reading and writing in the subject areas: targeted, discipline-based interactive resources for 1st...

Terry Royce, Mark Sakaguchi

Reading and Writing in the Subject Areas: Targeted, Discipline-based Interactive

Resources for 1st Year UG Students

Terry Royce, Mark Sakaguchi

(pp. 1111-1124)

The Asian Conference on Education

Official Conference Proceedings 2011

ISSN: 2186-5892

Proceedings URL: http://iafor.org/ace_proceedings.html

iafor

The International Academic Forum

www.iafor.org

Submission Reference Number: 0115

Paper Title:

Reading and writing in the subject areas: targeted, discipline-based interactive resources for 1st year UG students

Abstract

As Basil Bernstein’s (1971) seminal work has demonstrated, students from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds can often come to the schooling context disadvantaged by a lack of familiarity with the elaborated codes utilised in schools. Students entering universities from a low SES background can also often be challenged by the elaborated codes of the higher education system and by the discipline-specific discourses to which they are exposed.

In 2008, the Australian Government initiated a Review of Australian Higher Education to examine the future direction of the higher education sector, its fitness towards meeting the needs of the Australian community and economy, and the options for ongoing reform. This paper reports on a funded project under the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) Widening Participation Scheme (WPS), which arose out of the recommendations of the Review of Australian Higher Education. This project seeks to address the significant challenges facing first-year undergraduate students in regard to discourse and rhetorical structure and the genres of specific disciplines. The project involves firstly conducting a needs analysis and, on the basis of this analysis, providing genre- and discipline-specific online support materials and activities which scaffold students’ first attempts at reading and writing in the discourse of their chosen discipline.

Presenter Bios:

Dr. Terry Royce is a Senior Lecturer and Research Coordinator at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). At UTS Terry works across the university with postgraduate research students and staff in a range of faculties on research literacy, as well as developing research and publication writing syndicates for staff to develop their research outputs. He supervises doctoral students in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in language education (TESOL) and applied linguistics (discourse analysis, multimodality). His research interests include forensic linguistics (specifically with critical incident policing and authorship identification), the analysis of multimodality, discourse and cohesion analysis across disciplines (specifically scientific and economics discourse), the application of systemic-functional linguistics to discourse varieties, and TESOL education.

Mr. Marc Sakaguchi is a Lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). At UTS Marc teaches academic and professional skills courses in both undergraduate and post-graduate education programs. He has also taught visiting foreign exchange students in the Advanced Diploma in Australian Language and Culture (ADALC) program. He has a Master’s Degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from Columbia University. Prior to moving to Australia, he taught English and academic skills at secondary and tertiary education institutions in Japan for 14 years. Marc’s research interests include discourse analysis, particularly critical discourse and systemic functional linguistic analysis in the field of forensic linguistics, and the acquisition and development of second language reading skills in the field of TESOL education.

4897 words

The Third Asian Conference on Education 2011 Official Proceedings Osaka, Japan

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1. Introduction

In 2008, the Australian Government commissioned a Review of Australian Higher Education (commonly referred to as the Bradley Review) to examine the future direction of the higher education sector, its fitness for the purpose of meeting the needs of the Australian community and economy, and the options for ongoing reform. Two key targets recommended by the Bradley Review and subsequently adopted by the Australian Government are particularly relevant here: (1) that by 2025 40% of 25- to 34-year-olds should have attained at least a bachelor-level qualification and (2) that by 2020 20% of undergraduate enrolments should be students from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. Associated government budgetary measures in support of reforms aimed at achieving these targets have focussed primarily on providing student income support, scholarships, institutional performance targets, increased funding to student places, and a new quality and regulatory agency (for a review of these aims see Birrell & Edwards 2009).

In recognition and support of these announced targets and policy and budgetary changes by the Australian Government, the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), in the state of New South Wales, implemented its Widening Participation Strategy (WPS). The WPS recognises, however, that simply building aspiration and enrolling students from low SES and Indigenous backgrounds will not ensure the successful completion of university study for those students; a whole-of-university approach is required. The Bradley Review emphasizes that once enrolled, those students ‘require higher levels of support to succeed, including financial assistance and greater academic support, mentoring and counseling services’ (Australian Government, 2008, p. 28). The WPS therefore has funded projects over the two-year period, 2011-2012, across the university in four strands or themes: Building Aspiration, Widening Access, Inclusive Community, and Retention and Success.

This paper reports on the recently completed pilot stage of a two-year funded WPS project focused on the fourth of the WPS themes: Retention and Success. As the Bradley Review highlights, university students from low SES backgrounds must be supported in their transition to university study and provided with the assistance they need to succeed in completing their university study. One of the issues facing these students is that they often enter the university context disadvantaged by a lack of familiarity with the elaborated and discipline-specific codes utilised there (Bernstein, 1971; Hood, 2011).The central aim of the project described in this report is to address the related challenges facing these students in their first year of university undergraduate study by providing genre- and discipline-specific online support materials and activities to scaffold the students’ first attempts at reading and writing in the discourse of their chosen discipline. The paper outlines the background and context of the project, the project itself, and the development and trialling of materials in the first-year pilot stage. Examples of these materials are presented with an associated critical and evaluative discussion.

2. Background and Context

As Basil Bernstein’s (1971) seminal work in Class, Codes and Control has demonstrated, students entering universities from a low SES background can often be challenged by the “elaborated codes” of the higher education system, and by the discipline-specific discourses to which they are exposed. As a result of a lack of familiarity with those discourses, due perhaps in part to their previous social and educational experiences, these low SES students may find it difficult not only to learn and understand the theory and concepts of their new discipline, but also to communicate effectively in the academic and discipline-specific genres they encounter. Bernstein found that even though the low SES pupils in his UK study performed relatively poorly in language-based subjects, these pupils were achieving just as well as their higher SES counterparts on mathematical work. His study focussed on examining the reasons why this was occurring, and suggested that two codes are at work which might explain the situation: the "restricted" code, and the "elaborated" code (see Bernstein, 1964, pp. 57-67).

For Bernstein, the "restricted" code draws on a store of shared meanings and background knowledge in the contexts in which it occurs. It carries a social message of inclusion, of implicitly acknowledging another’s status as being "one of us”. It can perhaps be thought of as a private rather than public code, and commonly referred-to contexts are family or friendship groups. Restricted code can also be typically seen in the use of ‘group’ jargon, as in a trade-based workshop (e.g. mechanics in a garage). Essentially the code operates within, and is tuned into a restricted (or bounded) community or group. On the other hand, the “elaborated”


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code has been developed for contexts where new or challenging knowledge in a field is presented, and requires full explication because it is socially necessary for all participants to understand the content and the concepts on offer. Unlike the restricted code, it does not draw on agreed shared meanings and background knowledge that is integral to the social interaction.

Bernstein's research argued that while low SES students had access to their restricted code(s), higher SES students had access to and experience with both restricted and elaborated codes, because the higher SES students were more geographically, socially and culturally mobile (Bernstein, 1971). This also supports the findings from his earlier work (Bernstein, 1964, pp. 66-7). This finding is important for the WPS project described here because schools and universities in the Australian context (and indeed around the world):

• are concerned with the introduction of new knowledge which goes beyond existing shared meanings,

• are relatively anonymous institutions which do not share many taken-for-granted meanings in their formal structures (except perhaps in informal structures within the staff and student groups), and

• consequently, use the elaborated code to ensure ‘everyone gets the message’.

The assumption underlying this project is that it is vitally important to recognise that if a student is not familiar with the elaborated code, he/she will find it very difficult to succeed in the educational system. This may be especially true for the first year undergraduate low-SES-background student, confronted with the codes and complexities of a large university, and the requirement to start producing academically appropriate output from the first weeks of the first semester. The disciplinary ‘shock’ that the student experiences may lead to a sense of or fear of failure, actual failure, and dropping out.

This WPS-Retention and Success project is therefore concerned with supporting low SES students in their transition from high school contexts to university contexts, and their need to cope with disciplinarity, or the conventions of disciplinary knowledge (Hood, 2011). The project’s specific aims are to address:

• the challenges for students entering universities from a low SES background

• the elaborated codes of the higher education system

• the discipline-specific discourses encountered in lectures and tutorials

• the requirement to read textbooks, journal articles, and other academic/professional texts

• the requirement to write using the accepted and elaborated conventions of each discipline

The institutional context for this WPS Project is the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), in New South Wales, Australia. UTS is a member of the Australian Technology Network (ATN), a coalition of five Australian universities which stress that their graduates and resultant research are closely aligned to the needs of industry and the wider society. Their undergraduate student bodies typically consist of local and international students, and the institutions emphasise the practical application and practical outcomes of tertiary studies and research.

3. The Project: Targeted, discipline-based interactive resources for 1st year UG students

The results of university-wide after-enrolment language assessments of commencing students at UTS have shown that students assessed as being at particular levels (here labeled Levels 1, 2, and 3) tend to represent certain groups of students with their attendant needs. The level 1 students tend to be students who do not require much additional support to succeed in the university context in terms of learning to read and write in their chosen discipline. The level 3 students tend to be international students who have specific language and academic literacy needs that are often associated with the fact that their first language is not English. UTS’ specialised academic literacy unit and other support bodies are currently addressing these specific language and academic literacy needs.

The level 2 students on the other hand have needs that seem to be related to discourse and rhetorical structure, and the genres of specific disciplines; and while there is a significant proportion of international students in this group, there also seems to be a significant number of students who are Australian and


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whose first language is English. There is also a proportion who do not use English in their home, or who are second-generation immigrants. Many of these students may indeed be low SES students.

This project seeks to address the challenges related to discourse, rhetorical structure, and genres of specific disciplines faced by these level 2 students by establishing via a needs analysis the particular needs of this group and, on the basis of this analysis, providing genre- and discipline-specific online support materials and activities which scaffold students’ first attempts at reading and writing in the discourse of their chosen discipline. The aim is to develop online support activities for the specific reading or writing tasks required of students in particular core, first-year subjects. Students can access these activities on their own time with links to the website on each subject’s homepage and the university library’s website. Students from low SES backgrounds (and indeed NESB and other students) in each faculty area can access the interactive resources, view annotated text samples extracted from their core, first-year subjects and related to their assignment tasks, learn to negotiate the generic conventions of the texts, and apply the skills which are demonstrated in the activities.

The primary objectives of this project therefore are to:

1. conduct a needs analysis to confirm the specific needs of low SES students.

2. develop a web site which would allow low SES students to look up and work with sample texts.

3. develop interactive learning or text-approach resources which are discipline-specific.

4. develop interactive exercises which guide students on the reading and writing text approach techniques needed for study in their first-year core subjects.

5. promote these online resources both in class and through clear and prominent access links to the site on each subject’s homepage and the university library’s website.

The outcomes of this project have been set up to be realised in three stages over two years as illustrated in Figure 1 below.

YEAR 1 – 2011

Stage 1: Initial concept testing

The collection of a set of texts and resource/activity ideas that can be made available online, and the testing of the relevance of these with a sample of low SES students.

Stage 2: Pilot site creation and trialling

The development, implementation and review of a pilot version of the site aimed at two subjects with low SES students.

YEAR 2 – 2012

Stage 3: Expansion

Based on the results of the review of the pilot version, modify, prepare and implement a full version of the site for the remaining faculties at UTS.

Figure 1 - Stages of the project

It is expected that one of the main ongoing benefits of this project is that it will address the WPS theme of “retention and success”. If students from low SES backgrounds can easily obtain access to effective interactive support resources in their specific disciplines, then their ability to go beyond the first year of study with confidence will be greatly enhanced, and they will have the necessary foundational understandings to help them deal with the discourse of their discipline and the assignments which require that they demonstrate a familiarity with the disciplinary writing conventions. In addition, an important ongoing effect of this work is expected to be faculty staff professional development, as the existence of these materials and the questions that they may generate in classes should lead to an increased awareness on the part of the staff of the ways that their discipline organises its discourse and the kinds of demands that


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this discipline-specific discourse can make on new students. It is expected that the project will benefit not only low SES students, but all students who have to read and then write in the subjects they study.

4. The Pilot Stage

The remainder of this report will discuss the creation and trialling of the pilot website – Stage 2 of the project. This stage involved the selection of two first-year, core subjects for the trial, initial information gathering regarding the subjects and their reading and writing tasks/assignments, the writing of materials and activities to support students in their understanding and completion of the tasks/assignments and learning of the genres they represent, creation of the pilot website including backend and frontend functionality and design, and the trialling of the online materials with students enrolled in the subjects. First-year, core subjects were selected as they are required for all students enrolled in a particular course of study and are often prerequisites for subsequent subjects.

On the basis of internal faculty statistics and course of study requirements, two core subjects in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology (FEIT) were selected: one from Engineering (Physical Modelling) and one from Information Technology (Networking Essentials). After briefing the Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning in FEIT on the aims of the WPS Project, initial meetings were organised with the two Subject Coordinators concerned, and their cooperation and support was readily obtained once they were informed of the project’s aims and parameters. The subject coordinators were especially supportive of the eventual possibility of integrating the online activities into the assessment regimes of the subjects. A series of discussion meetings were then held to gather information regarding the subject requirements and reading/writing tasks.

As a result of these discussions, it was decided that two modules of activities would be developed and trialled for Physical Modelling (an Online Logbook Entry module and an Extended Report module), and one module of activities for Networking Essentials (a Case Study Report module). The next stage of the pilot was development: this involved the design and writing of materials and activities for each module and, once these began to take shape, the creation of an online interface – for this latter activity a private web developer was engaged and tasked with the development of the backend architecture and the frontend interactive interface. Once this pilot site was developed, edited and debugged, the subject coordinators informed their students of the site and asked them to complete the activities as part of their assignment preparation tasks.

To get a sense of the nature of this pilot site, please see the following screenshots of some of the pages and activities the students needed to read and complete, starting with the “Welcome” screen and the request to choose a discipline, and then a subject (Figure 2).


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Figure 2 - Website 'Welcome' screen

Figures 3 and 4 show an extract from the Case Study Report module for the IT subject: here the students are asked to read a preamble on the role of consultants and then, on the basis of this reading, to select an answer from four choices.

Figure 3 - Information + multiple-choice question page


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Figure 4 - Answer-selection

The student’s answer is recorded when the student clicks on the Next button, and the next page provides an explanation of the correct answer.

Figures 5 and 6 illustrate another interactive exercise which focuses on the semantics of each “move” in a sample text excerpt from a case study report (see Dudley-Evans, 1987; Swales, 1990; Martin, 1992, 2008). The students are asked to read the sample text and to pass the cursor over each of the highlighted sections. When they do so, an explanation of the semantic function of each highlighted part is presented in a text box. It is important to note that the students cannot proceed to the next page until they have passed the mouse cursor over each of the highlighted sections and viewed the information for all of the moves in the text.


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Figure 5 - Sample text page

Figure 6 - Pop-up text box presenting an explanation of the highlighted portion of the sample text

Multi-modal sample texts are highlighted and annotated as well, as illustrated in this next set of screenshots of a page on the use of tables and figures in a case study report (Figures 7 and 8). Note again that the students must pass the mouse cursor over each of the highlighted sections in the sample text to be able to continue to the next page.


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Figure 7 - Sample text page

Figure 8 - Pop-up text box presenting an explanation of the highlighted portion of the sample text

5. Evaluation and Discussion

A crucial aspect of the development of these interactive resources at the end of this pilot stage is the evaluation of the online interactive materials and the website’s usability for the students. The results from


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this evaluation will of course inform the next, final stage of the project, where the basic pilot versions of the site’s backend and frontend designs will be re-developed and improved, and interactive resources will be produced for selected core subjects across the remaining faculties at UTS.

The first aspect of this evaluation reviews the access/usage data for the two subjects and their modules. This is summarised below in Tables 1 and 2.

Table 1 - Physical Modelling access/usage figures

Physical Modelling (Engineering) Percentage

Online Logbook Entry module 75 students out of 155 48.4%

Extended Report module 30 students out of 155 19.4%

The figures for the two modules in the Physical Modelling subject (Table 1) show that the students did not really engage with the site –less than 50% of students enrolled in the subject accessed the first module and even fewer accessed the second. The reasons for this were felt to be related to (1) problems with the site’s materials and activities, functionality, and usability resulting from development timing pressures and (2) minimal promotion of the site to students.

Table 2 - Networking Essentials access/usage figures

Networking Essentials (IT) Percentage

129 students out of 218 59.2%

34 of the 129 students stopped at 5 pages or less 26.4%

54 of the 129 students completed all 53 pages 41.9%

Case Study Report module

14 of the 129 students stopped at the 10th page 10.9%

The module for Networking Essentials was created after the modules for Physical Modelling and benefitted from lessons learned from the development of the earlier modules and ongoing improvements to the website’s functionality and usability. In addition, the subject coordinator and instructors actively promoted the site to students in their lectures and tutorials and through the subject’s homepage. Finally, students were informed that they would need to go through the module in order to finish their case study report. As Table 2 indicates, site usage for this subject surpassed that of the other subject, reaching almost 60% of students. It is hoped that after further development of the website and its materials and activities, access/usage figures will improve even more in the final stage of the project.

In addition to overall access data, usage figures also reveal the viewing history of each user, indicating which pages were viewed, re-viewed, passed through rapidly, and viewed for a longer period of time. The usage data also indicates the completion rate of each user in terms of how many pages of each module the user viewed, and at which point the user decided to end the session. In examining these usage figures, it was found that 34 students left the site after viewing just 5 pages or less – those students perhaps decided early on that the site was “not for them’, and so they stopped viewing the module. This is, of course, unfortunate, but it is possible that those students already had an adequate understanding of the assignment and the genre it represents, and so felt that the online module would present them with nothing new. The module consists of 53 pages, and this may have discouraged those students from continuing to view the module further. On the other hand, 54 of the 129 students who accessed the module viewed all 53 pages, a


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figure that again is hoped will increase with further improvements of the module’s activities and interface along with increased promotion of the site to raise the estimation of the value of the modules in the eyes of the subject instructors and students.

The remaining students were relatively evenly spread out in terms of the point at which they decided to discontinue viewing the module and leave the site; however, the number of students who stopped at the tenth page of the module was unusually high at 14 students. This attracted our attention and we realised that many students may have left the site at page 10 because they were not able to access the next page. On page 10, students encounter a sample text page for the first time. As described in the previous section, students must pass the cursor over all highlighted sections of the sample text to view all pop-up text boxes before they are allowed to continue to the next page of the module. Until they have viewed all pop-up text boxes, the Next button remains inactive. However, in this pilot version of the module, there are no instructions informing users of the requirement to view all pop-up text boxes before proceeding, nor is there any indication of which highlighted sections and corresponding pop-up text boxes have been viewed and which have not. It is understandable, therefore, that some students, not realising that they had not yet viewed all of the text boxes or not knowing that they needed to do so, may have attempted to proceed to the next page by clicking on the still-inactive Next button. When nothing happened, even after repeated attempts at clicking on the Next button, they would soon come to the conclusion that there was something wrong with the site and end their session. The problem is now being addressed and future versions of the sample text activity will clearly inform the user when he/she has viewed all pop-up text boxes and is able to proceed to the next page. In this way, review of usage data has revealed problems with the site and the modules and continues to inform the evaluation and re-design of the online materials and activities. This type of feedback has thus proven to be extremely useful and is not always available in more traditional modes of presenting teaching and learning materials.

The second and perhaps most important resource aiding evaluation of the pilot site was a set of survey questions which students were asked to complete at the end of each module. The surveys consisted of 3 questions: two Likert Scale questions and a comments box. The questions were:

Question 1 – The website and its activities were easy to use and understand (Figure 9)

Question 2 – The information and activities helped you to understand and complete the assignment requirements better (Figure 10)

Question 3 – Comments (Figure 11)

Figure 9 - Survey question 1 – Perceived usability of the website


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Figure 10 - Survey question 2 – Perceived usefulness of the online materials and activities

Figure 11 - Survey question 3 - Comments and suggestions

The results of the first two survey questions are summarized below. Although they are clearly the responses from those students who were motivated to complete the modules to the end, they are encouraging in that they reveal a positive reaction to the site’s activities, relevance and usefulness.

Question 1 – The website and its activities were easy to use and understand

• Strongly agree 37 • Agree 44 • Neutral 9


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• Disagree 1 • Strongly disagree 0

Question 2 – The information and activities helped you to understand and complete the assignment requirements better

• Strongly agree 35 • Agree 42 • Neutral 9 • Disagree 2 • Strongly disagree 1

The open-ended responses to Question 3 were most useful for site development and change, as they contain suggestions on ways to improve the site and its usefulness. Excerpts from responses are provided below. Question 3 – Comments (phrases)

• ‘very informative’, ‘great idea’, ‘good stuff’ • ‘the next button doesn't always work’ • ‘multiple choice questions could provide feedback’ • ‘I'd like a way to export this out, so that we can refer to it for future use.’

In addition, these responses sometimes commented on the assignment itself or the subject in general, rather than on the website’s modules and activities, and so provided feedback for the subject coordinator as well. In the response below, the student has identified an issue related to the fact that information and resources for a single assignment were perhaps not easy to find as they were not all located in a single place.

Question 3 – Comments (extended)

‘This site was useful in gaining extra knowledge about the assessment. Though I would make sense if all of this information was in a single place. I felt as though we had to use multiple resources to get a full understanding of the requirements, and this made it difficult to ensure everything was sufficiently covered from all resources.’

Based on these survey results, student comments, and the results of debriefing meetings with the FEIT subject coordinators, the next step for this WPS Project will involve revision of the online materials, further development of interactive features, and preparation for the website to be housed within the university library online system. Once this is complete the final aspect of the project can commence, which focuses on expanding the site to include core subjects in the remaining faculties at UTS. A user-friendly subject- and module-creation interface is also in the works so that subject coordinators can create and edit their own modules for their subjects in the future.

References Bernstein, B. (1964). Elaborated and restricted codes: Their social origins and some consequences.

American Anthropologist, 66(2), 55–69. Bernstein, B. (1971), Class, codes and control. Volume 1: Theoretical studies towards a sociology of

language. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Birrell, B., & Edwards, D. (2009). The Bradley Review and access to higher education in Australia.

Australian Universities Review, 51(1), 4-13. Dudley-Evans, A. (1987). Genre analysis and ESP. ELR Journal, 1, 1-9. Hood, S.E. (2011). Writing discipline: Comparing inscriptions of knowledge and knowers in academic

writing. In F. Christie & K. Maton (Eds.), Disciplinarity: Functional linguistic and sociological perspectives (pp. 106-128). London: Continuum.

Martin, J.R. (1992). English text: System and structure. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins.


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Martin, J.R., & Rose, D. (2008). Genre relations: Mapping culture. London: Equinox. Australian Government. Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. (2008). Review

of Australian Higher Education. Canberra: Author. Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


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