DRAFT

Write Like An Academic: Designing an Online Advanced Writing Course for

Postgraduate Students and Researchers

2009-09-12

Nilgun Hancioğlu
John Eldridge
Steve Neufeld

Preamble
This is an article in draft.
Please don't cite or reference this web page. If you are interested in citing any part of
this draft, please contact us at lexitronics@gmail.com

In this short article, we describe how the Write Like an Academic online course was
designed.
• The detailed research that is the foundation of the course was the subject of
Nilgun Hancioglu’s PhD Thesis at the Eastern Mediterranean University,
Famagusta, Cyprus.
• Further information is also available at the Write Like an Academic Blog and
at the Lexitronics home page: http://lexitronics.edublogs.org/
• The course itself can be accessed at: http://lexitronics.org
• The corpus-based research described was an integral part of the Lexitronics
submission that was shortlisted in the 2009 British Council ELTONS awards
for innovation in ELT.

Introduction
As the overall trend in many domains, including education and academic scientific
research, is toward globalization, “more and more nonnative speakers are seeking to
publish in international journals devoted to English language teaching, applied
linguistics, and related areas” (Flowerdew, 2001, p. 121). Further, while the
percentage of articles written in English in the 1977 Science Citation Index was 83%
(Krashen, 2003), by 1997, this number had increased to 95% and of this, only half
came from authors in English-speaking countries (Graddol, 1997). It is clear,
therefore, that non-native speakers write ‘a considerable number’ of research articles
even in the “most prestigious journals in science” (Wood, 2001, p. 80).

Such statistics clearly indicate that non-native speakers of English are under
increasing pressure to both follow the latest research, and probably even more so, to
have their own research published. Non-native speakers of English “risk being
unaware of- and overlooked by- mainstream international research unless they learn
to read, write, and publish in English” (Garfield & Welljams-Dorof, 1990). Hence,
non-native speaker researchers and academics would seem to have little choice, but to
continue to try and master the prevailing conventions of academic English.

1
Writing, therefore, has become a central element of university courses, as well as
professional development programs, which necessitated the understanding of “what
these discourses of the academy are, and what counts as ‘good writing’” (Hyland,
2004a, p. x). These courses have often tended to focus on the general needs of
students involved in academic studies, and catered more for university students at
undergraduate level, who are not expected to carry out or publish research. However,
post-graduate candidates who are engaged in conducting and disseminating research
have more sophisticated needs in terms of language knowledge and related skills, the
most important of which is producing cohesive and coherent written text.

Written text is “the product of a series of complicated mental operations” (Clark and
Clark 1977, cited in Richards, 1990, p. 101), and is not easy to construct. After
deciding on a meaning to be conveyed, writers must consider the genre, the style they
are going to employ, the purpose they want to achieve and the amount of detail
required to achieve it (Richards, 1990, p. 101-102). Nunan agrees that “producing a
coherent, fluent, extended piece of writing is probably the most difficult thing there is
to do in language” and “it is something most native speakers never master”. He also
acknowledges the enormity of this challenge for second language learners,
“particularly for those who go on to a university and study in a language that is not
their own” (1999, p. 271).

The fact that language use is closely related to the social context naturally leads to the
concept of ‘genre’. Hyland characterizes genres as “socially recognized ways of using
language” (Johns et al., 2006, p. 3). For Swales, a genre is “a class of communicative
events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes” (1990, p.
58), and this purpose determines generic structure. This structure is in turn achieved
through units of purpose, called ‘moves’ (Swales, 1990) or ‘move structures’
(Flowerdew, 2000) which are fulfilled by lexico-grammar (Henry, 2007, p. 1-2). Key
lexical phrases represent the move structures of a genre (Flowerdew, 2000, p. 374).
Moves, in turn, are realized through different ‘strategies’ or ‘tactics’ (Henry 2007),
which are tactical selections of the writer in accomplishing the purpose (Bhatia, 1993,
p. 19). These tactics or strategies similarly necessitate the exploitation of lexico-
grammar. Therefore, it can be concluded that lexico-grammar has a major function in
the fulfillment of strategies or tactics leading to moves, which in turn form the generic
structure of a genre, and thereby reflect its communicative purpose.

The major role lexico-grammar plays in text creation requires a thorough analysis of
lexico-grammatical features employed to fulfill different communicative purposes in
texts, and this comprehensive analysis is nowadays viable through the use of a corpus,
“a collection of naturally-occurring language text, chosen to characterize a state or a
variety of a language” (Sinclair, 1991, p. 171). Thanks to the recent developments in
computer technology, it is now possible for anyone to store large amounts of language
data on a computer for analysis. Unsurprisingly, like many other scholars and
researchers, Hunston holds that “corpora, and the study of corpora, have
revolutionized the study of language and the applications of language” (Hunston,
2002, p. 1).

2
The Evolution of the Write Like an Academic Course
The Write Like an Academic course was first designed to focus on the common
language functions and lexis in academic writing prior to thesis writing. Gradually it
evolved into a classroom-based thesis writing course with a language focus.
Although the participants were given guidance and support in terms of the moves
making up the generic structure of the thesis in accordance with the genre-based
approaches, the quality of most of their work revealed a gap between actual and target
performance levels in producing coherent text. The main problem hindering the
production of coherent and appropriate texts seemed to be the participants’
insufficient knowledge of the lexico-grammatical resources necessary for meaning
creation. It was a problem that seemed to demand serious in-depth research.

The research employed a corpus-informed approach (McCarthy, 2001) whereby the

applied linguist can “mediate the corpus, design it from the very outset and build it
with applied linguistic questions in mind, ask of it the questions applied linguists want
answers to, and filter its output, use it as a guide or tool for what you, the teacher,
want to achieve” (p. 129). The main aim was to construct a pedagogic corpus. The
key component of the pedagogic corpus was a bank of lexico-grammatical patterns to
fulfill generic moves. The pedagogic corpus also included tasks for teacher-directed
data-driven in-class work, and a complementary web-based interactive platform
(MOODLE) to provide access to the authentic data, the corpora, and to promote
learner-led exploratory work. The complementary platform was a virtual classroom,
with all the features of a traditional classroom and more, which was expected to
increase the participants’ learning opportunities and decrease the gap between the
current and the target performance levels. Through the authentic corpus data and the
data-driven tasks, the students were expected to observe the use of language
themselves, and become language researchers, or ‘language detectives’ (Johns, 1997).

The two corpora incorporated into the pedagogic corpus were constructed from thesis
abstracts. One of the reasons for this choice is that abstracts do not normally include
quotations and paraphrases, and the language is expected to be the writers’ own. The
second reason is that abstracts are miniature forms of research studies. The scientific
research article has a particular type of rhetorical pattern which is reflected through
the Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion (IMRD) format (Swales, 1990).
Although there may be variations across different disciplines, Wood (2001) holds that
these rhetorical conventions “are so accepted and so standard that they are often given
in journal guidelines to contributors” (p. 74). In the same vein, according to Swales,
the abstract, like other genres reporting research, also seems to have an IMRD
(Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion) structure (1990, p.181). This structure
reflects the main chapters of the thesis: Introduction, Methodology, Analysis, and
Conclusion. Therefore, it was anticipated that the analysis of abstracts in the study
would reveal language data relevant to the thesis as a whole.

For the study, two corpora were compiled: a learner corpus of abstracts of about 100
non-native participants who had taken the advanced thesis writing course at the
Eastern Mediterranean University, Cyprus (LAC: Learner Abstract Corpus), and a
specialized target corpus built from a sample of 600 abstracts from universities in
countries where English is the native language (TAC: Target Abstract Corpus). Both
corpora were analyzed through computer-based tools: RANGE
(http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation/nation.aspx) for range and frequency,

3
Concordance (http://www.concordancesoftware.co.uk/) and AntConc
(http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software/README_antconc3.2.1.txt) to explore
the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations of words. The learner abstract corpus
(LAC) was analyzed to identify the most common lexico-grammatical problems in the
academic work produced by the post-graduate candidates enrolled in the advanced
thesis writing course. Then the target abstract corpus (TAC) was analyzed to extract
the targeted lexico-grammar used for fulfilling the strategies and moves within the
generic structure of a thesis, and compose a bank of moves and sub-moves. The data
was integrated into the pedagogic corpus through both teacher-directed data-driven
and learner-led discovery work. Through various task-based activities, the participants
were then provided with the opportunity to enrich their lexico-grammatical
knowledge, and produce coherent and appropriate academic text.

The positive feedback from learners to the approach led to a further round of
questioning, not least because a key factor in the success of the course was its use of
an e-learning platform. This platform, MOODLE (http://MOODLE.org/), which is
based on strong underlying pedagogical principles, provides an environment where
new knowledge is created through the individual’s interaction with the environment,
as well as through individuals constructing things for one another
(http://docs.moodle.org/en/Philosophy). The use of MOODLE was clearly benefitting
learners in terms of exposure to the target language, and the target genre. This now
raised another possibility, given the flexibility of the MOODLE platform. Could the
course now be converted to a fully online mode that would benefit the extremely large
community of students and researchers needing to and often struggling to publish in
English both institutionally and internationally?

Design Considerations
The original classroom course supported by MOODLE had been a hybrid course, with
classroom activity interacting with the online platform. In choosing to design a fully
online course of this scope the classroom dependencies of the original course had to
be removed. Furthermore the structure of the course needed to be clarified and in-
course commentary made more explicit. Most importantly, the fundamental objectives
of the course needed to be restated in terms of the wider audience the new course
would be aimed at. In particular, given the nature of the problems identified and the
potentially enormous spectrum of participants engaged in differing types of academic
work and research, it was clear that such a course should primarily aim to help
participants become fully self-sustaining and independent writers with the language
awareness, skills, and resources to hand to enable them to solve their own writing
problems both in the short and long term. The advantage of an online programme to
achieve this as opposed to a traditional course would clearly be that participants
would be able to work in their own space and at their own pace, free of the
suffocating constraints of time that are an inevitable constituent of more traditional
modes of delivery.

Course Methodology
Two important considerations underpinned the approach to the design of the course.
Firstly, although the product of academic writing is linear, the process is cyclical.
Somehow the course needed to reflect this. Secondly, the journey towards autonomy
required a carefully staged progression that would gradually promote independence

4
rather than try and impose it de facto. The basic principles of use of the new course
were thus that learners should treat the course as a cycle, and go round the course in a
loop rather than necessarily progress through it in a traditionally linear fashion.
Furthermore, they should be encouraged to ‘hop’ between different course units
according to need.

Having said this, the units were still carefully designed as a sequence that when
followed would offer maximum support and guidance at the outset, and then
progressively reduce the formal input and support, to the point where by the end of
the course, the participants would effectively have become their own teachers. The
key to this was to develop language awareness to the maximum degree possible, so
that participants would effectively become language researchers in their own specific
subject fields. Hence, building in differentiation was another prime consideration. The
number of machine-marked classical one-size-fits-all tasks often found in online sites,
such as cloze, matching and so on was reduced, and the emphasis put rather on
developing a cycle of activities in which participants would:

i) Familiarise themselves with the organisational structure of academic text.

ii) Study the lexico-structural patterns needed to realise those structures.
iii) Further investigate organisation and lexico-structural patterning within the
context of their own subject-specific fields.
iv) Draft their own work.

Since MOODLE is an interactive platform, the provision of open forum discussions

would also enable participants to share ideas, resources and problems as they
proceeded - in tune with the social constructivist philosophy of the platform.

Corpus Informed Methodology

Language corpora provide enormous insight into the lexico-structural patterning of
language, and through the use of concordancing software this information can be
readily accessed and exploited. The corpus revolution has stimulated an extraordinary
volume of research, and the progressive development of open corpora and easy-to-use
software applications has increasingly put these tools in the hands of practitioners to
make free use of in course design and lesson delivery. In the case of the Write Like an
Academic course, use was made of two corpora compiled as part of the research: The
Learner Abstract Corpus of work produced by learners at the Eastern Mediterranean
University in Cyprus and the Target Abstract Corpus comprising abstracts taken from
different fields published by students in English-speaking countries. The Target
Abstract Corpus was integrated into the MOODLE, as a prime resource for students to
investigate academic language.

Further, by investigating frequency patterns across the TAC, a new word list of 165
highly frequent words that were used across the different fields in the corpus was
produced. This new wordlist – the WLA165 – was then also integrated into the
MOODLE as a glossary from which direct links were provided to the TAC, and to
other resources such as dictionaries and thesauruses. The automated linking facility
provided by MOODLE, enabled these words to be highlighted on each page as they
appeared and linked into the glossary from which the words could be studied more
fully.

5
The TAC also provided the source from which the basic IMRD (Introduction –
Methods – Results – Discussion) structure could be investigated further. The result
was the development of four banks, one for each move, each providing important sub-
moves and exemplifying common lexico-structural patterns used to fulfil them. These
banks were integrated into the course units as ‘move posters’ which participants could
open up and explore as appropriate in the learning and writing process.

This corpus-informed approach was intended to provide participants with the

resources they needed to study language in detail independently and to then use it for
their own purposes. However, as already noted, non-native academic writers work in
numerous different fields and contexts, and, naturally enough, at different levels of
English language proficiency. Hence, the provision of corpus data of this type as a
guide, whilst fundamental to the approach, needed further supplementing, particularly
in the light of the intention to help participants to be self-sustaining writers by the end
of the course.

In this regard one aspect of corpus-informed methodology that has been rather less
exploited to date has been the integration into the learning process of learner-
developed corpuses. However, now that freely available concordancing software is
available on the worldwide web, an obvious strategy was for participants to start
compiling corpora of both their own work, and work specifically related to their own
field, and for them to analyse that work in terms of specific frequency, moves, and
lexico-structural patterns. In short, the goal was to turn participants into practising
‘language detectives’, able themselves to acquire data, store it, and analyse it to
identify the lexis and patterns they needed in order to produce cohesive and coherent
text. Thus as their familiarity with corpus tools developed, participants were also
provided guidance in using these tools for themselves. Thus the corpus-informed
methodology was also the foundation for learner autonomy.

Course Contents
The finalised version of the online course was divided into ten units:

1. Making the most of WLA

2. Academic Ethics and Plagiarism
3. Writing Research and Thesis Proposals
4. Writing Introductions
5. Writing a Literature Review
6. Writing up your Methodology
7. Writing up your Data Analysis
8. Writing your Conclusion
9. Writing your Abstract
10. Acknowledgements and Feedback

The heart of the course is devoted to the ‘classic’ chapters that are very often used in
thesis and dissertation writing, and which also tend to be the formula from which
academic articles are constructed. Given the online medium of instruction however,
the first unit takes the form of an orientation, and the second deals with the issue of
plagiarism, which is highly problematic in many parts of the world, and compounded
for many non-native speakers by the lack of confidence they have in their own writing
abilities. The unit on abstracts is placed at the end, partly because the abstract is rarely

6
completed until the work is finalised, but also because it serves as a central rather
concluding unit for participants following the suggested cyclical route through the
course.

In each of the main units meanwhile, participants are guided through the purpose and
structure of particular thesis chapters (or article sections) and asked to explore the
language typically used in each chapter. As already discussed, they are then trained to
use vocabulary profiling tools to build their own more specialised corpora for their
own individual use, and in the process, plan and draft each relevant section or chapter
of their work. Further help is given as they proceed in terms of other relevant issues
such as referencing and proof-reading.

Conclusion
Write Like an Academic is the culmination of nearly a decade of teaching
postgraduate learners and an exhaustive PhD Research project. The material is tried
and tested in a flexible learning environment and suggests that the corpus-informed
approach to writing development has the potential for extremely wide application in
language learning and teaching more generally. Perhaps indeed in the next phase of
the corpus revolution, we will see the ownership of corpus work pass more and more
to one of the major audiences for whom it has been produced – the language learners
themselves.

A further interesting though not entirely surprising outcome from the work evolved
from the long process of turning a supplementary online platform into a fully self-
access course. For once such a course is designed with the student-user rather than the
teacher-provider in mind, the process of adapting such that course back to a flexible
or even traditional classroom mode of delivery is not in any way problematic.

Hyland and Tse (2007) recommend that in EAP classes, “teachers help students
develop a more restricted, discipline-based lexical repertoire” (p. 235). “As teachers”,
they say, “we have to recognize that students in different fields will require different
ways of using language and so we cannot depend on a list of academic vocabulary”
(Hyland and Tse, 2007, p. 249). The conclusions drawn from our own research are not
entirely consistent with these claims (Hancioglu et al, 2008). Academic texts from
different fields certainly do exhibit linguistic variation, but on the other hand, genres
cut across subject fields, and moves and many of their lexico-structural realizations
are defined not only by the specific subject matter (e.g. architecture), but by the
conventions of the given genre (e.g. abstracts), which inevitably lead to the use of
lexico-structural patterns that are extremely similar in widely different fields.
Hunston indeed goes so far as to suggest that “for many writers who are expert in
their own field, … it is not the technical terminology, but what might be called the
terminology of rhetoric that causes problems” (2002, p. 135).

In this ongoing debate, we would hope that the Write Like an Academic Course has
gone at least some way to squaring the circle, and addressing the practicalities of
more specialised approaches as well their theoretical desirability. The solution
proposed has so far proved to be quite simple. The course input is primarily inter-
disciplinary, but by integrating student input into the course through individualised
corpus development and analysis, single disciplinary output evolves from the
students’ own autonomous research.

7
References and Resources
Anthony, L. (n.d.) AntConc. [Computer software].
(http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software/README_antconc3.2.1.txt)

Bhatia, V. K. (1993). Analysing Genre: Language use in professional settings. Essex:

Longman.

Cobb, T. (n.d.). The compleat lexical tutor for data-driven learning on the web
[Computer software]. http://132.208.224.131

Flowerdew, L. (2000). Using a genre-based framework to teach organizational

structure in academic writing. ELT Journal, Volume 54/4, pp. 369-378.

Flowerdew, J. (2001). Attitudes of Journal Editors to Nonnative Speaker

Contributions. TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 121-149.

Garfield, E & Welljams-Dorof, A. (1990). Language Use in International Research: A

Citation Analysis. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, Vol. 511, Foreign Language in the Workplace, 10-24.

Graddol, D. (1997). The Future of English?. The British Council. Retrieved on 2007-
10-14 from the World Wide Web. http://www.britishcouncil.org/de/learning-
elt-future.pdf

Hancioğlu, N., Neufeld, S. & Eldridge, J. (2008). Through the looking glass and into
the land of lexico-grammar. English for Specific Purposes, Volume 27, Issue
4, 459-479.

Hancioğlu, N. (2009). Incorporating corpus data into an advanced academic thesis

writing course. Unpublished Phd thesis, Eastern Mediterranean University,
Famagusta, Cyprus.

Henry, A. (2007). Evaluating language learners’ response to web-based, data-driven,

genre teaching materials. English for Specific Purposes, Volume 26, Issue 4,
pp. 462-484.

Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: CUP.

Hyland, K. (2004). Genre and Second Language Writing. Michigan: The University
of Michigan Press.

Hyland, K. & Tse, P. (2007). Is There an “Academic Vocabulary”? TESOL Quarterly.

Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 235-253.

Johns, A. M., Bawarashi, A., Coe, R. M., Hyland, K., Paltridge, B., Reiff, M. J.,
Tardy, C. (2006). Crossing the boundaries of genre studies: Commentaries by
experts. Journal of Second Language Writing, Volume 15, Issue 3, pp. 234-
249.

8
Johns, T. (1997). Contexts: The background, development, and trialling of a
concordance-based CALL program. In A. Wichmann, S. Fligelstone, T.
McEnery, & G. Knowles (eds.), Teaching and Language Corpora (pp. 100-
115). New York: Addison Wesley Longman.

Krashen, S. (2003). Dealing with English Fever. In Selected Papers from the Twelfth
International Symposium on English Teaching. English Teachers'
Association/ROC, Taipei: Crane Publishing Company. pp. 100-108.

McCarthy, M. (2001). Issues in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: CUP.

Monash University. (2008). Learning Support for Higher Degree Research Students.
Retrieved on 2008-12-9 from the World Wide Web.
http://www.monash.edu.au/lls/hdr/write/5.6.html

MOODLE Course Management System. (2008) Retrieved January 16, 2009 from the
World Wide Web. http://docs.moodle.org/en/Philosophy

Nation, P. (n.d.). RANGE. [Computer software].

(http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/staff/paul-nation/nation.aspx)

Nunan, D. (1999). Second Language Teaching & Learning. Boston: Heinle & Heinle.

Richards, J. C. (1990). The Language Teaching Matrix. Cambridge: CUP.

Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus Concordance Collocation. Oxford: OUP.

Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre Analysis. Cambridge: CUP.

Watt, R. (2004). (http://www.concordancesoftware.co.uk/) Concordance Software

Wood, A. (2001). International Scientific English: The language of research scientists

around the world. In Flowerdew, J. & Peacock, M. (eds.), Research
Perspectives on English for Academic Purposes. Cambridge: CUP.