Refining and developing tools to support academic, disciplinary, and professional communication

The proposed project builds on fifteen years of research in which I investigated academic writing at CMUQ through initial SEED funding and two major QNRF funded projects. The initial project documented the writing experiences and development of the class of 2013 at CMUQ over their four years of undergraduate study. This study highlighted the need to make writing expectations more explicit for students through interdisciplinary collaborations between writing specialists and disciplinary faculty. To address this need, my research team and I have worked with faculty in history, design, information systems, and organizational behavior and have developed a comprehensive set of tools to explicitly scaffold analytical and argumentative writing. While these tools have proven effective in improving students’ writing in various disciplines and in first-year writing, there remains a clear need to refine the existent tools and develop new tools to further support academic, disciplinary, and professional writing as well as oral communication. Using systemic functional linguistics and genre-based pedagogy, the proposed project aims to refine and develop tools to help students write consistent and compelling arguments, cohesive and coherent paragraphs, and written and oral summaries of research to non-expert audiences. These tools aim to enhance teaching and learning in higher education locally and globally by documenting the development of the tools and measuring student uptake and development.