Farzaneh Dehghan; Seyed Ayatoallah Razmjo
Abstract
A challenge for many postgraduate students is to move from the state of novice observers to those of professional contributors of a particular discourse community. They need to develop certain skills, practices, and competences, the demonstration of which is mostly through writing, called disciplinary ...
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A challenge for many postgraduate students is to move from the state of novice observers to those of professional contributors of a particular discourse community. They need to develop certain skills, practices, and competences, the demonstration of which is mostly through writing, called disciplinary writing expertise (DWE). DWE can be examined from two aspects of nature and development. This study aims at proposing a model of disciplinary writing expertise including both the competencies of DWE and factors developing these components. In-depth interviews with 28 postgraduate students of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) were collected and research papers written by these students were used to collect data. Based on substantive considerations and the results of the content analysis, five subcomponents of DWE were identified including strategic, genre, rhetorical, subject matter and discourse community knowledge components. Meanwhile, writing strategies and goal orientations were identified as two important factors influencing the development of disciplinary writing proficiency in a foreign language context. Two questionnaires were made and piloted to endorse these two factors among 538 postgraduate TEFL students. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), we proposed a model to show the relationship among these two factors and the components of DWE. The results showed that those who followed mastery goals used all types of writing strategies to develop different subcomponents of DWE. On the other hand, those who followed context and career-directed goals used strategies to develop rhetorical knowledge mostly.
Naser Rashidi; Mohamad Rahimi; Farzaneh Dehghan
Volume 3, Issue 2 , May 2016, , Pages 96-81
Abstract
Writing academic texts is a challenging endeavour for novice L2 writers, which causes them to rely heavily on the original texts. Some studies have differentiated intentional acts of fraud (like plagiarism) from patchwriting which they claim is unintentional source text reliance. However, others have ...
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Writing academic texts is a challenging endeavour for novice L2 writers, which causes them to rely heavily on the original texts. Some studies have differentiated intentional acts of fraud (like plagiarism) from patchwriting which they claim is unintentional source text reliance. However, others have a negative view toward it. The present study explores L2 graduate student writers and their professors' perspectives about these different writing practices and how they may work for or against developing professional writing expertise in a discipline. Survey questionnaires and interviews were used to collect data. The results were analysed through calculating frequencies and percentages as well as inductive data analysis for transcribed interviews. The results showed that many graduate students used patchwriting in their attempts to write academic texts unintentionally and intuitively. The reasons identified for patchwriting were students' lack of confidence to write independently, inability to paraphrase or fear of not expressing the writer's message thoroughly, and, in some cases, the writers' intention to get around plagiarism detection softwares. However, both students and their instructors had negative views about patchwriting. They believed that writing strategies like patchwriting could not lead to professional writing practices in a discipline. More importantly, the students seemed to continue this practice all through their studies, which may be a sign of not receiving enough instruction and feedback in this regard. The role of explicit teaching is emphasized in making students familiar with the differences between paraphrasing and patchwriting.
