Peter Stray Jørgensen

The (IM)Possibilities in Teaching University Writing in the Anglo-American Tradition When Dealing with Continential Student Writers

Writing centres and writing tutors are an American invention. For us Europeans it is a case of cultural importation. If we import American manuals, handouts, even on-line tutoring services on academic writing, it may collide with continental ways of writing and of teaching and tutoring writing at the university. We see the diversity in the European traditions and styles of writing as one of the major challenges to writing centres and their staff outside the US. The development from elite universities to mass universities adds to the problem, and we believe that at the modern mass university it is almost impossible to teach and tutor our students to write in a traditional continental way. This article lines up the problems with teaching academic writing to continental writers and sketches out the historical, economical, cultural and pedagogical background, and we put forward some suggestions for advising and tutoring the continental writers, and how and when to place the continental writing within studies at the modern mass universities.

Teaching Academic Writing in European Higher Education: An Introduction

The introductory chapter gives an overview of and provides background for the implementation of the array of European writing programs and pedagogies represented in this volume. The development of teaching academic writing in Europe is compared to the development seen in the US where the teaching of writing is further integrated into the educational institutions. The chapter discusses the striking diversity in the European program designs as well as the approaches to teaching and tutoring academic writing in the light of the shared background and also shared inspirational sources from the US in Europe. The integration with the disciplines is depicted as a prominent issue for the still quite small European writing programs and writing centres — a theme which is discussed in many chapters. The introduction lastly concludes that while the expertise in teaching academic writing is now established in Europe, deeper integration between the disciplines and the writing programs/writing centres (in the US known as WID and WAC-programs) has yet to be developed.

The Genre in Focus, not the Writer: Using Model Examples in Large-Class Workshops

Nearly 16.000 students, 25 departments at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen, and 21/2 writing consultants, no tutors — what are the pedagogic options available? In order to reach out to as many students as possible we choose to spend a good part of our limited resources on teaching academic writing in large-class writing workshops. In this chapter we present, exemplify and explain one of our favourite teaching strategies: Using the in-class analysis of model-examples of excerpts from term papers and theses, as a basis for teaching the desirable genre-qualities of term papers and theses at the university. The aim of commenting on model examples is to help students internalise the features of the overarching academic genre: there search paper and its quality criteria, and the aim of teaching large classes is to offer teaching within the constraints inferred by political and economical conditions that are imposed on most modern mass universities in Europe — including the University of Copenhagen. Firstly, we describe the problems we encounter and the context our centre functions within. Secondly, we account for our pedagogical use of model examples in our teaching of the scientific paper genre and its quality criteria, and thirdly, we point out what we consider the advantages of this approach as well as some problems we encounter.