The interaction of discipline and culture in academic writing

Work in contrastive rhetoric has often sought to examine the impact of culturally-based writing conventions on text production and has outlined cultural differences in texts in different languages. At the same time. the study of specialised languages has often claimed a degree of uniformity in text construction both at the level of culture and at the level of the discipline. It appears however that approaches which consider just culture or just discipline miss part of the picture. This paper argues that considerations of discipline and culture are. complex and interrelated and that this complexity and interrelationship can be seen at several different levels in specialised academic texts.

Ball point pen writing two signatures SFX

Ball Point Pen Writing Two Signatures SFX.

Punctuation and spelling in learners' writing

Despite their apparent straightforwardness, certain features of language seem almost less teachable. The learners’ writing is often full of minor errors on surface features that make it hard for the reader to make sense of it, let alone appreciate its content. These language features are taught to students of English during their first two years of education at university. However, whether these courses accomplish that goal to an acceptable point is questionable.

The present study focuses on two such aspects of writing, punctuation and spelling, in the writing of advanced level students at an Iranian University. For this purpose, three different subject groups are chosen from among those who have passed Grammar and Writing I, Grammar and Writing II, and Advanced Writing. Using a recognition-production (henceforth R-P) and a composition task, the performance of these groups is compared in various aspects of punctuation. For the measurement of spelling, a descriptive approach is taken based on the misspellings observed in the students' compositions. These errors are classified according to their assumed causes, and frequency counts are performed for the words of each category. The results of the punctuation and spelling tasks are compared across test items, subject groups and task types, using various statistical means. Overall, it was found that the courses mentioned above did not make much contribution to the development of the students’writing in terms of spelling and punctuation.

Language, experience and professional learning (what Walter Benjamin can teach us)

This essay raises questions about how language educators might construct and further develop their epistemology of practice in and through the situations in which they work from day to day. The occasion for this paper is our work as guest editors of a special issue of L-1: Educational Studies in Language and Literature, when we invited L1 teachers to reflect on the role that language plays in their professional learning, whether it be in the form of conversations with peers, reflective writing, or by other means. We begin this essay by locating our reflections within our current policy context, namely the standards-based reforms that have come to dominate educational thinking around the world, offering a brief critique of the values and attitudes embedded within them. We then outline a philosophical framework as an alternative to the world-view reflected by such reforms, focusing specifically on the work of Walter Benjamin. In the final sections, we review our work as guest editors of the special issue of L-1, reflecting on what we have learned from the papers we have assembled for this issue, and locating our learning within the philosophical framework that we have drawn from Benjamin. We argue that it is timely for language educators to articulate the assumptions that inhere within their work, in contradistinction to the common sense embedded in standards. Thus we might begin to reconceptualise the relation between language, experience and professional learning in opposition to the hegemony of standards.

Whither Australian Hill-Station creation : re-writing Adelaide Hills narratives about the architectural imperatives that crafted their establishment

This paper explores the historiography of the Adelaide Hills and offers a new perspective as to the reasons behind hill-station residence constructions that crafted this distinct cultural and designed landscape. Australian hill-station communities, and their major architectural edifices, were extensively established in two periods: the 1870s-1890s and the 1920s-1930s. Sites in the Darling Ranges, Adelaide Hills, Macedon and Dandenong Ranges, Blue Mountains and the Tamborine Mountains were favoured summer retreats for both the new and established wealthy families, who erected grand residences that have come to be celebrated in recent heritage assessments, and architectural and social histories of these environments. The majority of these studies and discourses have echoed an agenda that celebrates the architectural significance and personal associations of these structures, and thereupon have made a range of assumptions about the societal rationale for their establishment, construction and associated landscape plantings.

Taking examples from the Adelaide Hills, this paper argues that both architectural and social historians have ‘mistakenly’ concluded that the rationale behind these hill-station residences was based primarily on the provision of a ‘pleasant’ summer that echo the British Raj hill-stations. Further, it is argued that this conclusion constitutes a myth, or fabulation, about South Australian (SA) design, heritage and social histories, as many of these owners consciously sought out and selected hill-station allotments on the basis of their horticultural properties and possibilities, and that house-siting and construction were actually subservient to these imperatives.

Radical practice? Writing 'beyond' system

Might writing be at once the context or system that restricts and forms us but also, in some instances, the means to evade or transform this very system? The question posed in the call for papers for this conference outlines the very grounds upon which the writing subject may be seen as negotiating questions posed by artistic practice and creative research. Here these are formulated around ‘encounters’ between seemingly autonomous or pre-determined realms: between subjects and objects, between knowing and being, between aesthetic systems however defined. This view accepts the fragmentary definitional world of capitalist social relations. What I suggest is that the kind of subject that is at stake in creative practice and research has much in common with a kind of radical subjectivity. What I suggest is that writing is a practice that can be seen through the lens of Karl Marx’s notion of purposeful activity. Writing, in other words, is a critical/creative practice founding a radical view of subjectivity that attempts to overcome the dualism of subject and object via the category of human practice. Against an individual expressivist paradigm, or modes of thought that envision writing (and language) objectively, this might be called radical practice in that writing is a critical/creative practice: critical in that it is against what exists, and creative in that it seeks to move beyond it.

My place: exploring children's place-related identities through reading and writing

This paper considers how children perceive and represent their placed-related identities through reading and writing. It reports on the findings of an 18-month interdisciplinary project, based at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, which aimed to consider children’s place-related identities through their engage- ment with, and creation of, texts. This paper will discuss the project, its interdisciplinary theoretical framework, and the empirical research we conducted with two classes in primary schools in Eastern England. A key text used in our research was My Place by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins. Drawing on our interdisciplinary theoretical framework, particularly Doreen Massey’s notion of place as a bundle of trajectories, and Louise Rosenblatt’s notion of the transaction between the reader and the text, this paper will examine pages from My Place, children talking about how this text connects with them, children talking about their sense of place, and maps and writing the children produced based on their place.