Sue Starfield
The University of New South Wales, FASS, School of Education, Faculty Member
- Education, Educational Inequalities (class; race; gender etc), Academic Writing, Academic Literacies, Doctoral Writing, Writing in the Disciplines, and 12 moreTESOL, Higher Education, Writer identity, Writing for scholarly publication, Second Language Writing, Genre, Habitus, Plagiarism, Practice Based Doctorates, Doctoral Wriitng, English for Specific Purposes, and Critical Pedagogyedit
- Sue Starfield is a Professor in the School of Education at UNSW Sydney. From 2000-2018 she was also Director of The L... moreSue Starfield is a Professor in the School of Education at UNSW Sydney. From 2000-2018 she was also Director of The Learning Centre at UNSW. She is co-author with Brian Paltridge of Thesis and dissertation writing in a second language: A handbook for supervisors (Routledge, 2007) and they co-edited The handbook of English for specific purposes (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). She was co-editor of the journal English for Specific Purposes from 2009-2014. Her most recent book is Ethnographic perspectives on academic writing (Oxford 2016). Sue is co-editor with Brian Paltridge of the new Routledge Introductions to English for Specific Purposes series and the Research Monographs in ESP series,.
Sue was the recipient of a 2008 Australian Learning and Teaching Council citation for an Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning for the development of a research-led innovative curriculum to support postgraduate research students' writing with significant impact on the field of postgraduate writing.
Sue was the recipient (with Brian Paltridge and Louise Ravelli) of an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant 2008-2010 on the topic Writing in the academy: The practice-based thesis as an evolving genre. She was co-recipient of an ARC Discovery Grant: A cross-national study of the relative impact of an oral component on PhD examination quality, language and practice.edit
This paper examines the potential significance of typographic variation in the front pages of a corpus of Humanities and Social Sciences doctoral theses. Some account is taken of the linguistic content of these pages, but the primary... more
This paper examines the potential significance of typographic variation in the front pages of a corpus of Humanities and Social Sciences doctoral theses. Some account is taken of the linguistic content of these pages, but the primary focus is on typographic resources such as font choice, salience, and layout. It is found that there is a strong association between the nature of the typographic choices and the disciplinary orientation. Specifically, the more marked semiotic resources are likely to be associated with theses which are oriented towards the “New Humanities”, that is, adopting a more subjective approach to research.
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Research Interests: Sociology and Publishing
Part One Academic support programmes may be seen as an interim strategy to help students from a disadvantaged school system to make the transition to higher education effectively. At a university such as Wits, this takes place in a... more
Part One Academic support programmes may be seen as an interim strategy to help students from a disadvantaged school system to make the transition to higher education effectively. At a university such as Wits, this takes place in a context of multi-faceted debate and action concerning the kinds of changes in the university required by the changing demography of student intake and by the wider imperatives and priorities of South African society. The word interim is used because what is being worked towards, over the years, is a situation in which the appropriate pedagogical action is the responsibility not of a separate support structure but of the respective mainstream faculties and departments. (These latter may come to discharge some of their responsibilities in this respect through an intra-university predegree college.) But when the academic support moment was initiated in the early eighties, it was necessary to develop an inter-faculty team of specialists who could concentrate ...
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Abstract Recent studies have argued for an understanding of voice in academic writing that goes beyond the expression of a ’personal’ voice to include writers’ sociohistorically-shaped and dialogically-negotiated agency. While several... more
Abstract Recent studies have argued for an understanding of voice in academic writing that goes beyond the expression of a ’personal’ voice to include writers’ sociohistorically-shaped and dialogically-negotiated agency. While several studies adopt this more expansive conception of voice, very few are situated within a pedagogical context. This study investigates thesis writing groups offered by a learning centre at an Australian university to better understand their role in assisting students’ voice construction. Each group consists of five students and a facilitator; during group meetings members exchange oral feedback on one another’s writing. The participants were twelve postgraduate students and data were collected through observation and audiorecordings of group conferences, student and facilitator interviews and students’ drafts and revisions. Adopting activity systems analysis (Engestrom, 2001), we focused on the writing conferences and the revising activity. The study suggests that writing conferences facilitate the inter-psychological and intra-psychological processes of voice construction. In the writing conference, students’ social worlds intersect, bringing to bear the power and social structure, value systems and ideologies of scholarly writing. Revising is construed as a multivoiced activity that enables the writer to construct their own voice. The findings also suggest principles of designing social interactions for voice construction.
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While doctoral writing in the broader academy is a site of anxiety and contestation (Paré, 2019), doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts inhabits an even more contested space. For social and institutional reasons, the visual... more
While doctoral writing in the broader academy is a site of anxiety and contestation (Paré, 2019), doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts inhabits an even more contested space. For social and institutional reasons, the visual and performing arts are relative newcomers to the practice of doctoral writing (Baker et al., 2009; Elkins, 2014), and with theses that incorporate a creative/performed component, whole new ways of doctoral writing have opened up, including such features as new academic voices; highly innovative forms of typography, layout, and materiality; and varied relations between the written and creative components. Understanding such diverse texts requires a multi-valent approach to recognise the ways in which doctoral writing has been re-imagined in this context and the ways in which the academy can re-imagine a legitimate space for such academic work. In this chapter, we use a broadly social-semiotic framework to demonstrate the value of Legitimation Code Th...
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Abstract Evaluation of research is a core function of academic work, yet there has been very little theoretical development about what it means to ‘know’ in relation to judgements made in examination of doctoral research. This chapter... more
Abstract Evaluation of research is a core function of academic work, yet there has been very little theoretical development about what it means to ‘know’ in relation to judgements made in examination of doctoral research. This chapter addresses the issue by reflecting on findings from three projects aimed at enhancing understanding of doctoral examination. In order to progress understanding about knowledge judgements in the doctoral research context, the chapter draws on two key contributions in the field of knowledge and knowing, namely, Habermas’ cognitive interests and Chinn, Buckland and Samarapungavan’s notion of epistemic cognition. It examines the common ground between the two bodies of theory, drawing illustratively on empirical work in the field of doctoral examination. The comparison of the Habermasian theory of cognitive interests with Chinn et al.’s notion of epistemic cognition led to the conclusion that there were areas of overlap between the two conceptual schemas that could be utilised to advance research into doctoral examination in higher education. Habermas’ cognitive interests (which underpin his ways of knowing theory) offer a conceptual lens that facilitates analysis of the interaction of ontological and epistemic components of knowledge production. Chinn et al.’s notion of epistemic cognition allows for finer grained analysis of aspects of the cognitive work involved in knowledge rendition. This work is particularly pertinent in an era that sees the boundaries of the disciplines being challenged by the need for new perspectives and cross-disciplinary approaches to solving complex problems.
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Research Interests: Sociology, Education, Languages and Linguistics, Social Research Methods and Methodology, Research Methods and Methodology, and 15 moreResearch Methodology, Educational Research, Editing of Journals, Academic Writing, Applied Linguistics, Quantitative Research, Qualitative Research, Survey Research, Linguistics, Qualitative Research Methods, English language teaching, Research Writing, Research and Publications, Curriculum and Pedagogy, and English Language Teaching
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Research Interests: Discourse Analysis, Globalization, Critical Pedagogy, Human Resource Management, Empowerment, and 15 moreEssentialism, Competence, Computer technology, Authority, Hull, Doctoral Writing, H, M, E, C, L, G, J, A, and GEE
ABSTRACT Featuring a collection of newly commissioned essays, edited by two leading scholars, this Handbook surveys the key research findings in the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). • Provides a state-of-the-art overview of... more
ABSTRACT Featuring a collection of newly commissioned essays, edited by two leading scholars, this Handbook surveys the key research findings in the field of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). • Provides a state-of-the-art overview of the origins and evolution, current research, and future directions in ESP • Features newly-commissioned contributions from a global team of leading scholars • Explores the history of ESP and current areas of research, including speaking, reading, writing, technology, and business, legal, and medical English • Considers perspectives on ESP research such as genre, intercultural rhetoric, multimodality, English as a lingua franca and ethnography
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Doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts poses many challenges for the academy, not the least of which is accounting for the possible relations which can hold between the written and creative/performed components of a doctoral... more
Doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts poses many challenges for the academy, not the least of which is accounting for the possible relations which can hold between the written and creative/performed components of a doctoral thesis in these fields. This article proposes that the interrelations between the two components in doctoral submissions of this kind can be theorized as being on a continuum of interrelations, with a number of key text types (or archetypes) being manifested. Through textual analysis of the written component only, the different possible relations can be distinguished through the ways in which the creative component is resemiotized in the written text, through both the verbal and visual semiosis of the written component. This enables us to identify a number of ways in which the ‘one’ project can be construed through its two different component parts, casting an important light on debates within the field in terms of the relations between creative prac...
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Doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts poses many challenges for the academy, not the least of which is accounting for the possible relations which can hold between the written and creative/performed components of a doctoral... more
Doctoral writing in the visual and performing arts poses many challenges for the academy, not the least of which is accounting for the possible relations which can hold between the written and creative/performed components of a doctoral thesis in these fields. This paper proposes that the interrelations between the two components in doctoral submissions of this kind can be theorized as being on a continuum of interrelations, with a number of key text types (or archetypes) being manifested. Through textual analysis of the written component only, the different possible relations can be distinguished through the ways in which the creative component is resemiotized in the written text, through both the verbal and the visual semiosis of the written component. This enables us to identify a number of ways in which the ‘one’ project can be construed through its two different component parts, casting an important light on debates within the field in terms of the relations between creative pr...
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As the editors say in their useful introduction, this volume explores the interface between two distinct traditions of research into academic writing, namely corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, while considering the implications of... more
As the editors say in their useful introduction, this volume explores the interface between two distinct traditions of research into academic writing, namely corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, while considering the implications of both for academic writing pedagogy. This ...
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This report presents the findings of a three-nation study which examined stakeholder attitudes to the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). With research undertaken in Australia, the People's Republic of Chins and the... more
This report presents the findings of a three-nation study which examined stakeholder attitudes to the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). With research undertaken in Australia, the People's Republic of Chins and the United Kingdom, the perceptions and perspectives of university staff and students were measured via quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Staff and student surveys were distributed, culminating in a total respondent group of 624. To triangulate the data, 37 qualitative interviews were conducted. The student group consisted of currently enrolled tertiary degree students who had provided an IELTS score in partial fulfilment of university admissions. The staff group consisted of persons in academic and administrative positions at the focal institutions. As an inductive stu4y, various themes were highlighted in the research instruments. These included: knowledge areas; perceptual/attitudinal areas; beliefs regarding the predictive nature of IELTS...
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In the last 15–20 years there has been considerable international research related to the examination of doctoral theses (see for example Holbrook & Bourke, 2004; Lovitts, 2007; Mullins & Kiley, 2002; Powell & Green, 2003; Prins, de... more
In the last 15–20 years there has been considerable international research related to the examination of doctoral theses (see for example Holbrook & Bourke, 2004; Lovitts, 2007; Mullins & Kiley, 2002; Powell & Green, 2003; Prins, de Kleijn, & van Tartwijk, 2015; Wellington, 2010). The published research relates to issues such as purposes (Jackson & Tinkler, 2001), methods (Golding, Sharmini, & Lazorovitch, 2014) and outcomes (Lovat, Holbrook, Bourke, Fairbairn, Kiley, Paltridge, & Starfield, 2015) with a substantial number of works relating to the oral component of thesis examination as identified by Crossouard (2011). It is this final issue, the oral An oral component in PhD examination in Australia
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EJ487685 - Multicultural Classrooms in Higher Education.
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Recent research into student academic writing adopts an academic literacies approach in which writing is no longer viewed as a generic skill to be taught as a set of static rules but rather as shaped by complex interactions of social,... more
Recent research into student academic writing adopts an academic literacies approach in which writing is no longer viewed as a generic skill to be taught as a set of static rules but rather as shaped by complex interactions of social, institutional, and historical forces in contexts of unequal power. This chapter reviews research into student academic writing in Australia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, identifying how students and teachers negotiate academic literacies within specific local contexts. The key themes discussed are the changing notion of understandings of the concept of discourse community in academic writing; the significance of the interrelationship between intertextuality and plagiarism; and the increasing significance attributed to the role writer identity plays in academic writing. The pedagogical implications and potentialities of the academic literacies approach is considered and avenues for further exploration, particularly those that involve greater engagement of academic literacy practitioners and disciplinary specialists, are briefly examined.