University of Wollongong

Research Online
Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education)

2008

Developing academic literacy in context

Emily Rose Purser
University of Wollongong, epurser@uow.edu.au

Jan Skillen
University of Wollongong, jskillen@uow.edu.au

Mary Deane
Coventry University, chd004@coventry.ac.uk

James Donohue
Open University, j.p.donohue@open.ac.uk

Kelly Peake
University of London, k.peake@qmul.ac.uk

Publication Details
Purser, E. Rose., Skillen, J., Deane, M., Donohue, J. & Peake, K. (2008). Developing academic literacy in context. Zeitschrift Schreiben.

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University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW
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Developing academic literacy in context

Abstract

Where, when and how (indeed whether) academic writing should be taught to university students, who are
not necessarily aiming to study language per se, has long been a concern in higher education. While
students need to develop high level communication skills, in genres often quite specific to higher education, in
order that their learning can be assessed, teaching them academic writing during the course of their
disciplinary studies raises a number of pedagogical, organisational and research issues. This paper reports on a
collaboration between a group of academics in different geographic and institutional locations, who share a
dream of improving student learning through curriculum-integrated teaching of writing. Their project has
attempted to apply a model of learning development practice that works well in one arena to a range of new
contexts, in order to test its efficacy and transferability. Results indicate that the pedagogical strategies tried (e.
g. collaborative, inter-disciplinary design of learning tasks, resources and assessment processes based on
analysis of contextually-specific literacy demands) prove true in various situations, enabling positive
changes in student learning, in the design of curricula, in teachers professional development and in general
perceptions of the role of language in learning.
Keywords

context, developing, academic, literacy

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | Social and Behavioral Sciences

Publication Details

Purser, E. Rose., Skillen, J., Deane, M., Donohue, J. & Peake, K. (2008). Developing academic literacy in
context. Zeitschrift Schreiben.

This journal article is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow.edu.au/asdpapers/236

Developing Academic Literacy in Context

Emily Purser
Jan Skillen

University of Wollongong

University of Wollongong

Mary Deane

James Donohue
Kelly Peake

Open University

Queen Mary, University of London

Coventry University

Abstract
Where, when and how (indeed whether) academic writing should be taught to university students, who are not
necessarily aiming to study language per se, has long been a concern in higher education. While students need
to develop high level communication skills, in genres often quite specific to higher education, in order that their
learning can be assessed, teaching them academic writing during the course of their disciplinary studies raises a
number of pedagogical, organisational and research issues. This paper reports on a collaboration between a group
of academics in different geographic and institutional locations, who share a dream of improving student learning
through curriculum-integrated teaching of writing. Their project has attempted to apply a model of learning
development practice that works well in one arena to a range of new contexts, in order to test its efficacy
and transferability. Results indicate that the pedagogical strategies tried (e.g. collaborative, inter-disciplinary
design of learning tasks, resources and assessment processes based on analysis of contextually-specific literacy
demands) prove true in various situations, enabling positive changes in student learning, in the design of
curricula, in teachers professional development and in general perceptions of the role of language in learning.

It is becoming customary in introducing discussions

of academic writing in higher education to note that
students, on entering a new field and environment,
cannot be assumed to already know all they need
to know about the academic language and learning
their success will depend on. Where assessment of
conceptual learning in the disciplines is already based
primarily on extensive academic writing (such as in
Australian and UK higher education), consensus seems
to be growing across the Teaching/Learning literature
that writing not only needs to be explicitly taught, but
that such teaching should occur within the disciplines,
and even within the regular content-focused courses

www.zeitschrift-schreiben.eu

[e.g. Skillen 1998, Radloff and dela Harpe 2001, Tindale

2005, Wingate 2006, Lea 2004, 2008] 1. The view that
academic literacy needs to be explicitly taught tends
to emerge within many faculties in relation to changed
student cohort size, demographics and linguistic
diversity, and academics frustrating attempts to
evaluate student learning on the basis of problematic
writing, and to be conceptualised within a framework of
individualised deficiencies and needs for remedial
help and learning support [Haggis 2006]. At policy
level, it is voiced in relation to agenda issues of equity,
1 Unlike debate in the US, which tends to focus on the need to
include opportunities for writing per se into undergraduate
curricula of the disciplines see Russell (2002)

Online publiziert: 26. Juni 2008

retention, quality assurance and/or employability,

and conceptualised within a framework of generic
skills, competencies and broad ranging graduate
qualities. Perhaps the need for explicit instruction in
academic literacy is most frequently and acutely felt by
specialists in the teaching of academic language and
the general development of learning in universities, as
their work, and institutional positioning, often affords
unique insights into the relationships between learning,
teaching and assessment, curriculum development,
educational policy and institutional governance. It is in
the context of a generally increasing level of interest
in discussions of academic writing that the main
motivation behind the project reported in this paper
can be understood a strongly felt need for critical
comparisons of writing pedagogy across HE. It seems
that while general levels of in-principle agreement
about the need for universities to give students explicit
instruction in all aspects of academic language and
learning may be rising amongst many senior managers,
faculty-based and centralised (or marginalised)
educational support academics, serious questions of
when, where, by whom and exactly how to best do so
remain topics of debate and much needed research.
The DALiC project
The DALiC2 project is a comparative curriculum deve
lopment exercise begun in 2006, involving a group of
academic literacy specialists in the UK, the USA and
Australia. It was initiated to demonstrate how an
established model of practice in teaching/developing
academic literacy works, to apply it in a range of other
institutions, and to facilitate a gradual furthering of
evidence that will be useful to many others in this field,
particularly those endeavouring to integrate literacy
instruction into disciplinary curricula. Like most exercises
in comparative education, this project has a reformist
agenda, aiming to find what works within the specific
cultural contexts of each project participants workplace
and appropriately inform educational practice and
policy [Broadfoot 2000, p. 366]. At the University of
Wollongong, Australia, writing specialists work in close
partnership with disciplinary academics to integrate
into mainstream content courses3 opportunities for
2 Developing Academic Literacy in Context
3 The words course and subject are used synonymously
throughout to refer to a semester-based teaching/learning
session generally occurring over 10 to 14 weeks. Course
seems to be the more common term used in the UK, while
subject is used at UOW.

Emily Purser et al: Developing Academic Literacy in Context

students to develop their writing and learning. The

approach centres around analysis of a specific subjects
language and literacy demands, and production of
explicit assessment criteria and instructional materials
tailored to those particular demands. It is implemen
ted in strategically identified courses across degree
programs, and endorsed at institutional level. The
project set out to identify whether, how, and how
well, the approach could work in other contexts, and
has involved three UK institutions collaborating with
Wollongong to develop similar integration strategies.
At Queen Mary, University of London, two courses
in Geography were collaboratively revised to include
explicit (team) teaching of the genre by which student
learning was to be assessed (modeling, as well as a
guided process of drafting, feedback and redrafting),
and resources to illustrate and explain marking criteria
and process. At Coventry University, the collaboration
between academics in the faculty and in the Centre
for Academic Writing focused on analysing the key
learning task in a Physiotherapy course and developing
resources to clarify expectation to students and to guide
and standardize assessment. At the Open University (a
distance education environment where the distributed
nature of the teaching and learning creates particular
opportunities and challenges for cross-disciplinary
collaboration and direct contact with students), the
focus was to critically examine the design of a new
language-focused communication skills course for first
year students in Business Studies. Overall the project
facilitated useful and timely discussion of Australian,
UK and US approaches to embedding the teaching of
academic literacy into curricula, and the implications of
such collaborations for literacy development in higher
education. In reporting and reflecting on the various
pedagogical, organizational and research issues that
emerged from the initial attempts to adapt the UOW
model to suit three different contexts, various questions
emerged for further research and discussion about
the nature and uses of feedback on student writing,
the motivation of vocationally-oriented students to
pay close attention to language and literacy practices,
and the nature and extent of language development
that can be achieved through curriculum-integrated or
embedded literacy instruction.
Background
The model of academic literacy development explored
through the DALiC project emerged in Australian HE [e.g.

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Skillen and Mahony 1997], and has been in operation at

the University of Wollongong for a decade [Skillen et al
1998, 1999]. In short, it is a vision of the relationships
between teaching and learning practices, curriculum
development, different areas of academic work and
institutional governance. More than an approach to
developing any particular learning resource, course or
curriculum, it is about how to identify and target specific
needs, influence perceptions of students learning needs,
gain institutional support and negotiate with faculties
to and make specific changes in teaching and learning
practices so that student learning is better understood
and supported. It is a model of practice that is designed
to help implement a learning-centred educational policy
and ensure that teaching aligns with stated learning
objectives, teaching strategies, learning resources and
assessment practices. It is a model that encourages
targeted conversations between faculties and learning
support units, and encourages collaboration between
differently focused and positioned academics, across a
range of governance and teaching situations, to identify
where literacy integration might be most effective, and
co-design instruction to suit specific contexts, needs and
interests. The teaching of academic writing, in the view
of curriculum-integrated literacy instruction informing
this model, is one aspect of the general development of
learning. In practice informed by this model, specialists
in the teaching of academic language and learning aim
to work with discipline academics within the faculties
to ensure that students within a core course actually
get adequate opportunity within their normal course of
study to recognise and understand the specific types
of text that make up their discipline, and develop their
own practice as participants in their chosen discourse
community. The focus is thus not only on the problems
of individual students, but also on collaboration with
aculties to understand and address problems through
institutional changes. Informed by this model4, UOW
employs c. 13 academic staff, including specialists in
the teaching of academic language and learning, within
a centrally located Learning Development unit. LD
4 The current model of practice at UOW describes Learning
Development work as involving 50% teaching (mainly
within disciplines), 25% governance and 25% research (on
its core teaching practices). It has developed over the past
decade from a previous model, whereby most teaching
of academic literacy occurred outside of curricula as
per many HE institutions in the English-speaking world
through voluntary small group workshops and individual
consultations. Emphasis of current practice is on ensuring
that all students are taught how to write in the specific
ways required in particular subjects and disciplines.

Emily Purser et al: Developing Academic Literacy in Context

staff work closely with faculties to develop discipline/

subject-specific learning resources as well as teaching
and assessment strategies, to integrate these into
targeted areas of established curricula, and to help
ensure that assessment methods generally align well
with learning objectives and teaching strategies in
specific subjects/courses. It is both the institutionally
sanctioned balance of their work, and the specific nature
of their curriculum-integrated teaching, that marks the
approach taken at UOW as rather different from many
other tertiary literacy programs around the Englishspeaking world. Benefits of this approach being tested
through the DALiC project (e.g. to learning outcomes,
success rates and retention statistics) at Queen Mary,
Coventry and the Open University are evidenced in the
exemplary publications used as a basis for preliminary
discussion within and development of the project
Hampton et al [2003] and Skillen et al [1999].
Implementing the DALiC approach in different
contexts
Queen Marys Thinking Writing program5 is already
similar to UOW practice in some ways, in that contact
with many departments has already been established
across the campus, and the program focuses on
developing learning through writing. For the DALiC
project, Kelly Peake worked with Geography on a second
year course. The specific aim of the collaboration was
to improve students writing of a genre new to them,
called a briefing paper, which is to translate specialist
knowledge about hazards for the lay reader (maintaining
informational complexity, but avoiding technicality).
According to what the Geography staff said they wanted
from a briefing paper, marking criteria were developed
based on the MASUS instrument6 (which discussions
in Wollongong had introduced to the UK teams), and
a marking sheet was devised that could also be used
for feedback. As per UOW practice, a booklet was also
produced to walk the markers through the criteria
with annotated examples, and clearly illustrating to
students what problems typically occur in student
writing and what would be considered an improvement
(samples of weak and strong text being annotated
with comments from the language specialist indicating
why specific elements were considered a strength
5 Established by Sally Mitchell in 2001
6 Measuring the Academic Skills of University Students
University of Sydney, 1993.
http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/assessinglearning/04/
case19.html

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or weakness in the writing). Marking criteria were

explained through a jointly run classroom workshop
session as well as individual meetings with the lecturer
and the learning developer all of which occurred
within the normal delivery of the subject. The focus
of the collaboration was on formative assessment
students were able to redraft their work three times,
and receive various kinds of feedback. While not quite
the first time collaboration with a faculty had moved
beyond advising into team teaching, the distinctively
new element to this collaboration was the emphasis
on assessment criteria and on linguistic detail of the
target genre.
Staff were very positive about the team teaching and
discussion with another academic from outside their
discipline, as it gave them opportunity to seriously
consider what they were doing and articulate what
they wanted from students. Student feedback from
the intervention was also very positive, with 80%
appreciating explicit marking criteria, being able to
redraft their work, and the quality of feedback given.
Students found the booklet and annotated examples
useful, though the marking sheet itself received rather
mixed appraisal, many students failing to recognize it
as a form of feedback leading the team to question
what students understand feedback to be, and how they
use it. Students also indicated that while the resources
helped them distinguish between good and bad
writing, they did not necessarily enable novice writers
to produce work to the standard they recognized as
desirable. Throughout the staged writing and rewriting
process, students work demonstrated three types of
change. Most commonly, very strategic changes were
made based on the specific criteria set out on the
marking sheet (e.g. students added a conclusion or
sources of information missing from their first draft, or
replaced maps and illustrations with more appropriate
ones). While the clearly notable tendency to improve
content in relation to criteria-driven feedback led to
significantly improved marks and happier markers, it
also left an uneasy feeling with the writing specialists
that the students writing was not being guided towards
qualitative improvement overall. Another frequent
and problematic response to feedback was to simply
ignore suggestions about language students tended
to make little or no change to problematic wording,
even when corrections were overtly suggested, leaving
the language specialists wondering about how students
interpret feedback. Less common, but still significant,

were instances of marked improvement in student

writing that did not relate to the marking criteria actually
given, leaving staff wondering on what basis they had
been able to develop deeper understanding of what
was actually wanted, and indeed having to re-evaluate
what their marking criteria really were in practice, and
how best to articulate them to everyone. But while the
collaboration achieved various successes, it also raised
issues and questions requiring further investigation:
about the uses and usefulness of the marking criteria;
about whether and how students can be enabled to
improve the quality of their writing through the sorts of
modelling and feedback possible through curriculumembedded literacy instruction; and about students
perceptions of and relationship with feedback (seems
rather more complex than initially imagined); about the
perception of good writing from different professional
perspectives (disciplinary and language specialists)
and our capacity to negotiate curriculum development
to meet the double agenda of developing disciplinary
knowledge and communicative skill; and about the
relative value and positioning of writing within various
courses. Overall, while the collaboration caused this
team to question the degree to which language can
be meaningfully engaged or developed in/through a
course focused on another topic, it has strengthened
relationships between writing staff and the Department,
and has led to a collaborative curriculum review that
will be carried out over the next two years.
Coventry University was enthusiastic in its support for
explicit teaching about academic literacy, and opened a
Centre for Academic Writing in 2004. From the Centre,
Academic Writing lecturer Mary Deane collaborated
with Physiotherapy to adapt and trial aspects of the
model in a 2nd year course/subject. Because no
time was available for face-to-face team teaching in
this professional subject (which included three work
placements), the particular interest of the Coventry
team in this instance was the provision of feedback,
and the types of resources that would best enable
Physiotherapy academics to articulate expectations of
professional, reflective writing and provide constructive,
standardized feedback on students reflective writing.
Formative assessment strategies, based on MASUS, had
been previously developed at first year level, and the
aim of this collaboration was to increase collaboration
with the discipline and create opportunities for further
literacy development through the degree program.
The assessment task (a critical reflection on practice

Emily Purser et al: Developing Academic Literacy in Context

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in context) was designed by the faculty lecturer, while

the collaboration focused on developing explanatory
material for students and a marking guide (pack)
for teachers. Resources produced included annotated
samples of authentic writing, FAQs, and feedback sheets
with sample motivational comments. Staff generally
(73%) rated the marking pack very highly, which others
found the annotated examples of student writing rather
challenging the level of detail modelled (especially
when focused on academic writing) intimidated many
respondents. Since this collaboration, a working party
on reflective writing has been established to examine
the assessment of reflective writing in each discipline
across the institution, run a conference on the topic, and
produce guidelines. The main question arising from the
collaboration was how subject specialists and writing
specialists can collaborate to provide standardised
motivational feedback on students writing.
At the Open University the development of academic
language/literacy has long been recognized as
important and necessary. In this distance education
environment, students have enjoyed explicit academic
literacy support throughout the various programs
available, and the OU has been at the forefront of
curriculum-embedded study skills provision. The area
targeted for the collaboration with UOW was a new
course on the language of business studies, by means
of which the Open ELT department7 aimed to enhance
the development of business students literacy skills.
The intervention engineered here is not quite in the
model usually practised at UOW or the other UK partner
institutions where the aim is to embed academic literacy
instruction within existing courses, rather than create a
space for a separate course focused on the language of
a discipline per se. This collaboration is an interesting
variation on the theme, however, in that the chair of
the course development team, Jim Donohue, shares
extensive ground theoretically, and sympathy for the
general literacy development goals articulated in the
UOW model. While this is a separate course for the
enhancement of language communication in business
studies, the new course aims to be very closely connected
to the language and literacy requirements of an existing
content subject. This strategy can be seen as an
initial step towards the goal of curriculum-embedded
literacy development as understood in the UOW model,
within the constraints of what is institutionally and
7 This is a small team of English Language Teaching specialists
recently created to develop ELT at the OU.

Emily Purser et al: Developing Academic Literacy in Context

interpersonally possible at this stage at the OU (and

such approaches have been strategically used at UOW
also). Obviously, an entire course/subject devoted to
the language and communications of a discipline will
offer students dramatically more opportunities to work
on their language skills (the new course will involve
students in 6-9 hours of language-focused work a
week over 20 weeks) but the question of real interest
will be whether this will make a dramatically greater
developmental difference to their communicative
competencies and most importantly to their general
learning in their other Business courses.
Given the sorts of motivational issues that arise when
we attempt to direct students attention to language,
the main challenges for instructional designers on
this project have been engagement strategies for
learning resources and authenticity how to represent
business studies authentically while attempting to
achieve learning outcomes other than conceptual
understanding of Business, and how to highlight the
nature of literacy in business studies without losing
the intrinsically more motivating focus (for the given
students) on Business practices. Authenticity of context
was created by basing the new learning resources on
the content material and the student writing from
other courses in the same curriculum. To integrate the
distinct disciplines of Business and Language studies,
the Bernsteinian notion of a necessary subordinating
idea was adopted e.g. the key genres students need
to understand and produce (case study, report, essay)
are modelled through an analogy suited to the students
given interests in business studies: the case study was
explained in terms of a familiar transformation process
model, whereby textual production was construed in
terms of input and output, which students are most
likely to be able to relate to and feel motivated by,
being a view of the world that is familiar from their
chosen field of study. A few questions arose for this
team also: whether students in their first year of
business studies (when this course is designed to be
taken) will have sufficient background knowledge of
the field to understand the model texts being planned
for the explication and analysis of specific genres used
in business studies; how texts can be modified, and
activities sequenced so as to engage learners, maintain
interest and relevance while avoiding literacy challenges
beyond students capacity; how to manage potentially
very diverse levels of academic literacy and language
proficiency in a single cohort, using the same materials;

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whether it is possible to give balanced attention to both

textual organization/ logic and lexico-grammatical
knowledge in such a course; and what sort of metalanguage to use in order to get students to notice,
analyse and manipulate specific aspects of language
without being alienated by linguistic technicality. The
central question remains to be further investigated:
how can students be motivated to give close attention
to texts and literacy practices using this model of
literacy in context that were trying to use?
Main outcomes and implications
It is hard to standardize practices in this kind of work, and
to gather adequate convincing evidence to determine
what best practice might be. But however variable
and complex practice might appear, participants in this
project have found the effort very worthwhile. The goal
of integration may seem to some a new way of
thinking in higher education, in terms of teaching roles
and the type of learning that needs to be facilitated by
university curricula. Nevertheless, interest in research
on the teaching of writing continues to rise across the
HE sector, along with professionalisation of curriculum
development work and inter-disciplinary literacy
projects. The DALiC project has helped the UOW
participants articulate and communicate their practices
and rationale, and thereby help others explore the
potential for similar collaborative, integration practice
in their contexts. As more teaching academics within
the disciplines consider heading in the general direction
of designing instruction for learning and literacy
development, such joint projects will help clarify what
can be achieved and how.
At Queen Mary, outcomes so far have convinced the
Geography Department to implement elements of the
approach into a larger first year core subject (Ideas and
Practice), as well as continuing the current integration
of teaching in the 2nd year subject. Teaching outcomes,
development in assessment practices and the general
raising of language awareness, have strengthened
relationships between writing staff and the Department
and led to writing staff becoming part of curriculum
review. This is an important contribution to the work
of the Thinking Writing initiative, and institutional
thinking that reflects growing recognition of the link
between discipline literacy, learning and assessment. At
Coventry, one of the main implications of successfully
implementing the UOW model in one situation is that it
is now seen as transferable across the campus. Already

context-based literacy teaching has been implemented

in the School of Art and Design and the sigma Centre
for Excellence in Mathematics and Statistics Support.
It is hoped that it will increasingly be taken up by staff
in other disciplines and embedded within syllabi, which
will lead to the re-development of curricula and the
enhancement of more students learning. It has also
had a positive impact at the level of policy-making and
funding allocation. At the Open University, the dialogue
and collaboration provided by DALiC has had a significant
impact on OUs initiatives in teaching academic literacy
and in developing language and literacy policy. The OU
has a long tradition of providing higher education for
non-traditional students and has always prioritised the
development of study skills in its course design. The
DALiC collaboration began at a time when the OU had
just begun designing a more language-focused provision
of such study skills development allowing for an impact
on the nature of the design and, perhaps, contributing
to a UK distance universitys implementation of a DALiC
approach to language and learning. As Jim Donohue
notes, the DALiC model of language, literacy and
learning development has been both inspirational and
practically valuable to the OU in our development of
the Professional Communication for Business Studies
course and in the complex debates about institutional
responses to learners of English as an additional
language and a language policy at the OU and that
on-going dialogue with partners in the DALiC project
have provided an affirming and empowering influence
on our contribution in this area.
Success can be measured in various ways including
of course deeper learning and better writing from
students but also raised awareness amongst facultybased academics of the nature of discourse and
learning to write within their discipline. To us, one of
the strongest indicators of a collaboration that works is
the faculty academic (of which there are now many at
UOW) who now talks as we do, and assumes literacy
teaching and resource development as part of their
regular work. The key implications of the DALiC project
for UOW is that basic practices we have found to work
in our context also seem to be working elsewhere, and
interest in this general approach is growing stronger.
The more participation and mutual exchange we can
engineer over coming years, the greater basis we will
all have for proper benchmarking and identification
of best practice in various aspects of the teaching of
academic writing and learning development in Higher

Emily Purser et al: Developing Academic Literacy in Context

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Education. The initial collaboration with various other

institutions has led to plans to apply for larger scale
and reciprocal funding to support ongoing research and
further colloquia between UOW, QM and Cornell, and
an expanding number of UK and US universities.
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