Genre, habitus and student´s academic writing

Research project P 14720 Genre, habitus and students` academic writing. Helmut GRUBER 27.11.2000 Our project aims at an analysis of students` writing at Austrian universities in order o put up a catalogue of competencies and deficits in students` writing, which can be used as basis for a program which helps students improving their writing skills. Therefore we will investigate the discursive features of seminar papers as well as professional texts in two social science disciplines at two departments of two universities (which also differ with respect to organisational aspects). These data will be supplemented by interviews with students and lecturers as well as by participant observation protocols from two seminar classes. This multi-variate data set allows to contextualise students` academic writing with regard to institutional as well as attitudinal aspects and represents an empirical progress in German academic Writing research as no study so far considered all these linguistic and contextual aspects. In our theoretical framework we combine Bourdieu`s theory of practice (Bourdieu, 1977) with Fairclough`s discourse theory (1992), viewing discursive orders as constitutive parts of the habitus in a certain academic field. This means that knowing the appropriate genres, styles, and activity types and their interrelations in a certain academic field and applying this knowledge aptly contributes to the symbolic capital a person may acquire in the field. This interrelationship between field, habitus, and symbolic capital on the one hand and discourses and discursive orders (with their constitutive parts) on the other hand leads to the following research questions of the project: * In which respect(s) does the habitus differ between different fields? * How and to which extend do staff members help students in developing an appropriate academic habitus? * To which extent do students acquire the habitus in the respective fields of their studies`? * How do genre conventions in different academic fields reflect the differences in habitus in different fields? * To which extent are students aware of these conventions`? * How do they apply these genre conventions when they actually write a text (i.e. to which extent to their texts show the genre conventions of their field of study)? * Which material and social practices (e.g. use and impact of computers; team work vs. single authorship) is the process of students` text production associated with? * How may students be helped in developing an awareness of the demands they have to meet and in coping with these demands? As we combine different sets of data in our analysis, employing a multi- method analytic approach, our results will assure that the supportive measures we will propose will not only be based on the actual deficits and competencies of student writers, but that these measures will also be in agreement with students` and staff members` wishes and self perceptions as well as with situational and institutional demands.

In this study Austrian university students` writing practices in three social science disciplines (social history, business studies, business psychology) were investigated. In order to do this, textual analyses were combined with interview analyses and participant observation of three courses. To account for our results we developed a text model which differentiates between "text types" (abstract units on a rather general level) which are mainly influenced by the social and institutional purposes they serve and "genres" which are (semiotically enriched) realisations of text types in certain institutional and social contexts. Text types and genres are related to field specific habitus of persons insofar as the knowledge which text types and genres are appropriate for which kind of task in a field are relevant symbolic capitals. One general goal of the project was to investigate if students already develop a discipline specific habitus and hence if they produce texts which realise discipline specific genres. A further major goal was to investigate if and which linguistic features of a seminar paper correlate with the grade it receives. Quantitative and qualitative text analyses of all linguistic characteristics which were analysed show that students in the three seminars produce different genres which, however, belong to one abstract text type which we coined "academic qualification text". This text type is located at the intersection of two social fields, namely the field of academia and the field of the university respectively (this differentiation follows Bourdieu`s work on the "homo academicus"). Our results show that students are aware of this doubled institutional purpose of the text type in differing, yet systematically varying ways. Whereas social history students mainly orient towards the academic purpose of a seminar paper and thus display the habitus of apprentice scholars, management students and most of the business psychology students orient towards the assessment character of the texts they produce and thus display a "student habitus". The relationship between linguistic features of the texts and the grades the papers received is not straight forward. Most linguistic features of the micro-textual level do not show any correlation with the grades the papers received. Many features of the meso- and macro- textual level, however, do show rather systematic correlations with grades. The study has a wide potential for application oriented research and practice. The results of both text and interview analyses can be used to design and plan support for students` writing in different forms (workshops, support for instructors to help their students with writing issues, individual trainings).