CAMBRIDGE SECOND EDITION ing A course in writing skills for academic purposes Liz Hamp-Lyons Ben Heasley CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi Cambridge university Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521534963 © Cambridge University Press 2006 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2006 4th printing 2009 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-521-53496-3 Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Information regarding prices, travel timetables and other factual information given in this work are correct at the time of first printing but Cambridge University Press does not guarantee the accuracy of such information thereafter. Photo acknowledgement p 51 bildagentur-online.com/th-foto/Alamy The authors and publishers are grateful for permission to use the copyright materials appearing in this book, as indicated in the sources and acknowledgements throughout. If there are errors or omissions the publishers would be pleased to hear and to make the appropriate correction in future reprints. contents Acknowledgements 7 To the Student 9 To the Teacher 11 UNIT ONE The academic writing process 15 Introduction 15 Thinking about writing processes 15 Distinguishing between academic and personal styles of writing 16 The grammar of academic discourse 19 The writing process: Visualising your text 23 UNIT TWO Researching and writing 25 Recognising categories and classifications 25 The language of classification 26 The structure of a research paper 30 The writing process: Exploring the Internet and recording your explorations 32 UNIT THREE Fundamentals and feedback 35 Exploring comparison and contrast structures 35 The language of comparison and contrast 39 Using comparisons and contrasts to evaluate and recommend 42 The research paper 45 Identifying a research gap 47 The writing process: Joining a virtual peer group to get feedback on your writing 48 UNIT FOUR Definition, vocabulary, and academic clarity 50 The Clarity Principle 50 The language of definition 52 Reduced relative clauses 53 Extended definitions 54 The place of definition in academic text 55 The writing process: Understanding academic vocabulary 57 Contents 3 4 contents UNIT FIVE Generalisations, facts and academic honesty 60 The Honesty Principle 60 The language of generalisation 63 Hedging generalisations 64 Boosting generalisations 66 Writing a literature review 69 The writing process: Working with a peer group 72 Brainstorming and clustering 73 UNIT SIX Seeing ideas and sharing texts 75 Writing about events in time 75 Connecting events in a text 80 Reading and writing about visuals 82 The writing process: Learning about peer reviews 86 UNIT SEVEN Description, methods, and academic reality 89 Describing processes and products 89 The language for writing about processes 90 Nominalisations 95 Writing the Methods section 98 The Reality Principle 100 The writing process: Giving and getting formal peer feedback 102 UNIT EIGHT Results, discussion and academic relevance 104 What is an argument? 104 The language of argument 108 The Results and Discussion sections 111 Results 112 Discussion 114 The Relevance Principle 114 The writing process: Finding an academic voice 117 Getting peer feedback on your academic voice 117 UNIT NINE The whole academic text 119 S-P-S-E: Focus on structure 119 S-P-S-E in the Introduction 125 The language of coherence and connection 127 Process writing: Teacher evaluation 131 UNIT TEN creating the whole text 134 Structure of the research report or paper 134 Creating your own research 137 Plagiarism .. . and how to avoid it 140 Creating citations 143 In your own words: Paraphrase and summary 145 'Authorial identity' - sounding like your academic self 148 .......................................................................................................... Teaching notes and Key Unit 1 155 Unit 2 160 Unit 3 166 Unit 4 170 Unit 5 174 Unit 6 179 Unit 7 186 Unit 8 190 Unit 9 195 Unit 10 200 Appendix A Tips for carrying out peer review 204 Appendix B Academic writing assessment criteria 206 Appendix C Assessing written work 208 Contents 5 Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge the help of Harvey Broadstock, Director of Studies, English Language Institute, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia, and Eric Glendinning, Director, Institute for Applied Language Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland for access to their teachers and students for trials of material for this book; and Libya Charleson and Janet Hamilton at the English Language Institute, Victoria University and Kenneth Anderson at the Institute for Applied Language Studies, University of Edinburgh, for trialling materials with their students and providing us with feedback from the teacher's perspective. We particularly thank Janet Hamilton for her help with editorial commentaries on early units, which helped greatly in working out the structure for the book. We thank all those we have worked with at CUP over what turned out to be more years than any of us wished! Peter Donovan instigated the idea of new versions of all the books in this series; Mickey Bonin worked with us to get the plans off the ground and provided useful external reviews and comments of his own; Alison Sharpe picked up the project towards the end and provided the kind of forceful encouragement we needed to get to the end. Shirley Whitehouse has been a wonderful editor for the final stages. We must also thank colleagues who over the years since the original Study Writing was published in 1987 have approached us at conferences with words of praise for the book; and more recently, it has been a pleasure to meet academic colleagues - in ELT and other disciplines - who have reported that Study Writing was a significant force in helping them write well enough to further their academic careers: these have been the people who provided the impetus we needed to undertake a new edition. Our families have grown up since 1987, but their role in our lives remains central. Our love and thanks go as always to Mike, Nick and Chris; and to Hilda, Yana, Myles and Cian. Acknowledgements 7 To the Student In this section we will outline answers to frequently asked questions. We hope you find them helpful. I Q: Who is this textbook for? I We think Study Writing is most suitable for students whose English level is between intermediate and early advanced (approximately IELTS 5.0-7.0, 'old' [paper and pencil] TOEFL 480-600, computer- based TOEFL 160-250, or 'new generation' iBT TOEFL 55-100). Typically you will be adult ( 17 +), be able to write reasonably correct sentences in English, but want to develop your ability to write better academic essays, projects, research articles or theses. Most users of this book will either be going to follow a course of study at an English-medium college or university, or planning to take an examination in English, such as the written paper in IELTS or TOEFL. Q: How will the course help me? It will help you in five main ways. Firstly, it will introduce you to key concepts in academic writing, such as the role of generalisations, definitions and classifications. Secondly, you will explore the use of information structures such as those i:i;d to develop and present an argument, a comparison or a contrast. Thirdly, you will be guided through the language as it is used in academic writing. Fourthly, you will become familiar with particular genres such as theresearch paper. Finally, you will try out some of the processes which we have found help students to improve their writing abilities, such as how to participate in a virtual peer group and how to get feedback on a piece of writing before you present a final draft. Q: Do I need to do anything else, apart from studying this course, in order to improve my writing ability? While we sincerely believe that this course will help you become a competent writer, we are the first to acknowledge that there are limits to what a course can achieve. This is because wr1tin g is a·very complex process involving the ability to communicate in a foreign language (English) and the ability to construct a text that expresses the writer's ideas effectively. The more communicative exposure and practice you can get, the more you will support your progress in writing. One highly recommended approach to improving yo_ur w.rjting is throughreadi~g. ·specifically, we recommend reading widcly in the a~ of your ~t~dy/interest. The best way of becoming familiar with the demands of academic writing is to study how other writers meet To the Student 9 these demands. For example, if you are unsure of how to use definitions in an academic text it makes sense to see how established writers deal with this issue. We recommend ke~_pj n_g aJ_og_book <2_f extracts from readings that strike you as interesting/useful from a writer's point of view. These extracts can highlight a range of items, such as language expressions that can be used to signal support for an argument, or ways of moving from one topic to another. A more obvious way you can help yourself to improve is by writing regularly. Part of writing ability is skill-based, and like any skill it gets better with practice. Even writing that nobody reads except yourself is good practice, helping you to think about ideas and how to express them. But especially important is attending to any feedback that you get on your writing. Without attention to feedback, improvement will not take place. You and other learners can discuss the ideas and arguments in each other's writing and learn a lot from that; you can give written feedback to each other on how effective you find each other's texts (we don't advise you to try to correct each other's language though!) Your teachers will provide you with feedback on language errors, but also on content, organisation and style. In engaging with different kinds of feedback you will improve the quality of your writing in terms of grammar, vocabulary choice, organisation and content. 10 To the Student To the Teacher Study Writing is designed for students whose English level is between intermediate and early advanced (approximately IELTS Band 5.0-7.0, 'old' [paper and pencil] TOEFL 480-600, computer- based TOEFL 160-250, or 'new generation' iBT TOEFL 55-100). Typically they will be adult (17+ ), be able to write reasonably correct sentences in English, but want to develop their ability to write better academic essays, projects, research articles or theses. Students will most likely either be going to follow a course of study at an English-medium college or university, or planning to take an examination in English, such as the written paper in IELTS or TOEFL. Timing While the course provides between 40 and 60 hours of classwork, it is not advisable for every task to be undertaken in class time. Many tasks will be more appropriate for homework, for example researching on the World Wide Web or writing long texts. In general, we have erred on the side of providing too many rather than too few tasks, giving considerable flexibility to teachers in how they manage the course and respond to the needs of the students. General principles Study Writing is based on an approach which emphasises the discoursal and cognitive aspects of writing. We see writing as a form of problem-solving in which the writer is faced with two main tasks: a) generating ideas, and b) composing these ideas into a written text that meets the needs of a reader and efficiently communicates the author's message. In generating ideas we promote group work, brainstorming and visualisations such as clustering. In transforming these ideas into a written form we guide students in exploring the use of information structures such as generalisations, definitions, the use of Situation-Problem-Solution-Evaluation, and the Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion structure used in research papers. We also stress the value of being attentive to how other, more established writers meet the demands of academic writing. We recommend that students keep a log book of extracts from readings that strike them as interesting and useful from a writer's point of view. These extracts can highlight a range of items, such as language expressions that can be used to signal support for an argument, or ways of moving from one topic to another. We also acknowledge that part of writing ability is skill-based, and like any skill it gets better with practice because it helps students to think about ideas and how to express them. Therefore it makes To the Teacher 11 12 To the Teacher sense to encourage students to write even if nobody will read what they write. This is not to downplay the provision of feedback to the student. Without attention to feedback, the rate of improvement will be unnecessarily slow. We help students discuss the ideas and arguments in each other's writing and show them how to give written feedback to each other on how effective they find each other's texts. However, it is up to you as teacher to provide feedback on language errors, and also on content, organisation and style. In engaging the student with these different kinds of feedback they will improve the quality of their writing in terms of grammar, vocabulary choice, organisation and content. The first edition of Study Writing had a substantial section on 'Providing feedback on written work'. In the late 1980s, few second- language teachers knew about process approaches to the teaching of writing, and it was useful to provide such support material, but that situation has changed substantially. This edition of Study Writing continues to stress the importance of working with others, and of talking about ideas when engaging in a writing activity, but there is much less need to explain how these processes work. We have instead provided an updated and more sophisticated treatment of 'Assessing written work', which we hope will be of use to the modern English language teacher who knows about curriculum and about pedagogy for teaching writing, but may be less confident about assessment. You will find this material in Appendix C. course organisation Unit 1 provides the student with an overview of the major elements involved in academic writing. They learn to examine and evaluate their own writing processes, to distinguish between academic and personal styles of writing, explore the grammar of academic discourse and begin visualising their texts. Subsequent units build on this foundation and students are guided, on the one hand, towards mastery of increasingly complex information structures and, on the other hand, through strategies (such as peer group review) that help them produce increasingly more complex texts. This development culminates in Unit 10, which deals with the creation of whole texts, the structure of the research report and papers, creating bibliographies and trying to achieve an authorial v01ce. General advice on teaching procedure The general principles which we outline here are taken from the first edition of Study Writing and have, we believe, stood the test of time. We do not believe that there is a 'right way' to teach writing, and we do believe that individual teachers should be allowed the freedom to make their own decisions. Nevertheless, the writers of a book always have certain ideas and assumptions which necessarily affect the book they write, so that it is easier to use the materials in some ways than others. We state our general views here in the hope that they will be helpful to the teacher seeking to understand why we have done this or that, and how we might teach it: this is not intended as a prescription of how any other teacher should do it. Writing is clearly a complex process, and competent writing is frequently accepted as being the last language skill to be acquired (for native speakers of the language as well as for those learning a foreign/second language). Few people write spontaneously, and few feel comfortable with a formal writing task intended for the eyes of someone else. When the 'someone else' is a teacher, whose eye may be critical, and who indeed may assign a formal assessment to the written product, most people feel uncomfortable. It makes sense, then, that the atmosphere of the writing classroom should be warm and supportive, and non-threatening. It helps if teachers show willingness to write too, and to offer their attempts for class discussion along with those of the students; it helps if students can work together, assisting each other, reviewing each other's texts, pointing out strengths and weaknesses without taking or giving offence. Many of our tasks suggest working with a partner or in groups, and we see this work as very important: not only does it make the task livelier and more enjoyable, but it ensures that students see that writing is really cooperative, a relationship between writer and reader. Usually the writer has to imagine a reader, but cooperative writing provides each writer with a reader and makes the writing task more realistic and more interactive. Writing is commonly seen as a three-stage process: pre-writing, writing and rewriting. Although this is very much an oversimplification, it is a helpful one. In the past, teachers concentrated on the end of the second stage, that is, after the writing had been done. They did not see how they could intervene at the pre-writing and writing stages, and rewriting was seen only as 'correcting the mistakes'. We now understand the importance of all three stages as part of the writing process and try to help students master the process, by participating in it with them, rather than contenting ourselves with criticizing the product- the composition - without knowing much about how it was arrived at. We have included a Teaching notes and Key at the back of the book, for those teachers who would like more detailed guidance on how to use Study Writing. To the Teacher 13 The academic writing process This unit aims to improve writing skills by: e introducing the idea that writing is a set of processes e showing how to distinguish between academic and personal styles of writing f) looking at the grammar of academic discourse 8 practising visualising text as a pre-writing step. Introduction You will already be capable of writing in English and so this course is intended to extend that skill to include the different types of written English essential for studying. In this unit, we will show you examples of both personal and formal writing and help you distinguish between them. A number of texts will be used as examples of the writing process, and you will be asked to identify the elements of grammar that indicate formal writing. In later units, we will study the processes of writing in more detail. All the later units will include opportunities to learn and practise at least one of the key grammatical elements identified here. Thinking about writing processes People set about the writing process in many different ways. They require all kinds of different situations in which to feel 'comfortable' when writing. Use the following short questionnaire to help you think about your own writing processes. • When you write an important text, do you make more than one draft? • Do you prefer to write on paper or use a computer? Have you ever asked yourself why? • What do you do before you start writing? • How do you start writing? Do you begin at 'the beginning' or jump in wherever you have some ideas? Do you think one approach is better than another? • What do you do while you are writing? Do you stop and think? Do you ever go back to the beginning and start again? • When you finish your first complete draft, what do you do next? Unit 1 The academic writing process 15 If you are working with others, choose a partner and discuss your answers to the questionnaire. There are no 'correct' answers, so freely discuss all views. Would your answers be the same for writing in your own language as for writing in English? Now that you have considered some basic questions about writing, ask yourself: What do I hope to get from this course? If you are working in a group, your teacher may want you to discuss this question with others. Alternatively, you may be asked to write a rough draft of a short answer at home. 1 Distinguishing between academic and personal styles of writing What is academic writing? There are many different kinds of academic writing in English. Some of these differences arise from the different disciplines and the ways in which they create and share knowledge; some relate to the audience (the reader); and some to the use to which the text will be put. The rules of academic writing in English are quite complicated; nevertheless most students find that they can recognise the difference between informal writing and formal, academic writing. TASK 1 Recognising academic writing A: Look at the following sentence. Linguists were and remain convinced by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who discovered that however disparate human languages seem, all share a common, basic structure, seemingly hardwired into the brain. If you are working in a group, choose a partner and together identify at least three features of this sentence that you think are academic. B: Now look at the following sentence. The way you speak says a lot about you. 1 A rough draft is a first version of a piece of writing: it might be early thinking about a topic for an essay or report; or, as in this case, it might be a way of capturing your thinking about something in order to talk clearly about it later. 16 unit 1 The academic writing process With your partner, identify at least three features of this sentence that seem non-academic to you. Note: This separation between academic and non-academic is not simple or absolute. You will see non-academic style in academic texts; and academic features will occur in non-academic texts. But it is generally true that academic texts have predictable patterns of grammar, organisation, argument, and of giving credit to the work and words of others. You will learn about these predictable patterns in this book . •.......•.•••.•........... . Recognising levels of formality Reader content Style Organisation Grammar vocabulary Sentences TASK2 Study Table 1.1, which identifies two quite different levels of formality, and then complete the table that follows. Table 1.1: Different levels of formality Academic Non-academic academics family and friends serious thought conversational complex sentences showing mostly simple and compound sentences considerable variety in construction joined by conjunctions such as and or but clear and well planned less likely to be as clear and as organised likely to be error free may not always use complete sentences technical and academic language use of short forms, idioms and slang used accurately Read the sentences and tick(,/) either F (formal) or I (informal) after each sentence. Make notes on which features helped you reach your decision. F I Notes I couldn't finish the interviews on time. The initial tests were completed and the results analysed by June 2002. I'd like to start by drawing your attention to previous research in this area. In the 1990s, some researchers started to point out the problems with this theory. He agreed with me that this procedure didn't make much sense. We'll repeat the test sometime next year. While it is still too early to draw firm conclusions from the data, preliminary analysis suggests the following trends are present. In addition, the research attempts to answer two further related questions. Unit 1 The academic writing process 17