Anna Wärnsby

Academic writing in social work education : reflections from an international classroom

Abstract The affordances of processing subject knowledge through academic writing are rarely explicitly realised in social work education. In this article, we highlight the link between instructors’ efforts to facilitate students’ academic writing and students’ perceived increase of knowledge in the subject of social work in an international context. Based on instructors’ and students’ reflections collected before, during, and after a course, we aimed to answer the following questions: in what way can academic writing support students’ learning in social work? What are students’ reflections on the pedagogical model involving academic writing? The theoretical framework for the analysis was based on learning theories focusing on collaborative learning. The main conclusion is that the instructors’ awareness of how to scaffold students’ ability to write in an academic context and to develop the students’ understanding of social work in a local and global context is an important factor in student learning.

Automated Feedback in a Blended Learning Environment: Student Experience and Development

Nowadays, e-platforms designed specifically to cater for academic writing offer a new range of feedback possibilities for instructors. On our writing courses we use automated feedback, that is, metalinguistic comments generated within the e-platform on skill-building assignments in the form of multiple-choice exercises pertaining to the surface-level features of writing: grammar, punctuation, and citation conventions. In this chapter we explore the impact that automated feedback has on student experience of learning and development of skills pertaining to these features from beginner to advanced courses. Some of the key features of automated feedback which we consider are immediacy, metalinguistic explanations, and links to additional readings and exercises. We suggest that surface-level features can successfully be taught as part of academic writing courses, but the focus should be on improving writing fluency rather than language proficiency. Automated feedback on surface-level features is a particularly successful form of feedback on both our beginner and intermediate courses, but it performs less successfully on our advanced-level courses.

Assessment of situated orality: the role of reflection and revision in appropriation and transformation of research ethos

Abstract In this study, we aim to investigate how students on a cross-disciplinary postgraduate course in research communication describe the formative peer feedback they have received on their oral presentations and what impact they report it has had on their performance. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of 36 transcribed video recordings from the course. Our findings show that the students, through their reflections and revisions, clearly demonstrate to have appropriated and, in some cases, also transformed the course content: they were able to select parts of the feedback relevant to their development and redefine some of the concepts to suit rhetorical situations. Surprisingly, feedback on deficits in student presentations resulted both in reflection and revision, while affirmatory feedback resulted, if at all, in reflection only. These results may help develop effective educational tools for assessment of oral performances in higher education.

Building interdisciplinary bridges : MUCH : The Malmö University-Chalmers Corpus of Academic Writing as a Process

This paper describes a corpus of writing as a process (MUCH), comprising English as a Foreign Language (EFL) student texts. The corpus will contain a large number of richly annotated papers in several versions from students of different performance levels. It will also include peer and instructor feedback, as well as tools for visualising the revision process, and for analysing the writing process and the peer and instructor feedback. MUCH will make it possible to study how texts develop and change in the course of the writing process and how feedback impacts the process.