The rocky terrain between delocalized and localized, duplication and originality: learning to write and learning to teach academic English

Abstract

In this paper I report the action research I carried out on improving the teaching and learning of academic writing at a university. The action research sprang out of my experiences of learning and teaching academic writing. It sought locality and originality in what students read and write during academic writing courses. The macro and micro discourse and practice of textual literacy, especially academic writing literacy, in Third World academia, which the action research tried to disentangle, has major stifling effects on what and how students learn to write. It was this learning condition that the action research sought to challenge by adopting Habermas’ communicative action for a triangular engagement of course participants that maximized the possibilities of localized and original meaning-making efforts. This action research has shown how students seize (and resist to a certain extent) opportunities in a refashioned course to generate knowledge and make meanings that are meaningful and original to them.

Keywords:

• localization
• originality
• academic writing
• academic textual literacy
• Third World university
• triangular engagement
• communicative action
• in-service students
• English
• duplication
• de-localization

Notes

Since the time of writing, the author has become a doctoral student at the University of San Diego, USA.

1. The author of this paper was the course instructor. Prior to this action research project, he had offered English writing courses for both pre-service and in-service students for a decade. He is a ‘non-native’ (although the label ‘non-native’ is considered racist among critical educators and language education scholars) English language educator.

2. The students who attended the course were in-service students who had been teaching English at primary schools in Ethiopia. The majority of them were adults who had joined the in-service programmes to upgrade their diploma into a BEd.

3. The course instructor’s colleagues were those academic staff who were assigned to teach English writing courses at the time.

4. Advanced Writing Skills, a course intended for English majors, emphasizes written English to be used in research papers. It includes aspects of argumentations, citations and referencing.

5. The two writing courses I offered in July–August 2010 are Basic Writing Skills and Writing for Academic Purposes. The instructions given in regards to the courses were to use the course outline prepared for Sophomore English. Despite the differences in the course titles, the department decided to stick to the contents of Sophomore English which had been taught for several decades at the university. The major emphasis was on academic paragraphs and academic essays.

6. Locality Criteria are the criteria used to evaluate the thematic relatedness and richness of the contents enshrined in the texts composed. These criteria are: major academic study area; general institution-specific academic literacy requirement; and student personal–public identity area.

7. Originality Criteria are the criteria used to evaluate the extent of an author’s personal identity in texts composed (thematically and content-wise). An author’s personal identity was conceptualized as encompassing: consistency in stylistic choices across all the core and additional texts within a portfolio; and presence of an author’s personal identity within the text itself.

8. Both the English teachers and Amharic teachers (i.e. the in-service students on my course) had ‘exposure’ to English for over 13 years. They ‘studied’ English as a subject at primary school (six years), secondary school (four years), and post-secondary college. In addition, some of them studied other subjects through English as a medium (at secondary and post-secondary levels).