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This dissertation is about the writing of theses in Swedish higher education. The aim is to construct meanings about thesis writing from different kinds of texts. The meanings are answers to the overall question about what good teaching can be in relation to thesis writing, and to what extent handbooks on writing can enhance such teaching. The dominant meaning constructed from handbooks on thesis writing is that writing is about following certain rules and closely connected to this meaning is the idea that writing can be taught as a separate ability. Focus is on the abilities of the individual student. A consequence of this meaning is that handbooks can be of use. The dominant meaning constructed from research on thesis writing is that writing takes place in a context, and that the teaching must concentrate on the content of the subject. When students understand the subject they will also be able to write. Focus is on what the institution can do to support students. The consequence of this meaning is that there is no need for handbooks in the teaching of writing. Important aims of Swedish higher education are being neglected in most texts on writing, i.e. critical thinking, students’ influence over the education, the possibilities of all categories of students participating in higher education, students’ personal development, education and citizenship. These issues, however, are frequent in other texts on higher education, and in the last part of the dissertation the question of thesis writing is brought to these broader contexts. The dissertation takes pragmatism as its theoretical starting point. The construction of meanings and their consequences, as well as the insistence on the two roles of education being of use to the individual as well as to society, come from pragmatism. So does also, following Dewey, the belief that what students do in education must have significance, not only in future, but as it takes place.

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The primary aim of this study is to determine whether it is possible to standardize written feedback on L2 student writing for use in a computerised marking environment. It forms part of a bigger project aimed at enhancing the feedback process as a whole The study attempts to establish "best practice" with regards to feedback on writing, by establishing from the literature what works and what should be avoided. Also, an empirical study was launched to establish what lecturers focus on and what marking techniques they use. A set of randomly selected essays from the Tswana Learner English Corpus and the Afrikaans Learner English Corpus were sent to the English departments of different tertiary institutions across the country. The essays were marked by the English lecturers at the relevant institutions. The conclusion was that lecturers typically focus on surface structures, and use ineffective marking techniques. The best practice (and data from the empirical study) was then used to create a set of standardised feedback comments (tag set) that can be used in a specially programmed software package in which students submit their texts electronically. Lecturers can then mark the student essays on the computer, hopefully speeding up the process, while at the same time giving much more detailed feedback. In later stages of the bigger project, students will get individualized exercises based on the feedback, and there are experiments currently being run to try and automate certain pans of the marking process in order to take some strain off the lecturers when marking. The immense archiving abilities of the computer will also be utilized in order to create opportunities for longitudinal studies. The effectiveness of the feedback tag set was tested in comparison to the marking techniques used by the lecturers in the empirical study and a self-correcting exercise. The conclusion was that the feedback tag set is more effective than the other two techniques. but students seem to perform weak overall when it gets to the revision of cohesive devices and supporting arguments. I argue that students are not used to revising these features, since lecturers seldom (if ever) comment on the structural elements of texts. However, the experiment proves that standardization of written feedback is possible to an extent. The implications of the findings are discussed, and recommendations for further research are made. / Thesis (M.A. (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2006

Cohesive devices such as anaphoric reference play an important role in written discourse. This thesis investigates the extent to which the anaphoric demonstratives this and these are used as determiners (‘attended’) or pronouns (‘unattended’) by first-year undergraduate students from four different academic disciplines. Data extracted from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus were analysed quantitatively to determine the frequency of use of attended and unattended this/these across disciplines, as well as qualitatively to examine the types of nominal and verbal structures that follow the demonstratives. When compared to findings from previous studies, novice student writers were found to employ this/these as pronouns to a larger extent than both students at a more advanced level and research article writers. It was also observed that the determiners this and these pattern differently, selecting distinct attending nouns to a great extent. In addition, comparison of the results for each subcorpus shows that even though there are some differences between the four disciplines, these differences are not as great as might be expected and do not indicate a clear distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences. While the influence of genre has not been scrutinised, other possible explanations proposed relate to the educational context and level of study in association with the range of lexical choices available to novice student writers.

Thesis (M.A. (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2006.

This thesis features a qualitative study of student source use and speech representation in two corpora of review essays that acknowledges the complexity of classroom writing contexts and the rhetorical nature of school genres. It asks how students engage with the texts they review, for what reasons, and in response to what aspects of the writing context. When considered as a distinct genre of student assignment, review essays make for a particularly interesting study of source engagement because they challenge students to maintain an authoritative voice as novices evaluating the work of an expert. In addition, citation issues in the review assignment might not be as obvious to students or their instructors as they would be, for instance, in a research paper for which multiple sources are consulted and synthesized. The review essays interrogated in this study were collected with appropriate ethics clearance from two undergraduate history courses. The analysis is extended to a small corpus of published reviews assigned as model texts in one of these courses. The study features a robust method that combined applied linguistics and discourse analysis to tease out connections between the grammatical structures of speech reports and their argumentative roles. This method involved a recursive process of classifying speech reports using Swales’ (1990) concepts of integral and non-integral citation, Thompson and Yiyun’s (1991) classifications of speech act verbs, and Vološinov (1929/1973) and Semino and Short’s (2004) models of speech reporting forms. In addition, the analysis considered the influence of the writing context on the students’ citation practices and took into account theories of rhetorical genre and student identity. The results show connections between assignment instructions and the effective and problematic ways students engaged with the texts they reviewed, such as a correlation between a directive to reduce redundancy and the absence of in-text attributions. Most notably, this study offers a fluid set of descriptors of the forms and functions of speech reports in student coursework that can be used by students, educators, plagiarism adjudicators, as well as scholars of rhetoric and composition, to illuminate some of the methods and motives of student source use.

The primary aim of this study is to determine whether it is possible to standardize written feedback on L2 student writing for use in a computerised marking environment. It forms part of a bigger project aimed at enhancing the feedback process as a whole The study attempts to establish "best practice" with regards to feedback on writing, by establishing from the literature what works and what should be avoided. Also, an empirical study was launched to establish what lecturers focus on and what marking techniques they use. A set of randomly selected essays from the Tswana Learner English Corpus and the Afrikaans Learner English Corpus were sent to the English departments of different tertiary institutions across the country. The essays were marked by the English lecturers at the relevant institutions. The conclusion was that lecturers typically focus on surface structures, and use ineffective marking techniques. The best practice (and data from the empirical study) was then used to create a set of standardised feedback comments (tag set) that can be used in a specially programmed software package in which students submit their texts electronically. Lecturers can then mark the student essays on the computer, hopefully speeding up the process, while at the same time giving much more detailed feedback. In later stages of the bigger project, students will get individualized exercises based on the feedback, and there are experiments currently being run to try and automate certain pans of the marking process in order to take some strain off the lecturers when marking. The immense archiving abilities of the computer will also be utilized in order to create opportunities for longitudinal studies. The effectiveness of the feedback tag set was tested in comparison to the marking techniques used by the lecturers in the empirical study and a self-correcting exercise. The conclusion was that the feedback tag set is more effective than the other two techniques. but students seem to perform weak overall when it gets to the revision of cohesive devices and supporting arguments. I argue that students are not used to revising these features, since lecturers seldom (if ever) comment on the structural elements of texts. However, the experiment proves that standardization of written feedback is possible to an extent. The implications of the findings are discussed, and recommendations for further research are made. / Thesis (M.A. (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2006

This thesis features a qualitative study of student source use and speech representation in two corpora of review essays that acknowledges the complexity of classroom writing contexts and the rhetorical nature of school genres. It asks how students engage with the texts they review, for what reasons, and in response to what aspects of the writing context. When considered as a distinct genre of student assignment, review essays make for a particularly interesting study of source engagement because they challenge students to maintain an authoritative voice as novices evaluating the work of an expert. In addition, citation issues in the review assignment might not be as obvious to students or their instructors as they would be, for instance, in a research paper for which multiple sources are consulted and synthesized. The review essays interrogated in this study were collected with appropriate ethics clearance from two undergraduate history courses. The analysis is extended to a small corpus of published reviews assigned as model texts in one of these courses. The study features a robust method that combined applied linguistics and discourse analysis to tease out connections between the grammatical structures of speech reports and their argumentative roles. This method involved a recursive process of classifying speech reports using Swales’ (1990) concepts of integral and non-integral citation, Thompson and Yiyun’s (1991) classifications of speech act verbs, and Vološinov (1929/1973) and Semino and Short’s (2004) models of speech reporting forms. In addition, the analysis considered the influence of the writing context on the students’ citation practices and took into account theories of rhetorical genre and student identity. The results show connections between assignment instructions and the effective and problematic ways students engaged with the texts they reviewed, such as a correlation between a directive to reduce redundancy and the absence of in-text attributions. Most notably, this study offers a fluid set of descriptors of the forms and functions of speech reports in student coursework that can be used by students, educators, plagiarism adjudicators, as well as scholars of rhetoric and composition, to illuminate some of the methods and motives of student source use.

This dissertation uncovers and examines linguistic and functional patterns of student writing in the first two years of college. A corpus of student papers from six disciplines (philosophy, English, psychology, biology, chemistry, and physics) was collected, and multi-dimensional (MD) analysis (Biber, 1988) was used to examine the ways that discipline and paper type influence writing. Further explorations of the data compare lower-level student writing to upper-level student writing, professional academic biology writing, and the discipline-specific approximations of an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course. Findings show that specificity of both linguistic and functional properties exist even at such low levels of disciplinary acculturation. These studies are followed by a summary and contextualization of their findings. Finally, future inquiry using collected data and future investigations into student literacy practices are proposed.