‘Accept with revisions’: regulating the language of student writing

Abstract

This article focuses on the regulation of student writing by exploring a specific form of such writing, the maturity test. In Finnish universities, the maturity test is a compulsory part of a bachelor’s degree in which students demonstrate their familiarity with the topic of their bachelor’s thesis, as well as their mother tongue skills. Maturity tests are written, revised and assessed in a multiphase process in which students receive both written and oral feedback on their texts before submitting the final version for acceptance. The focus of this paper is on feedback conversations between the student and the reviser. The questions explored are: (1) what aspects of the texts and their acceptability are brought up in the conversations and by whom, and (2) what kinds of normative systems do the participants orient to? The findings suggest that there are several kinds of these systems, and that the participants orient to polycentric systems of norms, which are tied to a various centring institutions. The data include regulatory documents, maturity tests, and feedback conversations.

Keywords:

• Academic literacy
• higher education
• language regulation
• polycentricity
• text trajectory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This is according to Statistics Finland (2007, 2017a, 2017b); in 1920, there were 3,600 students in all higher education institutions in Finland, whereas in 2016, there were almost 300,000 students in universities and universities of applied sciences.

2. Since June 2017, due to Rector’s decision, the assessment process of maturity tests at the University of Helsinki no longer includes language revision conducted by language teachers. This will, undoubtedly, affect and change the practices of regulating language and writing, as well.