Papers by Magnus Gustafsson
Revista da Anpoll, Nov 14, 2023
Co-Exploring International Writing Research and Rehearsing Scholarly Performances (CCCC2019)
Our performances as writing scholars involve more than just composing and publishing research. We... more Our performances as writing scholars involve more than just composing and publishing research. We must also engage with diverse traditions, methods, and theories from around the globe. Complex cultural, political, and linguistic contexts often complicate these performances. That said, writing scholars rarely have an open space to “rehearse” with each other across these contexts. In this workshop, participants will enter dialogic conversations to give and receive rich feedback on their research and deeply reflect on higher education writing research from around the world. The design of this workshop also allows scholars to interact with audiences not always accessible during the writing process. Scholars studying writing in different languages are welcomed, especially those typically underrepresented in the field.This workshop is made up of 32 writing researchers, who will be designated as workshop facilitators. In advance of the workshop, 27 facilitators will share works-in-progress with a brief explanation of theoretical, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Each scholar will read the works-in-progress and choose 5 before attending the workshop. Then each facilitator will lead a table discussion on their piece. All perspectives will be explored on equal footing with other “embodied performances” and potential audiences. Participants will rehearse their current findings and questions, encounter many international perspectives, and perform as both agents and audiences throughout the day. Throughout the workshop, participants will foster deep engagement with each other’s work and discuss various avenues for publication.The projects represent new developments in writing studies from Bangladesh, Canada, China, Colombia, France, Germany, Ireland, Jordan, South Korea, KSA, Lebanon, Pakistan, Philippines, South Asia, Syria, Sweden, Scotland, UAE, UK, and US . The 21 projects and 32 writing researchers from diverse national, cross-national, disciplinary, and multilingual contexts form the heart of the workshop exchanges. In other words, these projects and how they interrelate throughout the day will be the content of this workshop. The workshop chairs will provide the framework for these discussions and guide them towards overall themes and future applications. Understanding how different methodologies “perform” in various projects will be a key focus. Some of the represented methodologies include genre theory, archival research, interviews and surveys with students and faculty in specific contexts, corpus analysis, microgenetic analysis of student writing, analysis of institutional policy documents, ethnographic approaches to disciplines, participatory action research, and digital tracking
Rethinking English as a lingua franca in scientific-academic contexts
Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes
We aim to challenge assumptions made about the use of English as a “lingua franca” in scientific-... more We aim to challenge assumptions made about the use of English as a “lingua franca” in scientific-academic contexts, identify the impact of such assumptions on trajectories of knowledge production and uptake, and legitimize the use of multiple languages for transnational scholarly exchange. We set out ten principles: Using English as a scientific-academic “lingua franca” does not always promote inclusion; A language positioned as a scientific-academic “lingua franca” can act as a language of domination; Positioning English as the “lingua franca” policy may discourage translations and exclude participation; Policies which position English as being the contemporary scientific-academic “lingua franca” may convey the idea that knowledge produced in English is the only knowledge that exists; The imposition of English as a presumed scientific-academic “lingua franca” is a manifestation of the unequal distribution of knowledge production and uptake; Languages/varieties function as powerful ...
The Englishization of Higher Education in Europe, 2021
English-medium education (EME) has traditionally been associated with attracting international st... more English-medium education (EME) has traditionally been associated with attracting international students-one-way mobility-in combination with English L1 speaker norms due to the prestige and global hegemony of English. The implications of using EME go beyond mere communication, since they also affect ways of thinking, seeing and practising the disciplines and this has been reflected in public controversies in Sweden. University leadership has to consider the pedagogical, linguistic, and cultural implications of internationalization and the impact of Englishization. This chapter offers a partial governance overview of EME in Swedish HEI and exemplifies EME interpretations with two case descriptions, where one focuses more on EME and the other more on the internationalization of the curriculum.
Modes and affordances for cultivating content faculty in their work to enhance learning through writing
This presentation offers a European example of how the landscape of English-medium instruction (E... more This presentation offers a European example of how the landscape of English-medium instruction (EMI) in combination with a European WID-like approach referred to as ‘integrating content and language in higher education’ (ICLHE) provide additional ways of working with faculty to cultivate their work with student writing development and enhanced learning. The paper draws on the one hand on our long-standing collaborative ICLHE work and research and, on the other hand, on research conducted in a sub-project of a three-university project investigating the alleged incidental effects on English professional literacy in EMI-education. The main focus of our ICLHE-endeavor is to promote student writing and learning with the help of genre-based writing instruction with an academic literacies approach. The main focus of the research project is proficiency in terms of vocabulary but in the sub-project we also study how writing assignments provide progression and scaffolding for learning and wri...
Collaborating to constructively align writing assignments on engineering master's programmes
PROFiLE is a three-university project investigating the alleged incidental effects on English pro... more PROFiLE is a three-university project investigating the alleged incidental effects on English professional literacy in EMI-education. This sub-project in PROFiLE encompasses mapping writing assignment and writing development in two international master’s programmes of engineering. The observational mapping stage evolved into an interventional study and material presented here stems from teachers at the programmes not being satisfied with texts written by students on courses on the programmes. This dissatisfaction prompted discussion with course managers and analysis of course material. These dialogues and analyses revealed that instructions for assignments were vague, did not highlight teacher expectations, and that crucial features were not obvious to the students. The challenges involved e.g. selection of content, articulating the understanding of core theory, comments about how results should be interpreted, and the presentation of results in figures and tables. Our results show ...
We offer an example from Chalmers university of technology of how the landscape of English-medium... more We offer an example from Chalmers university of technology of how the landscape of English-medium instruction (EMI) might enable or hinder enhanced learning of crucial aspects like a threshold concept (TC) in an educational programme. The study is part of a larger 3-year study focussed on observing EMI-learning contexts to investigate whether or not the hypothesis of incidental language proficiency holds. The main focus of this pilot-level sub-project is to study how talk about specific threshold concepts and the degree of content expertise are reflected in student conversations. Both quantative analysis and qualitative analysis by the disciplinary faculty suggest that the two threshold concepts studied are not mastered as well as the faculty have assumed. The pilot study has resulted in revision of course design and exaplanatory models.
Facilitating Writing in the Tension between the Quasi-Generic and the Multidisciplinary: Chalmers University of Technology
Editorial: EATAW2019: Selected papers from the 10th Conference of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, July, 2019
Journal of Academic Writing, 2020
Så kan studenter stöttas systematiskt i sitt skrivande
Universitetsläraren, 2021
Debattartike
Assessing and Developing Writing Skills (S. Göpferich & I. Neumann (Eds.)), 2016
English: This article examines business students' ability to technicalize in an L2 English writin... more English: This article examines business students' ability to technicalize in an L2 English writing task. Building up technicality in discourse is a key component of writing competence. Despite the importance of technicality for discipline-specific writing, so far little attention has been paid to identifying the usage patterns characteristic of this type of writing. The aim of this study is to investigate how undergraduate writers technicalize in elaborating on technical terms by means of defining, exemplifying and explaining. Drawing on a self-compiled specialized corpus, the study adopts a mixed-methods approach of computation and interpretation. It was found that technicalizing is a two-stage process, which consists of naming a term and subsequently embedding it in taxonomic relationships. The resulting chains of reference are taken to be indicative of field-specific uses in writing. The findings have important implications for developing business students' writing skills in view of the conceptual challenges they meet in current specific-purpose instruction. German: Gegenstand des vorliegenden Beitrags ist die Art und Weise, wie Studierende beim fachspezifischen Schreiben in ihrer L2 Englisch Technizität (technicality) herstellen. Hierzu werden diejenigen sprachlichen Verfahren ermittelt, die sie nutzen, um Fachtermini durch Definitionen, Beispiele und Erklärungen in den Text einzubetten. Die Fähigkeit, Technizität herzustellen, wird dabei als wesentliche Komponente der Kompetenz zum fachsprachlichen bzw. disziplinspezifischen Schreiben verstanden. Als Datengrundlage dient ein spezialisiertes Korpus von studentischen Texten aus vier Bereichen der internationalen Betriebswirtschaftslehre, die auf Englisch als L2 verfasst wurden. In einem Mixed-Methods-Ansatz werden korpuslinguistische mit interpretatorischen Verfahren kombiniert. Es zeigt sich, dass das Herstellen von Technizität als zweistufiger Prozess beschrieben werden kann, in dem ein Fachausdruck zunächst benannt und dann in eine taxonomische Beziehung eingebettet wird, wodurch Referenzketten entstehen, die für die untersuchten Texte charakteristisch sind. Aus den gewonnenen Erkenntnissen werden Schlussfolgerungen für die Didaktik der Schreibkompetenzförderung in wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Lehr-/Lernkontexten gezogen. Writing for specific purposes 21 Table 2: ABE corpus data Subcorpora Number of papers Type/token ratio (STTR) Number of running words (tokens) Business 103 41.22 236,917
Journal of Academic Writing, 2016
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 2019
Background: Research suggests that communication instruction is particularly effective when situa... more Background: Research suggests that communication instruction is particularly effective when situated in disciplinary courses. While studies show that this approach improves communication skills, less is known about how it enhances engineering learning. Literature Review: Prior work includes approaches to integrating communication into engineering, studies of writing-to-learn, and explorations of the role of communication in identity development. Research Question: How might the integration of communication instruction and practice into undergraduate engineering courses support engineering learning? Methodology: Because little is known about how communication instruction enhances engineering learning, we conducted an exploratory case study of an established integrated program in one European university. Participants included six engineering instructors, five engineering program heads, and six engineering students. Using interviews and focus groups, we explored the engineering-specific gains that faculty and students perceived from integrating communication assignments into engineering courses. Results: Our analysis yielded three salient areas of learning: 1. understanding disciplinary content, 2. selecting important information, and 3. justifying choices. While the first aligns tightly with writing-to-learn research, all three themes, in fact, bridge content learning and disciplinary literacy to enhance students' development as engineering professionals. Conclusions: Communication instruction can potentially support engineering learning through assignments that prompt students to select information in ways that are consistent with both disciplinary values and the needs of stakeholders, and make and justify decisions about approaches and solutions in ways that demonstrate sound engineering judgment. 3 Index Terms-Communication-in-the-disciplines, disciplinary discourse, engineering education, integrating content and language. Communication continues to lead lists of skills required of graduating engineers in the U.S., Europe, and indeed around the world, as students move from university into the workforce [1]-[3]. And increasingly, as educators recognize the importance of learning in context, communication instruction is taking place within engineering courses themselves [1], [4]. Such integration operates under a variety of terms. Within the U.S. it is termed Writing (or Communication) in the Disciplines (WID or CID), while in Europe, it is referred to as Integrating Content and Language (ICL) or Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). Because our study is a collaboration between U.S. and European researchers, we use "CID and ICL" when speaking generally, "CID" when referring to U.S. programs, and "ICL" when referring to European programs. In the U.S., the practice of embedding writing instruction in engineering courses dates back to the late 1800s, but by the middle of the 20 th century, much of this instruction had moved into technical writing service courses [1]. With the publication of Janet Emig's [5] seminal article, "Writing as a Mode of Learning," though, universities again began to embed writing in disciplinary courses, leading to the growth of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs [6]. In the 1990s, Writing in the Disciplines (WID) separated from WAC to focus on helping students learn the professional genres of their disciplines [6], and quickly expanded to include oral and visual communication-hence Communication in the Disciplines (CID). CID continues to grow across the U.S., including programs within engineering units such as those at Cornell
This chapter describes the Cross-Cultural Collaborations project, an international teaching partn... more This chapter describes the Cross-Cultural Collaborations project, an international teaching partnership and an evolving cross-cultural, collaborative, and multimodal learning environment whose participating members, scholar - teachers and students, collaborated across institutional, international, and disciplinary borders. The project involved an exchange where students at universities in Sweden and i the United States read, interpreted, and analyzed poetry collaboratively in cross-cultural groups. Central to the chapter are discussions of theoretical and methodological issues related to how informed design and use of virtual environments can make possible communication across the globe and enhanced learning experiences not easily facilitated in traditional environments.
Globalisation, internationalization, and widening participation are trends in higher education th... more Globalisation, internationalization, and widening participation are trends in higher education that require efforts to foster a culture of cooperation, reflexivity and learning among lecturers as well as among students. These central forces in education call for curriculum change to respond not only to workforce and student mobility but also to indirect effects like changing requirements for teamwork in the professional world and by extension also in education. These requirements might involve an emphasis on transdisciplinary teams, an increasing amount of information distribution, and greater cultural and disciplinary variety in student or co-worker profiles. One curricular approach exploring and problematizing this 'culture of cooperation' is Integrating Content and Language (ICL), where a disciplinary focus (content) is combined with a concurrent emphasis on the corresponding communication dimensions (language). [1] This special issue of ATD investigates understandings of Integrating Content and Language (ICL) through the exchange of knowledge and experience regarding collaboration between content (discipline-based) and language (communication / academic literacies) lecturers in higher education contexts. To date, it seems that this type of collaboration can be challenging to students and faculty alike for infrastructural, institutional, epistemological, disciplinary, rhetorical, and other reasons. The papers in this issue help us address some of these challenges and improve our understanding of ICL-collaboration. Not surprisingly, the ways of addressing the role of and need for language and communication education as ICL are many and varied. In this issue, we offer a closer look at places where specific communication-oriented interventions are integrated with disciplinary courses and taught collaboratively. This approach, however, calls for decisions on what is required of teachers of these courses and interventions and the manner in which they collaborate. What is the division of labor and how does the team make the most of the expertise in it? Findings from previous research conducted by the authors, a collaborative team of Swedish and South African researchers, suggest that the creation of productive institutional discursive spaces transgressing disciplinary boundaries has the potential to bridge the distance between communication specialists and disciplinary specialists (e.g. Jacobs, 2008; Wright, 2006; Räisänen, 2007). Along with related academic literacies research, we support a shift away from a 'prerequisites model', where 'communication skills' are conceptualized as
Enhancing the development of students’ disciplinary discourse and content learning in science and engineering through a focus on writing: a comparison between approaches at a Swedish and a UK university
An Erasmus funded collaboration between Chalmers University and Queen Mary University of London i... more An Erasmus funded collaboration between Chalmers University and Queen Mary University of London in 2016, involving a one‐week visit by Queen Mary disciplinary and Learning Development/Thinking Writing staff to Chalmers, enabled us to share practices and approaches in how we support the development of students’ disciplinary discourse in science and engineering. In Queen Mary, a funded project known as The Whole Programme Approach to Writing Development has been focusing on two degree programmes, Mechanical Engineering and Electronic Engineering and Computer Science. The objective of the project is to investigate writing development across the three years of the programmes and support innovations that build engineering discourse along a more coherent trajectory. At Chalmers, there is a long tradition of developing disciplinary discourse at the level of entire educational programmes. Given that many students start on a BSc‐programme and continue onto an associated MSc, the ‘programme’ ...
Coverage and development of academic vocabulary in assessment texts in English medium instruction
In many European universities, English is today used as a medium of instruction. One of the reaso... more In many European universities, English is today used as a medium of instruction. One of the reasons is that it is believed that using English as a medium of instruction (EMI) can develop students’ subject-specific knowledge of English. This knowledge is seen as an asset in the workplace and often presented as providing a competitive advantage supporting professional success. The design of many educational programmes shows that this knowledge is supposed to develop incidentally rather than through explicit instruction. Recent research has, however, offered reason to question the extent to which such incidental learning actually occurs (Pecorari et al., 2011, Shaw et al. 2010). In addition, little is known about what type of knowledge is developed in different educational contexts. The present paper reports on the preliminary findings of a project testing assumptions about the development of English-language skills in the EMI environment. This longitudinal study is following students ...
Using vocabulary as an indicator of development of academic literacy and academic success
[Paper presented at 8th Biennial Conference of the European Association for the Teaching of Acade... more [Paper presented at 8th Biennial Conference of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW), Tallinn, June 15-17, 2015] In many university contexts around the world, students’ mastery of English academic vocabulary is considered necessary if they are to be properly socialized into academic discourse, and therefore succeed in their academic endeavors. This study is part of the PROFiLE-project (a project concerned with English Medium Instruction and the development of academic literacies) and is among the first to draw on the new Academic Vocabulary List (Gardner & Davis 2013) to conduct empirical research regarding students’ knowledge of academic vocabulary. Using a 750,000-word corpus of written course work from students’ first and second year of study in MSc programs in four different disciplines, and by relying on a methodology of lexical profiling, we investigate students’ productive knowledge of academic vocabulary. Three research questions provide direction for the study and address some widespread assumptions regarding academic words from the research literature: (i) How much and what type of academic vocabulary do MSc students use when writing in English during their first and second year of study? (ii) Is there a positive development of students’ productive knowledge over time such that second year written assignments contain more academic vocabulary, and/or academic vocabulary of a different kind? (iii) What does measuring students’ knowledge of academic vocabulary actually tell us about their academic literacy? The results have implications for teachers of academic writing and for teachers and administrators in English Medium Instruction.
European Journal of Physics, 2021
The promotion of high-quality written communication in the disciplines is an important learning o... more The promotion of high-quality written communication in the disciplines is an important learning outcome in higher education. Given the time invested by students and teachers alike, it is crucial that writing assignments also promote engagement and content learning. But is it worth the time for university teachers to invest in such ‘writing-to-learn’ activityes? We find that it can be, and present an improved design for an experimental lab-report writing assignment in an English medium instruction environment, where English is an additional language. Our context is assignment development for formative assessment in master’s-level physics, but the method is broadly applicable within the science-technology-engineering-math disciplines. Our first experience with the assignment resulted in substandard lab reports, suggesting insufficient subject understanding and prompting this assignment design. We therefore focused on communicating the alignment of aims, learning objectives, instructio...
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Papers by Magnus Gustafsson