Writing well is central to success at school and university. However, it is a skill with which many students struggle. Students need not only to develop skills in a formal educational register that is challenging to many, but, crucially, to shape that language to meet the demands of different academic disciplines and writing tasks. Very different lexical and grammatical resources are required to, for example, report experiments in Chemistry, explain phenomena in Physics, account for events in History, and critique poems in English. Different language is needed when writing for experts or a lay-audience, for colleagues or strangers; to integrate written sources, analyse quantitative data, or foreground the writer’s voice.
The ability to tune one’s academic writing to a variety of purposes and audiences is one of the key outcomes of, and determinants of success in, education across academic disciplines. It is an ability that is becoming all the more important as students learn to negotiate the shifting linguistic norms and text types associated with changing media technologies and to effectively employ the emerging tools offered by generative AI.
Researchers seeking to understand academic language use and its development therefore need to tell a complex story that models the emergence of multifaceted linguistic skills and their application to different, and shifting, contexts and purposes. Such understandings can directly benefit teachers, examiners, and educational policy makers. By better understanding the different linguistic challenges and learning opportunities presented by different writing tasks, educators will be better prepared to help students face the challenges and benefit from the opportunities. By understanding the range of tasks set across different disciplines and year groups, educators will be better able to make links and comparisons between the tasks they set and those students are encountering in other areas. They will be better able to understand how tasks relate to students’ prior knowledge and experience. And they will be better able to look ahead to what students will be expected to write at later levels.
Writing Tasks at School and University is an ESRC-funded project that aims to:
1. create a ‘map’ of the range of writing tasks at schools and universities. This will enable researchers and educators to understand:
a. the linguistic challenges and learning opportunities presented by different types of writing task in different disciplines;
b. the linguistic similarities and differences between the writing needed for different tasks and disciplines, and the principles underlying this variation;
c. the typical distribution of text types across educational levels and disciplines;
2. create and evaluate an online resource and practitioner-focused guidance that will help users navigate this map in order to:
a. gain an explicit, detailed, understanding of variation in academic language and;
b. understand how individual tasks, and the texts students produce, fit into their broader educational experiences and needs;
3. support future research by creating new reference resources. We will add grammatical annotations and information about text type variation to two existing corpora of school and university level writing. Our survey will, further, provide a basis for evaluating the representativeness of these and future collections of academic writing.
Phil Durrant 