Supporting student writers in the university of the 21st century

Opening address by Mary Lea from the UKCLE seminar on legal literacy held on 10 March 2005. Mary is a Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University. She has experience of research and practice in student writing in a range of contexts and is the co-author of two guides to student writing.

Mary’s presentation examined issues of student writing against the backdrop of ongoing change in UK higher education. She began with some illustrations from the higher education press associated with a particular view of student writing and learning, what has become known as a ‘deficit model’. This is based on the assumption that problems associated with learning are, basically, due to a lack in the student, who arrives at university ill equipped with the necessary skills for study.

The remedy for such ‘problems’ is either to require schools to prepare students more effectively, or to provide remedial study ‘clinics’ within the university itself, rather than to consider the issue as one to be addressed through mainstream subject-based teaching. This presentation provided an alternative view. Mary examined the implications of the changing nature of higher education for present day approaches to teaching and learning and discussed this in relation to student writing. Having set the scene, the presentation moved on to explore a research-based approach to understanding student writing, and indeed academic writing more generally, based on the work of Lea & Street (1998), Lea & Stierer (2000), Lillis (2001) and Ivanic (1997) amongst others.

Mary outlined and discussed three models developed from research findings in diverse university contexts. Whilst acknowledging that all three models are important in terms of understanding and supporting student writing, she privileged that of ‘academic literacies’, which recognises that writing is a contextualised social and cultural practice. She argued that student texts cannot be reduced to the surface features of language form, or be understood through general statements about what writing in a particular discipline, for example law, entails. She suggested that writing is concerned with issues of meaning making. Written language is not merely an empty vessel carrying along disciplinary content; it is through the very act of writing that the discipline itself is constructed, and there is maybe no better illustration of this than in a subject such as law, where language is evidently so powerful. Students write themselves into the discipline in particular ways in their assignments, and writing for assessment is not merely about replicating a given body of disciplinary content.

The requirements for writing vary not just between subjects, for example between history and law, but between university departments, individual tutors and specific assignments. Little wonder, then, that students struggle with their writing in trying to work out the ‘ground rules’ of what is involved in any particular context. Mary considered what relevance this research might have for law lecturers trying to make sense of their students’ assignments, and in so doing, focused on the gaps that can occur between tutors’ and students’ expectations of the task in hand. The final part of the presentation explored some recommendations for practice and ways of working with students on their writing, including some reference to resources that academics might find useful in this context (Creme & Lea, 2003, Coffin et al, 2003).

References and further reading

• Creme P and Lea M (2003) Writing at university: a guide for students (2nd edition) Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill
• Coffin C, Curry M, Goodman S, Hewings A, Lillis T and Swann J (2003) Teaching academic writing London & New York: Routledge
• Ivanic R (1997) Writing and identity: the discoursal construction of identity in academic writing Amsterdam: John Benjamins
• Lea M and Stierer B (eds) (2000) Student writing in higher education: new contexts Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education/Open University Press
• Lea M and Street B (1998) ‘Student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach’ Studies in Higher Education 23(2): 157-172
• Lillis T (2001) Student writing: access, regulation and desire London: Routledge

Last Modified: 30 June 2010