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This study aimed to examine the relationship between teacher written feedback and change in the writing of tertiary students in their final year of undergraduate study through investigating: (i) the characteristics of final year undergraduate tertiary students’ texts prior to receiving feedback; (ii) the way these characteristics change after written feedback is given; and (iii) the relationship between the changes made and the types of feedback given. The study examined student texts and teacher written feedback that arose naturally out of a third year disciplinary-based unit in which the students each submitted a text three times over the course of a semester, each time receiving feedback and a mark prior to rewriting and resubmitting. Two in-depth non-quantitative analyses were conducted: one analysing the characteristics of each of the students’ texts and how these changed over the course of the process, the other analysing the relationship between the different types of feedback and the changes that occurred in the subsequent text. The analysis of the students’ texts and their changes covered: (i) coherence; (ii) the sources used and the manner in which these were cited and referenced; (iii) academic expression and mechanics; and (iv) additional expectations and requirements of the writing task. These characteristics and their changes were related to the instructional approaches to which all the students had been exposed in their first, second and third year studies. The analysis shows that, on their own accord, the third year students were able to produce a range of generalisable characteristics reflecting the “basics” in writing and demands specific to the tertiary context that had been revealed through the instructional approaches used. The problems in the students’ texts were mainly related to (i) executing and expressing the specific requirements of the task and (ii) their reading of the social context. Most of the changes in the texts were related to the feedback given. Some of these changes directly resolved problems, however, others did not. Some changes occurred to accommodate other changes in the text and some were made to satisfy a demand of the lecturer sometimes resulting in a problem that did not present in the previous text. These findings enabled insights to be drawn on two major views of tertiary student writing: the deficit view in which the problems in student’s texts are seen to be due to a lack of “basic skills”; and the view that students’ problems arise due to the new demands of the tertiary context. The study found that the deficit view and the “new demands” view were unable to explain all the characteristics of the students’ texts and their changes. Arising out of these findings, this study proposes that the characteristics of a student’s text show the end result of how that student negotiated and integrated his/her understanding of form, content and contextual demands at the time of writing. In analysing the relationship between the different types of feedback and the changes that occurred, the feedback was categorised according to the issue that was being addressed, the manner in which it was given, and its scope. The different types of feedback were directly related to the changes that occurred in the students’ subsequent rewrites. The analysis shows that clear direct feedback on which students can act is strongly related to change where it (i) addresses characteristics that could be readily integrated into the existing text without the need to renegotiate the integration of form, content and contextual demands OR (ii) addresses characteristics and indicates to students how to negotiate the integration between form, content and contextual demands where integration in the text needs to change. In addition, the analysis shows that change is further influenced by the balance between the various individual points of feedback and the degree to which they reinforced each other. The findings from both analyses in this study show that the use of feedback that is strongly related to change can improve the writing of all students beyond what they learn through other instructional approaches to writing.

This thesis examines the way in which purpose and identity are realised in the written case reports of radiography students in comparison with those of professional writers. Students entering a new discourse community have to take on a new social identity and this identity is expressed by means of familiarity with the appropriate discourse conventions, including genre as the most overt expression of rhetorical purpose. Also important are the pragmatic choices used by writers to guide readers’ understanding of text and to construct interaction between them, i.e. metadiscourse, which here provides an additional and complementary way of viewing purpose and identity. The study aims, at a more theoretical level, to make a contribution to writing research by integrating genre analysis and metadiscourse analysis within a single framework to provide new insight into the resources available to writers to construe identity in text. At a descriptive level, it provides analyses of a hitherto neglected genre of medical writing. Because the study compares the writing of novices and professionals, the description of this genre makes findings available for pedagogical application. Radiographers and radiologists work as members of the same professional teams and both publish case reports, often in the same journals. Data for the study is provided by two corpora of reports, one produced by radiography students and the other published in national journals by professionals. The genre analysis establishes the move structure of the radiological case study for both corpora and a cross-corpus analysis of metadiscourse demonstrates how identity is realised in the text as the moves unfold. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted with regard to the data. The student reports appear to be examples of a sub-genre of case reports with the move structure and metadiscoursal strategies differing in several significant ways, reflecting the different purposes and identities of the writers. Student writers are found not to be concerned with the more persuasive rhetorical functions of the genre and tend to align themselves with the viewpoint of the patient rather than the medical profession, drawing on school essay discourse and making use of metadiscoursal strategies associated with textbooks. / Linguistics / D.Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics)

The problem of this study was to investigate the extent to which businesses use the scientific method in the organization and preparation of written business reports. Data for this study were collected by the use of a questionnaire which was devised, validated, and pilot testes. Questionnaires were mailed to 50 systematically, selected members (200 total) of each of the four major group categories (banking and finance, government and education, manufacturing and utilities, and sales and services) from Region V's 1985-1986 Association of Records Managers and Administrators membership roster. One hundred six responses were received, representing a 53 per cent return. Additional information was obtained from sample records and telephone interviews.

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The purpose of this study was to examine assignment writing as a phenomenon of academic writing. This was done through exploring the experiential accounts of members of a university writing community. Their accounts described the community's perceptions and experiences of literacy practices needed to write assignments, of how students developed these practices, and, of what constituted success in the writing. A multi-method, embedded, case-study approach was used. Quantitative data were derived from first-year, second-year, and fourth-year respondents' perceptions and experiences related to assignment writing. A cross-sectional comparison of groups showed consistent year-level effects. Fourth-year students were more confident as writers than first-year and second-year students, and had less difficulty with declarative and procedural aspects of writing assignments. These findings were replicated in a repeated-measures study using a sub-group of first-year and fourth-year students. However, when students contextualised their responses by nominating a subject and referring to their completion of its written assignment, first-year students reported less difficulty with the declarative aspects while fourth-year students were more positive in the procedural aspects. Year-level effects were found for what they reported as helpful in acquiring declarative and procedural knowledge of writing. First-year students reported a wider range of sources as helpful than fourth-year students did, with two exceptions. More of the latter had found information gained in consultations helpful in understanding an assignment question. Additionally more had found friends helpful. Second-year students generally were more positive than first-year and fourth-year students about the usefulness of information in helping them understand an assignment question and in writing it in an academic genre. Knowing how to write predicted success more strongly and consistently than any other factor. Qualitative data informed findings from the quantitative analyses by providing experiential accounts about students' perceptions of themselves as assignment writers, their experiences when writing assignments, and how these experiences developed literacy practices that contributed to success. Additionally, qualitative data were collected from lecturers who convened first-year subjects and those who convened fourth-year subjects. The qualitative data indicated students' strong reference to experiences of writing and of seeking help. Both had shaped their self-perceptions as writers and these had changed over time. First-year students believed that knowing what lecturers wanted in writing assignments was an important factor in success. They described their efforts to access this information and to give lecturers what they thought was wanted. Fourth-year students recognised the same factor, but were more self-reliant in approaching an assignment task. The change to greater internal control appeared to be an outcome of encountering inconsistent and confusing information from external sources over their four years of writing assignments. For their part, lecturers of first-year students said that successful students knew what to write and how to write it. However, lecturers of fourth-year students believed knowing what to write should be subsumed by knowing how to write, and concentrated on the procedural aspect. They believed a coherent assignment resulted when students conceptualised subject matter in ways that enabled them to write academically. Findings in this study extend recent reconceptualisations of literacy as 'literacies' and socio-cultural, socio-cognitive theories about literacy as social practice. They demonstrate limitations of an apprenticeship model for acculturation and suggest a more agentic role for novice members in accounting for learning outcomes as students develop as assignment writers. The experiential accounts reported by members of the academic writing community described their shared and idiosyncratic perceptions of literacy practices and relations of these practices with success in assignment writing. Their descriptions enhance our understanding of the complexity and consequences of these experiences. They also account for why calls for the community to be more visible and explicit in sharing communal expectations of what is privileged and valued in academic assignment writing generally may not be a solution. Based on findings here, this is not a solution. Expectations need to be co-constructed within the community, among students, and lecturers within the context of the writing task. An outcome of understandings reported here is the development of a model from which factors, conditions and critical events that situate learning within a rhetorical conundrum may be described and predicted. This model offers a framework for members of a writing community to explicate individual experiences and expectations in ways that help everyone make sense of those critical events that contribute to a rhetorical conundrum and shape encultured knowledge.

The purpose of this study was to determine if adult students at the College of the Rockies improved in their ability to write technical English after having studied specifically developed curriculum. The research was conducted during the winter semester (January to April 1999) at the Cranbrook, BC campus. Curriculum for the course Technical and Professional Writing 091 was developed as a project for the Centre for Curriculum, Transfer and Technology, an arm of the post-secondary education division of the government of the Province of British Columbia. Four of the units, Direct Requests, Bad News Messages, Persuasive Writing, and Reports and Proposals were tested out in the Cranbrook class via pre and posttesting of the students. As well, field observations and interviews formed an integral component of the study. The final data analysis overall improvement in the learners' ability to write technical English; in addition, each curriculum unit was scrutinized for improvement rates. Recommendations were made for further areas of study and research needed in this discipline. / ix, 81 leaves ; 29 cm.

Teachers confront the problem of plagiarism when they give research assignments. These research projects vary according to the way in which the professor, the department and the discipline defines research. To investigate research across the disciplines, I interviewed six professors who teach research assignments in their classes and six students who attempted to complete these assignments during the academic period of summer semester (1993) through fall semester (1994) at Ball State University.Specifically, I observed six disciplines--English, history, philosophy and religious studies, anthropology, physics, and biology--to assess the teachers' procedures for teaching research, and their explanations of how research could go wrong.Six student volunteers were observed throughout their research assignment as they gathered sources, accumulated data, observed experiments, wrote papers and compiled11a Works Cited list. After students completed their research assignments, I requested that each instructor evaluate the assignments and conclude whether it constituted legitimate, effective research. Although all six student researchers had difficulties completing their assignments, by the end of the semester four out of the six produced successful research projects. One student received an F on her project because she plagiarized, while another earned a C because she did not complete the assignment effectively. The students who did well on their research projects exhibited discipline-specific skills and the following general characteristics: the ability to gather sources, focus topics, authenticate sources, employ disciplinary language, adhere to citation and documentation format guidelines, and use computer and lab equipment. Indicators of possible plagiarism in research projects included: students using unspecified format (such as an older MLA format), writing that revealed improvement several skill levels above previous writing, uncited elevated language and phraseology, and a lack of sources in the bibliography. / Department of English

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of English, General Literature and Rhetoric, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.P.H.)--University of Michigan, 1944.