the extent to which EAP learning outcomes aretransferred into disciplinary writing contexts. While these studies, particularly those on transfer climate andstudent motivation have contributed to our knowledge about the factors that both facilitate and impede learningtransfer, they are limited to the study of far transfer and adopt a socio-cognitive construct of language learningwhich does not account for the role of students’ past learning histories, identity, investment and agency ininfluencing transfer. The study reported here aims to fill these research gaps by investigating both near and fartransfer from an English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) pathway course at a large metropolitanAustralian university; and through adopting an academic literacies lens for this. The course has the dualobjectives of (i) near transfer – training for the university’s English admissions examinations, and (ii) far transfer –training for participation in disciplinary discourse practices. Drawing on data from students’ writing tasks, semistructuredand text-based interviews, the research analysed the transfer trajectories of seven non-native Englishspeaker students (NN ES) to investigate the impact of the course on students’ written academic literaciesdevelopment; and subsequently, the negotiation of their postgraduate writing tasks in the first semester ofpostgraduate studies. The research findings indicate that although evidence of far transfer was found, transfer hadoccurred in a constricted manner, implying that the course had minimal impact on students’ performance in theirdisciplinary writing tasks. In addition, transfer was influenced by student factors, task factors and contextual factorswhich were found to have multi-directional relationships, and which were mutually constitutive. Finally, studentsw

This thesis examines introductory chapters of recent history theses, in order to identify generic structure, engagement strategies, and to explore the extent of the role engagement strategies play in relation to the construction of text. In order to resolve analytical issues in the Swalean method, a new method is proposed, which integrates the Greimassian method, a semiotically oriented structuralist method of reducing elements to the minimum function. By doing so, this thesis demonstrates that emerging elements such as postmodern personal anecdotes can be effectively incorporated into this minimized generic structure model, providing a practical methodology for future generic structure analyses. Quantitative and qualitative investigations are pursued in order to compare the generic structures of thesis introductory chapters of different ideological orientations. The results are statistically tested with correspondence analysis so as to visually identify the correlation between generic structure components and ideological orientation. The analysis of engagement strategies is also conducted quantitatively and qualitatively to compare the distribution of different dialogic elements according to ideological orientation. The engagement analysis further investigates the distribution of dialogic elements across generic structure components, which investigates if and how engagement strategies realise larger textual resources, namely, the interaction between engagement strategies and generic structures. This thesis finds that traditional and postmodern theses vary significantly in the way they create dialogic spaces and that engagement strategies vary across generic structure components. This thesis concludes that a minimized binary generic structure model is useful in analyzing increasingly diversified thesis writing. It also concludes that dialogic elements play a crucial role in constructing text, enabled by dynamic interaction with ideology and textual resources. This t

This case study investigated the implementation of an EMI program as an educational change in a Vietnamese public university. Using a needs analysis framework, this qualitative-dominant study sequentially collected data from questionnaires, in-depth interviews, and class observations from 148 students and 71 lecturers in the program to provide a thick description of their perceived meaning of the change. The findings revealed that EMI, based on the content and language integrated principles, was promoted as an intended means to improve the quality of the education system in general, and of language teaching and learning in particular, to meet the increasing demand of a previously closed nation toward a more open and market-oriented economy. While the students and lecturers were positive about the benefits of EMI, they were unaware of the big picture of the change and the change process. Therefore, they exhibited uncertainty and confusion about the meaning, actual practices, and outcomes of the innovation. Through the lens of change theory, the study confirmed that these phenomena were common in the change process. It also identified areas that needed to be addressed to effectively enact EMI; for example, clarification of its purposes and implementation model, teacher learning community, teacher and student support, program evaluation, and student recruitment. In other words, the EMI implementation was depicted as a transition from a Confucian-influenced education system towards a Westernised one, in the context of a transforming nation striving to join the rest of the world.

The Continuum Companion to Research Methods in Applied Linguistics is designed to be the essential one-volume resource for students. The book includes:* qualitative and quantitative methods* research techniques and approaches* ethical considerations* sample studies* a glossary of key terms* resources for studentsAs well as covering a range of methodological issues it looks at numerous areas in depth, including researching gender and language, language and identity, pragmatics, vocabulary, and grammar. Comprehensive and accessible, this will be the essential guide to research methods for undergraduate and postgraduate students in applied linguistics and language studies.

Accompanying The Routledge Doctoral Student?s Companion, this book examines what it means to be a doctoral student in education and the social sciences, providing a guide for those supervising students. Exploring the key role and pedagogical challenges that face supervisors in students? personal development, the contributors outline the research capabilities which are essential for confidence, quality and success in doctorate level research. Providing guidance about helpful resources and methodological support, the chapters: * frame important questions within the history of debates * act as a road map through international literatures * make suggestions for good practice * raise important questions and provide answers to key pedagogical issues * provide advice on enabling students? scholarly careers and identities.While there is no one solution to ideal supervision, this wide-ranging text offers resources that will help supervisors develop their own personal approach to supervision.