International Student Adaptation to Academic Writing in Higher Education [1 ed.] 9781443863766, 9781443848336

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International Student Adaptation to Academic Writing in Higher Education

International Student Adaptation to Academic Writing in Higher Education

By

Ly Thi Tran

International Student Adaptation to Academic Writing in Higher Education, by Ly Thi Tran This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Ly Thi Tran All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4833-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4833-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures............................................................................................ vii List of Tables ............................................................................................ viii Preface ........................................................................................................ ix Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Introduction Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 17 International Students and Distinctive Cultural Writing Traditions Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 35 Different Approaches to ESL Academic Writing in Higher Education Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 44 International Students’ Writing within the Institutional Context Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 60 The Trans-disciplinary Framework for Conceptualising International Students’ Academic Writing Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 81 Different Forms of Adaptation to Academic Writing Practices Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 96 Displaying Critical Thinking in Academic Writing Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 113 Negotiating the Communal Approach to Constructing Knowledge

vi

Table of Contents

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 124 Lecturers’ Perspectives on International Student Adaptation Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 143 Conclusion: The Dialogical Pedagogic Model for Mutual Adaptation Bibliography ............................................................................................ 152 Index ........................................................................................................ 166

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 5.1: Lillis' framework Figure 5.2: The modified version of Lillis' framework Figure 5.3: An integrated framework for interpreting students' academic writing practices and lecturers' views Figure 10.1: The dialogical pedagogic model for mutual adaptation

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.1: Lecturer profile Table 1.2: Student profile Table 1.3: Summary of data collected

PREFACE

International Student Adaptation to Academic Writing in Higher Education has been nurtured by a doctoral study at the University of Melbourne, Australia. My first and foremost thanks go to Sophie Arkoudis for her sustained support and wisdom, which have been invaluable for me throughout the course of this study as well as my research tenure. I am deeply indebted to Sophie for her incisive reading, useful discussions and critical comments on various drafts of this work. My sincere thanks also go to Joseph Lo Bianco for his ongoing encouragement and his insightful comments on this research I would like to express my deep gratitude to the students and academics who volunteered to participate in this research. They shared with me their interesting experiences and were willing to work flexibly with me. I have learnt enormously from the conversations with them and have been changed by my encounter with their intriguing stories! I sincerely thank Simon Marginson for being inspiring in research on international education. Simon generously supports my research and offers most valuable feedback on my work. Chris Nyland always encourages me to explore new areas of research and provides brilliant comments on my ideas. Helen Forbes-Mewett is a valuable friend and colleague who has shared with me the research journey over the past 5 years. I am grateful to my colleagues at RMIT University, Berenice Nyland, Rachel Patrick, Ian Robertson, Chris Ziguras and Lyn Hoare for stimulating intellectual conversations and enormous support. My thanks are to many lecturers and friends at the University of Melbourne including Martin Davies and Ana Jones for their valuable support in many ways. I am thankful to my friends Hiep Pham, Le Truong, Hoai Phuong, Thanh Ha, Ngoc Ton, Huong Ton, Oanh Duong, Chamnong Kaewpet, Kim Anh, Thanh Truc, Nhai Nguyen and Mai Hoa Nguyen for their help at different times and in numerous ways. To my Parents, I am deeply indebted for their emotional nourishment, unconditional love and support for me. To my sisters, brothers, relatives and friends in Vietnam, who have been always beside me and have confidence in what I am pursuing: my special thanks. To my children, Beam and Bӕng, who were born during this endeavour and have gone through the first years of your life along with this research

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Preface

and this book: Your giggles have brightened my life and my research journey - Ḿ yêu con! To my husband, my heartfelt thanks are for his love, tolerance, understanding, constant support and encouragement. As with any book drawing on a very wide range of sources, I have relied on many authors, papers, articles, events, broadcasts, observations and conversations. I am thankful to all these authorities. I also wish to thank the staff at Cambridge Scholars Publishing, especially Carol Koulikourdi and Amanda Millar, for their professionalism, proofreading and editing. Earlier and different drafts of two chapters were published as follows. Different forms of adaptation to academic writing practices (Chapter 6): Tran, L. T. (2011). Committed, face-value, hybrid or mutual adaptation? The experiences of international students in higher education. Educational Review, 63(1), 79-94. Negotiating the communal approach to constructing knowledge (Chapter 8): Tran, L. T. (2006). Different shades of the collective way of thinking: Vietnamese and Chinese international students' reflection on academic writing. Journal of Asia TEFL, 3(3), 121-141. I acknowledge with deep thanks to the Australian Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations for the Endeavour International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS) and the University of Melbourne for the Melbourne International Research Scholarship (MIRS), which enabled me to undertake this research.

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

The Setting Within the current phase of neo-liberal globalisation and internationalisation of higher education, English medium institutions have developed strategic policies which aim to increase the proportion of international students. Currently there are more than 4.3 million mobile students globally. 1 In Australia the number of international student enrolments is around 497,458.2 The sustainability of the education export sector depends largely on the extent to which international students’ diverse needs are being adequately addressed by education providers and the country of education. Given the competition amongst host countries of international students on the education export market, the knowledge about effective approaches to addressing the learning needs and expectations of international students is an important asset to education providers and the international education sector. More importantly, this knowledge is integral to education providers’ responsibility to fulfil their ethical commitment in ensuring adequate support and high quality education be provided for international students. Effectively catering for the needs of international students is imperative partly because of the growing dependence of host institutions on international students’ tuition fees, which is largely driven by the decrease in real funding from the federal government. This is more critical given the fact that potential international students have an increasing number of options for their higher education destinations. Major competitors to the current English speaking countries’ share of international student market are coming from some Asian countries such as Singapore, Malaysia and Japan. This is evidenced in the campaigns of these countries to optimise their policies of internationalising higher education and become competitive Asian education providers in attracting 1 2

OECD, 2013. AEI, 2012.

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Chapter One

international students, who may currently see English speaking countries as their best option.3 On top of this, other Asian countries such as China and South Korea have also focused more on developing their own higher education sector, which has the potential to stem the flow of students from these countries seeking to study overseas. A more and more competitive worldwide market is therefore developing and Australian tertiary education institutions need to understand where they are now and how best to respond to those challenges. Various aspects of international students’ needs and experiences have been explored in the literature over the past couple of decades. These include international students' learning and communication styles, 4 the impacts of students' prior literacy practices on their academic performance, their lived experiences and adaptation to the host university, 5 their identity6 and their security needs.7 Challenges facing international students in higher education in English-speaking countries have often been assumed to be largely related to students’ language proficiency and cultural differences.8 International students have been viewed mainly from a deficit frame. This frame tends to locate international students’ challenges as emerging exclusively from their cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Within this frame, their different ways of constructing knowledge are often seen problematic in the English-medium institutional context. Yet, international students’ agency, their adaptive capacity and their transformative power are not adequately explored in relevant research. Furthermore, little has been documented about what is actually involved in the process or processes that these students must undergo to adapt to the academic culture of the disciplines they are studying. Academic writing is a central practice in most English-medium higher education institutions. It is at the heart of students’ academic success because the assessment of students’ performance in higher education is largely based on academic writing. However, the specific requirements for academic writing vary in different disciplines and different higher education institutions. Student writing in higher education often involves

3

Tran, 2011; Arkoudis & Tran, 2007. Cownie & Addison, 1996; Hellsten & Prescott, 2004; Holmes, 2004; Wong, 2004; Kettle & Luke, 2012; Bailey, 2012. 5 Russell et al., 2010; McMahon, 2011; Tran, 2012. 6 Koehne, 2005; Fincher, 2011; Kuo, 2012. 7 Marginson et al., 2010; Marginson, 2012. 8 Samuelowicz, 1987; Ballard & Clanchy, 1995; Robertson et al., 2000; Lacina, 2002; Holmes, 2004; Parks & Raymond, 2004; Sawir, 2005; Andrade, 2006. 4

Introduction

3

the navigation of “hidden features” of academic writing, 9 a variety of rhetoric styles and personal preferences. International ESL students’ views and experiences in writing academic texts in English-medium universities have been a common theme across various studies.10 The focus of a great deal of research has mainly been on the impact of ethnic values on international students’ writing and their struggles to accommodate the dominant conventions of academic writing in English-medium institutions. 11 In fact, the issues surrounding English as a Second Language (ESL) students’ interaction with their disciplinary writing in an international and intercultural environment tend to be dynamic, multidimensional, wide-ranging and subtle. They depend on a host of aspects such as the students’ personal preferences and identity,12 cultural values and approaches to knowledge,13 lecturers' beliefs, power relationship and the disciplinary assumptions of what counts as knowledge and good writing. 14 However, there has been an insufficiency of research that investigates ESL students’ processes in exercising their personal agency, negotiating power relationships and mediating their academic writing in their discipline of study, which is conceptualised as a specific social context. This book responds to this gap in the literature on international education.

International student adaptation to academic writing International Student Adaptation to Academic Writing analyses how international students negotiate academic writing from an insider, or an emic perspective by giving international students the opportunity to talk about their own experiences in adapting to academic writing practices in higher education. By explicating and giving voice to student experience, this book offers insights into the hidden intentions influencing their decisions in constructing knowledge and their potential choices in meaning making. Drawing on case studies with international students from China and Vietnam and lecturers in Australian higher education, the book works through many unresolved issues related to international students’ cultural, linguistic, intellectual and personal negotiations. The book also 9

Street, 2009. Basturkmen & Lewis, 2002; Canagarajah, 2006; Fox, 1994; Green, 2007; Ridley, 2004; Wang, 2011; Bailey, 2012. 11 Fox, 1994; Basturkmen & Lewis, 2002; Phan, 2011. 12 Ivanic, 1997; Lillis, 2001. 13 Connor, 1996; Fox, 1994, Green, 2007. 14 Lea & Street, 2000; Lea & Stierer; Street, 2009. 10

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Chapter One

reveals the complexities of international students’ adaptation to academic writing through focusing on critical aspects including displaying critical thinking, communicating ideas in academic writing and transforming learning through negotiating academic writing.

Forms of adaptation The book introduces new concepts that capture different patterns of international students’ adaptation in higher education. These include surface adaptation, committed adaptation, reverse adaptation and hybrid adaptation. Committed adaptation occurs when students exercise personal agency and deliberately position themselves as wishing to accommodate what is required of them. In this case, the students value the new ways of constructing knowledge to which they have adapted and feel positive about their shift. Surface adaptation refers to the surface changes the students make in order to enable them to gain access to the conventions, which prevail in their academic discipline. Students who overall enact surface adaptation may exercise agency by disguising their personal beliefs about what academic writing should be and resort to accommodating only as a coping strategy. In this case, students often experience tension between what they personally value, which they often keep invisible in their writing, and their public response to the requirements of their discipline. Students may also display surface adaptation when they do not feel comfortable or positive about responding to what they think they are expected to write. Some students engage in hybrid adaptation through their attempts to create a hybrid space for meaning making. Within this form of adaptation, students engage critically and creatively with the disciplinary requirements and treat their first language and culture as a resource rather than a problem. Their mediation of academic writing is embedded in their attempts to incorporate intentionally and strategically their understandings of the academic expectations in the host institution while still retaining some of their personal preferences rather than exclusively following the academic requirements. Hybrid adaptation differs from the other two forms of adaptation in that within this form, students attempt to integrate the ways of writing they personally find meaningful into their academic writing. Reverse adaptation occurs when students’ interaction with the disciplinary convention in the host institution has led to a change in their initial habit of writing in their mother tongue. Within this case, students move towards internalising the preferred approach in their discipline as part of their writing style.

Introduction

5

Drawing on these new concepts of adaptation, International Student Adaptation to Academic Writing in Higher Education provides readers with new and deeper insights into the complex nature of international students’ adjustment to host institutions. The students’ process of adaptation arises from their intrinsic motivations to be successful in their courses and to participate in their disciplinary community. However, where they differ is in their internal negotiation related to what they really value amongst the writing requirements and the writing patterns they adopt in constructing their texts. The book takes a critical stance on contemporary views of international students. It shows that international students’ journeys of adaptation to academic practices appear to be much more complex than what is often described in the current literature as being largely related to language and cultural factors. Through examining how international students mediate between different approaches to collective thinking and different patterns of displaying critical thinking in their written assignments, the book reveals that international students’ negotiation of academic writing involves a complex web of factors. But these appear to be unrecognised on the surface of their writing. The students’ journeys of adaptation illustrate the complexities of how cultural norms are meditated and reproduced in contested institutional discourse, which involves shifting relations of power and the complex web of international student subjectivity. Thus, although trends in their cultural writing traditions need to be acknowledged, placing too much emphasis on them as the only explanation for international students’ writing can easily lead to ethnic or cultural stereotyping. This is important because national culture does not play a dominant role but instead was found to be inflected in these individual students’ writing and interact with other factors that shape their writing. The book focuses on different forms of adaptation emerging from the ways international students exercise personal agency and mediate between disciplinary writing practices, cultural writing norms and personal desires in meaning making. In this book, students’ agency is understood in light of activity theory,15 which draws on Vygotsky’s theory on mediated learning in the zone of proximal development. Agency is defined as the intentional action of students as they position themselves in relation to academic expectations in the host institution. Also, students’ mediation of meaning is referred to as the process of actively negotiating imposed positionings from their disciplinary requirements and making choices about ways to construct meaning. 15

Lantolf, 2002.

Chapter One

6

The underlying objective of International Student Adaptation to Academic Writing in Higher Education is to challenge the way international students are viewed from the problem-focused vantage. It shows that international students self-position as embracing an aspiration to transform themselves and actually undergo significant moves throughout their engagement in higher education. The process of negotiating academic writing represents a dynamic interplay between challenges and transformative power: the removal from the comfort zones and the need to overcome challenges and navigate a plurality of academic demands actually create spaces for international students to undergo fundamental personal as well as intellectual changes. It is the challenging and complex nature of the adaptation to higher education that enables international students to mediate the shifting borders, discover their potentials and experience movements in their perspectives.16 This process also provides the springboard for the emergence of newly-constructed self of international students. The book shows that international students are capable to reflect on their own personal experiences, appreciate the need for change and plot new strategies to transform themselves personally and academically.

Reciprocal adaptation The study reported in this book exposes a number of mismatches in the display of disciplinary knowledge among the lecturers themselves and between the lecturers and international students. It reveals that the inconsistency and subtlety of the lecturers’ explanations of the academic expectations makes it more challenging for international students to make sense of what is required of them in specific disciplines. Yet, in the relevant literature, what challenges international students is often attributed to such factors as English language, study skills and cultural norms, which arise from international students themselves. The lecturers in this research position themselves as being aware of the needs of their international students, yet struggle with how to best assist them with their work. The main strategies that the lecturers use seem to focus mainly on what international students should be demonstrating in their academic writing, but not on how international students can actually develop these skills. Some lecturers appear to struggle with explaining what “good academic writing” involves within their discipline. Also there appears to be little discussion with their colleagues that may lead to developing 16

Tran, 2012.

Introduction

7

shared understandings around this. The book also discusses how international student’s agency impacts on lecturers’ positioning of their views, which leads to the transformations in their pedagogic practices. So far the responsibility of adaptation within academic faculties that host international students has been commonly placed on international students. Yet reciprocal adaptation between international students and lecturers is indeed crucial for the effective pedagogic practices that cater for international students and for the sustainable development of international education. Based on extracts from interviews with both international students and lecturers, the book reveals that reciprocal adaptation is a complex process that requires lecturers to mediate between their disciplinary traditions and the knowledge and skills that international students bring to the educational context. It also requires the commitment of the lecturers to open up the learning space in which students’ different ways of constructing knowledge can be recognised and considered as an opportunity for learning rather than a disadvantage or limitation. This book presents a dialogical pedagogic model for reciprocal adaptation that can be developed between international students and lecturers rather than the onus being on exclusive adaptation from international students. The model presented in this book offers concrete steps towards developing mutual relationships and changes of international students and staff to each other within the overarching institutional realities of the university. Such a dialogical model is viewed as an essential tool to enhance the education of international students in this increasingly internationalised environment. The book thus contributes to the current debate on the development of culturally responsive practices and internationalised curriculum that facilitate the emergence of valuable and shifting discourses in higher education where diverse dimensions of knowledge are incorporated and access to academic discourses is opened up in flexible ways.

A trans-disciplinary framework A distinctive contribution of this book is the development of a transdisciplinary framework, which draws on a modified version of Lillis’ heuristic of talk around text 17 and positioning theory 18 for interpreting international students’ and lecturers’ perspectives within the institutional structure. The framework developed in this book enables an exploration of 17 18

Lillis, 2001. Harré & van Langenhove, 1999.

8

Chapter One

not only the reasons underpinning international students’ specific ways of writing but also their potential choices in constructing institutional knowledge, which Lillis refers to as “what the individual student-writers might want to mean in a transformed socio-discursive space”. 19 Talk around text focuses on connecting students' specific instances of writing to their intentions and potential choices in meaning making, thereby revealing how they negotiate different ways of constructing knowledge. Positioning theory complements talk around text and offers an analytical tool to examine students' agency and personal transformations through their negotiation of the power relations and the imposed positionings in their disciplines. Positioning theory also provides space to interpret the lecturers' views on students' writing practices. Merging together, talk around text and positioning theory can offer an interpretive framework to help explore the key aspects which the study reported in this book aims to capture. This book demonstrates the value of employing such an analytical model for investigating the broader range of students in participating in institutional practices in higher education. Such a conceptual framework is likely to be applied in different settings in the emerging field of scholarship and research on international students’ diverse need, adaptation process and international pedagogies.

International students and institutional practices An emergent stream of literature has problematised the common stereotypes about the cultural learning styles and experiences of Asian students. 20 Highlighted in these studies is the need to avoid simply attributing learning styles to cultural backgrounds. Instead, these studies suggest the significance of exploring more adequately the complexities in students' processes of unpacking, interpreting and adapting to various disciplinary practices. The research on which this book draws attempts to contribute to this growing area of knowledge. This research acknowledges that international students bring distinctive cultural resources and literacy backgrounds with them into their courses in Australia. It also highlights the complex factors which affect how international students exercise personal agency in mediating academic writing and gaining access to their disciplinary discourse. By focusing on the “personal agency” of international students, the study offers a change from the dominant 19

Lillis, 2001, 51. For example, Volet & Renshaw, 1996; Biggs, 1997; Rizvi, 2000; Doherty & Singh, 2005; Doherty & Singh, 2005a; Jones, 2005; Kettle, 2005; Koehne, 2005. 20

Introduction

9

approaches on “problems”, plagiarism and policing of standards often circulating about international students. It is significant to acknowledge the contested nature of terms such as “Asian”; “Western”, “Oriental”. In using the term “Asian students”, I am not essentialising students from different Asian countries as a homogenous entity. In the literature, however, this term is in general use. As a matter of convenience, therefore, I will use the term with the acknowledgement of the diversity and variety of Asian students encompassed by this descriptor. The terms “Western way”, “Asian style” and “Oriental style” have been used quite often by both students and lecturers involved in this study. These terms have been presented in the study as the participants have said them. Also, the term “international students” is used in this book to refer to students who are pursuing a degree in a foreign country but are not citizens or permanent residents of that country. As this research is concerned with international students undertaking their Masters by coursework, disciplinary writing is used to refer to the course assignment writing for coursework students in a specific discipline. A discourse which locates Asian international students’ challenges as emerging from language and cultural differences largely influences the current teaching and learning practices of Australian higher education. This discourse determines preferred methods of learning and values that Asian students may bring with them into Australian institutions. Such a way of positioning international students and their needs does not seem to match with the “wider context of changing cultural traditions and the accelerating mutual entanglements of globalising times”. 21 Furthermore, within the current global world, relying too much on the link between cultural factors and images of Asian students may limit the possibility of exploring the complexities, variables as well as invisible aspects in international students’ processes of participation in institutional practices. In particular, this discourse has led to various attempts from universities to provide support services for international students which focus predominantly on language and learning skills to help them transit to the new environment. Thus, this practice, based as it is on changing international students to fit the environment, does not appear to take into account the transformative capacity of international students and to respond adequately to the diverse needs of international students, which may go beyond aspects of language and learning skills. A growing focus of the research literature is concerned with the need to challenge the mono-cultural assumptions in teaching practices and to explore the role of “authentic Western” pedagogy in English-speaking 21

Ang, 2001, 87, cited in Doherty & Singh, 2005, 2.

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Chapter One

institutions.22 According to Vandermensbrugghe, there seems to be a trend to spread the education practices of “Western Anglo-Saxon countries” (mainly the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia) since internationalisation is fostered widely in these countries.23 Hellsten and Prescott argue for inclusive practice and the accommodation of diversity in the process of internationalising university curricular.24 Based on a study of foundation programs for Asian international students, Doherty and Singh critique the current internationalised curriculum, which tends to privilege the “purity” of “Western” pedagogy. They argue that “these retrospective discourses work to create/reassert a cultural script of an authentic, pure and essential pedagogical tradition, in active denial and suppression of any emerging hybridity”. 25 Although Doherty and Singh imply that such practices seem to treat international students as “Other”, their study does not elaborate on the complexities of what is going on in this process within the current institutional realities. International students’ challenges in engaging with dominant discourses in education have also been described in some research studies. 26 However, there seems to be insufficient literature on how international students themselves actually accommodate, negotiate or resist specific requirements and expectations embedded in specific disciplinary discourses. To respond to this gap, the research this book relies upon is concerned with investigating how Vietnamese and Chinese international students mediate between different interpretations of academic writing in their process of gaining access to their disciplinary community.

International students and academic writing Participating in English medium host institutions, Chinese and Vietnamese international students may bring with them different interpretations and expectations of academic writing from their distinctive academic writing traditions. In addition to the expectations shaped by their own educational and cultural settings, most international students also have their personal preferences and concerns that they wish to see reflected in their disciplinary writing. Academic writing is a central practice in teaching and learning in higher education. Therefore, 22

For example, Morris & Hudson, 1995; Vandermensbrugghe, 2004; Doherty & Singh, 2005b. 23 Vandermensbrugghe, 2004, 418. 24 Hellsten & Prescott 2004, 349. 25 Doherty & Singh, 2005, 69. 26 Fox, 1994; Lacina, 2002; Ridley, 2004; Wong, 2004.

Introduction

11

international students may naturally attempt to write in accordance with the academic practices which are valued in their academic discipline within the host institution. However, the literature seems to show that the challenges students encounter in disciplinary writing appear to go far beyond simply acquiring study skills and language forms in writing. These challenges include the gaps and tensions between students’ own interpretations of approaches to academic writing and the specific requirements of a distinct discipline.27 An important trend in the literature on student writing in Englishmedium institutions has been devoted to bringing to the fore the deficiencies of treating writing as simply a set of skills or a “transparent” medium of meaning representation.28 It argues for the need to see writing at the discursive and social level. In an attempt to avoid making surface assumptions about student writing, these authors typically explore deeper aspects involved in the nature of student writing within institutional practices. These include power relations, the issue of epistemology and identity. These diverse and deeper aspects addressed in the existing scholarly work suggest that research on international student writing in higher education needs to be embedded in such broader issues of writing and its institutional and social contexts. A focus on such complex issues underlying the practice of student writing can also be seen as a recognition that student writing in tertiary education appears to be a site of contested and changing discourse. Student academic writing in a discipline tends to operate in a particular social context with its own traditions, practices and values. 29 It is necessary to explore the ways in which a given disciplinary discourse communities position student academic writing and whether and how students can reshape those positionings through their writing in the discipline. This relationship can on the one hand be viewed in the ways students as language producers with their own values, interpretations and experiences of academic writing negotiate ways to respond to the disciplinary requirements and have some influence upon the written discourse practices. Such an approach in turn links to how international students, through their negotiations of ways of participating in the 27

Lea & Street, 1998; English, 1999; Hermerschmidt, 1999; Jones, 1999; Jones, Turner, & Street, 1999; Lea & Street, 2000; Lillis, 2001. 28 Fairclough, 1989, 1992b, 1995; Ivanic, 1995; Clark & Ivanic, 1997; Ivanic, 1997; Lillis, 1997; Lea & Street, 1998; English, 1999; Hermerschmidt, 1999; C. Jones, 1999; C. Jones, Turner, & Street, 1999; Lillis, 1999; Lea & Stierer, 2000; Lea & Street, 2000; Lillis, 2001; Street, 2009. 29 Fairclough, 1995; Liddicoat, 1997; Lillis, 2001; Matsuda, 2001a.

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Chapter One

disciplinary community, could contribute to reproducing, reshaping or creating new possibilities for lecturers to transform disciplinary practices. This aspect is on the other hand related to how lecturers, who to a certain extent represent the disciplinary structure and practices, perceive what counts as good academic writing as well as reflect their beliefs in their responses to student writing. Thus, in order to gain insights into Vietnamese and Chinese students' academic writing experiences, it is valuable to investigate lecturers' comments on students' written texts and their perceptions of disciplinary writing practices. The students’ and lecturers’ views on their practices can offer insights into the conditions for promoting richer reciprocal relationships and even mutual transformation within the institutional context. This is one of the main focuses of the study on which this book is based. Although attention has been increasingly focused on problems facing international students in adapting to the new academic environment, little has been done to explore in detail postgraduate overseas students’ actual experiences of studying in general and their academic writing in particular. This would seem critically important if we are to avoid making “surface” assumptions about students’ writing and “to search for deeper understandings” 30 of their adaptation process. This view highlights the need to go beyond the routine in studying student writing, which is mainly based on researcher’s analysis of students’ texts, to identify new ways to gain insights into students’ actual writing experiences and struggles in producing their own texts. Within this study, these principles recognise the value of listening to individual students talking about the experience of writing their own texts, which is at the centre of Lillis’ framework for interpreting student writing in the institutional context31. The book is therefore concerned with exploring how Vietnamese and Chinese international students mediate their disciplinary writing in the country of education. It examines not only their general perceptions of disciplinary conventions and expectations of academic writing but, more importantly, their real accounts of how they produced their own texts. That is, students’ written texts, their potential choices and their intentions in making meaning through writing their own texts are placed at the heart of the study presented in this book. By involving students in talking about their first texts at the Australian university and reflecting on their experience in writing these texts, the book aims to offer a grounding to unpack issues of agency and potential choices embedded in Chinese and Vietnamese students’ adaptation to disciplinary academic culture. 30 31

Jones, Turner & Street, 1999, xvii. Lillis, 2001.

Introduction

13

The Research This book draws on an investigation involving international students and lecturers from an Australian university.32 The research explores the journey of adaptation to academic writing practices of eight international students from China and Vietnam undertaking Masters courses in Economics or Education at an Australian university. It also investigates the perspectives and expectations of student writing from four academic staff in these disciplines. This research focuses on Chinese and Vietnamese international students in Education and Economics due to a number of reasons. China is currently the leading source of international students for Australian institutions. 33 At the university where this was conducted, international students from China comprise the largest proportion of international students. In addition, recent analysis has revealed that at this university, there has been an emerging postgraduate student growth from Vietnam. Chinese and Vietnamese students from two disciplines, Economics and Education, were selected for the study. Economics is the biggest faculty and it has the largest enrolment of international students at this Australian university. Education is one of the disciplines in the university which has recently seen a rising trend in the international student cohort. The students in this study were required to meet the cut-off IELTS score of 7.0 and 6.5 in order to gain the entry to their Master course in Education and Economics respectively. These eight students have been selected because they meet the research criteria of this study. They are Chinese and Vietnamese students enrolled in Masters of Education or Economics. They volunteered to participate in the study and were willing to reflect on their experiences of writing their first text at the Australian university as well as on how they participated in disciplinary practices as they progressed through the course six months later. The lecturer participants selected are those who lectured in the disciplines in which the student participants were enrolled and who volunteered to participate in the study. There is no one to one correspondence between individual lecturer and individual student involved in this study. The students’ perceptions of lecturers’ expectations are mixed. A summary of lecturer and student profiles is presented in the tables below. 32 33

Tran, 2007. AEI, 2012.

Chapter One

14

Name

Gender

Discipline

Anna

Female

Education

Teaching experience 13 years

Kevin

Male

Education

16 years

Lisa

Female

Economics

16 years

Andy

Male

Economics

> 16 years

Ethnic background Australian Native speaker of English Australian Native speaker of English Dutch Non-native speaker of English Australian Native speaker of English

Table 1.1: Lecturer Profile Name

Gender

Xuân

National background Vietnamese

Wang

Chinese

Female

Bình

Vietnamese

Female

Lin

Chinese

Female

Hao

Chinese

Female

Ying

Chinese

Female

B. Law, M.FM student

Vӻ

Vietnamese

Female

Lan

Vietnamese

Female

B.Eco M. FM student B.Eco M. FM student

Female

Educational background B.English, M.Ed student B.English, M.Ed student B.English, M.Ed student B.English, M.Ed student B.Admin Man., M.FM student

Previous Experience Teacher of English Teacher of English Teacher of English Interpreter Human resource officer Human resource officer Marketting officer Finance officer

Table 1.2: Student profile The data collected was a combination of students’ assignments, the lecturers’ comments on these students’ texts, two rounds of semistructured interviews with the students and two rounds of interviews with

Introduction

15

the lecturers. All respondents presented in this research have been given pseudonyms. Data

Method of collection

1. Talks around texts with students

Semi-structured interviews about students’ practices in writing 1st texts at the Australian university; Audio-taped and transcribed

2. Positioning interviews with students

Semi-structured focus-group interview and individual interviews Audio-taped and transcribed

3. Students’ essays

Photocopies of students’ essays

4. Individual interviews with lecturers

Semi-structured interviews about lecturers’ expectations of student writing Audio-taped and transcribed

5. Individual lecturers’ comments on students’ texts

Semi-structured interviews about lecturers’ comments on student writing Audio-taped and transcribed

6. Lecturers’ written comments

Photocopies of lecturers’ comments on students’ texts

7. Lecturers’ teaching and assessment documents

Photocopies of lecturers’ teaching and assessment documents

8. Institutional guidelines

Photocopies of institutional guidelines on assessment and academic writing

Table 1.3: Summary of data collected Data were analysed using a trans-disciplinary framework to interpret students’ adaptation and lecturers’ views on student practices. The conceptual framework drew on two interpretive tools, a modified version of Lillis’ heuristic for exploring student meaning making34 and positioning theory.35 The integration of these two analytic models represents a trans34 35

Lillis, 2001. Harré & van Langenhove 1999.

16

Chapter One

disciplinary approach for social analysis of students’ practices, lecturers’ views and discourse. Further discussion of the development of this framework is included in Chapter 5.

The Book The Book consists of 10 chapters. Chapter 1 provides a context for understanding international students’ adaptation to academic writing practices in the host institution. It addresses the purposes, the significance and original contributions of the study. Chapter 2 presents a review of the distinctive Chinese and Vietnamese writing traditions. This is followed by a discussion of different approaches to academic writing in higher education in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 provides a review of the key issues around student writing in disciplinary discourse community, and aspects of students’ subjectivity and agency in academic writing. Chapter 5 focuses on the development of the trans-disciplinary framework for conceptualising student writing and lecturers’ perspectives in the academia. Then, the different forms of adaptation that Chinese and Vietnamese international students draw on in their process of negotiating academic writing in the host institution will be addressed in Chapter 6. How international students demonstrate critical thinking in academic writing in response to the disciplinary requirements is explored in Chapter 7. Chapter 8 discusses the communal approach to constructing knowledge that Chinese and Vietnamese students have adopted in their journey of meaning making. Chapter 9 captures lecturers’ perspectives on disciplinary academic writing of international students. Chapter 10 draws out implications and conclusion including the model for mutual adaptation between international students and lecturers.

CHAPTER TWO INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS AND DISTINCTIVE CULTURAL WRITING TRADITIONS

Research on writing across cultures, contrastive rhetoric and intercultural learning has shown that international students’ writing experiences are influenced by their distinctive writing traditions into which they were socialised during their previous schooling in their home country.1 The discussion in this chapter will thus include a review of the key factors of the wider context which forms the beliefs and principles underpinning Chinese and Vietnamese writing traditions. The review suggests the need to look at the context shaping these written discourses in interpreting instances of Chinese and Vietnamese students’ writing rather than relying only on cognitive and linguistic factors. The discussion in this chapter also shows that even though international students may have preferred ways of writing, which are to some extent shaped by their distinctive writing tradition, their writing in the host institution may also depend on a web of personal variables. That is, international students’ writing practices can vary as these are affected by individual students’ values, their strategies in locating themselves in the new academic context and their language proficiency even though most need to meet the cut-off IELTS score of 6 to gain entry to most of Australian universities. With respect to the above aspects, the discussion in this chapter is informed by research concerning issues of writing across cultures, contrastive rhetoric, Chinese and Vietnamese composition traditions, intercultural communication and teaching international students. The first part of this chapter will focus on how international students’ writing is characterised by their distinctive academic writing traditions, including particular ways of constructing their arguments, interacting with the audience and positioning themselves in writing. Next, a review of Chinese and Vietnamese writing traditions will be presented in order to highlight what may constitute Chinese and Vietnamese students’ prior 1

Fox, 1994; Connor, 1996; Cadman, 1997, 2000; Ryan, 2000; Connor, 2004; Wang, 2011

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writing practices and how these may offer clues in interpreting students’ negotiation of disciplinary writing in Australian higher education. The third part of the chapter will discuss how and why culturally preferred ways of writing should be seen as fluid and variable amongst individual writers.

International students from distinctive writing traditions Entering the new context of higher education in English medium institutions, international students often bring with them different expectations of academic writing from their distinctive academic writing traditions. Their different interpretations of the approaches to writing are marked by a host of factors including the ways they have learnt to see the world, the ways of valuing and constructing knowledge, the ways of communicating with the audience and organising discourse. 2 Therefore, analytical, descriptive or reproductive approaches should perhaps be viewed as different logical ways of making sense of the world and making meaning in writing in different cultures. In the same vein, Ryan recognises that as international students come from different cultures, they may prefer different cognition and learning styles.3 From this perspective, international students have been brought up with particular ways of interpreting and describing the world and of reflecting this in their writing. There are, therefore, particular approaches to knowledge in different cultures which may have impact on international students’ interpretation of the ways to construct an argument in writing. Contrastive rhetoric is concerned with the preferred cultural patterns of thinking and writing amongst students from different cultures. 4 Kaplan highlights the different rhetorical organisations of ideas in different writing traditions. Indicated in his “doodles” article in 1966 is the transfer of first language writing conventions to second language writing practice. Kaplan’s research offers insights into how second language texts are constructed.5 His article has, however, been disputed for generalising the writing approach of different language groups, for example all Asians as “Oriental” who use an “indirect approach”. 6 Also, Kaplan’s argument about culture-specific patterns of writing appears to place much emphasis 2

For example, McKay, 1993; Fox, 1994; Connor, 1996; Cadman, 1997; Wang, 2011 3 Ryan, 2000, 11. 4 Kaplan, 1966; Purves, 1988; Connor, 1997. 5 Kaplan, 1966. 6 Hyland, 2003a, 46.

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on rhetorical styles while leaving the influence of the culture-situated factors on forming these rhetorical styles unexplored.7 Thus, it is necessary to explore how student writers learn what counts as good and sophisticated writing in different cultures. Contrastive rhetoric tends to rely on the analysis of actual finished texts to explore writing practices of students from multicultural backgrounds. However, it seems insufficient to base the study of written discourse on only the surface of texts. In the past two decades, research into the area of academic writing has recognised the significance of the process involved in writing texts.8 Hence, in addition to the written product, internal and external factors which affect the writing process which student writers have gone through are worth being studied. Furthermore, early contrastive rhetoric, which made generalisations about the first language “thought patterns” of students based only on the examination of their second language writing, reveals the deterministic view of the writers’ cultural backgrounds.9 Such generalisations alone, which do not draw on evidence about students’ reflection on their intentions in constructing texts, may not be considered reliable information for teachers. 10 This view offers the grounding for the selection of talk around text model in the research design of this study. This framework enables the students in this study to reflect on the process and practice involved in writing their own texts. Thus, it offers an insightful interpretation of student writing, which looks beyond the surface of the texts and the generalisations about studentwriters’ cultural backgrounds to account for the complexity of the diverse factors that may affect students’ writing. When international students learn to write in a specific discipline in the host institution, they may encounter challenges which go far beyond the level of study skills and language forms in writing. The challenges may lie in the mismatches between their own culture-situated interpretations of approaches to knowledge and academic writing and the specific requirements of a distinct discipline in the English medium host instituion. This proposes that Chinese and Vietnamese international students’ negotiation of disciplinary writing appears to be related to the mediation of the ways of writing into which they have been socialised and the disciplinary requirements embedded in the whole system of ideologies in the new institutional context. International students’ academic writing is at the same time the endeavour to mediate between the different sources of 7

Connor, 1996. Raimes, 1983; Zamel, 1987; Caulk, 1994; Jordan, 1997; Badger & White, 2000. 9 Leki, 1991; Matsuda, 2001b; Hyland, 2003a. 10 Matsuda, 2001b. 8

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identities rooted in their personal experiences and the academic writing requirements in their new institution. The ways one conceptualises knowledge and constructs arguments in writing appear to influence their approaches to building up their own position and nurturing their identity in writing. 11 Cadman recognises international students’ identities as learners are shaped by the epistemological orientation of their own culture.12 Her research illustrates the challenges facing international research students which come from “the ways in which the students as researchers approach their projects and the sense of identity which informs their approach”.13 Thus, international students may cherish in their disciplinary writing multiple identities which are embedded in their different approaches to knowledge or in the different epistemologies of the educational system and culture they were previously familiarised with. As a result, multiple identities as student-writers have led to the characterisation of international student writing in higher education as being complex and diverse. As discussed, different attitudes towards the construction of knowledge and the discourse structure with which students have been brought up during their prior schooling and socialised in their current academic context may help to build up their different interpretations of academic writing. Thus, the study of international students’ mediation of academic writing in the host institution is associated with not only what the conventions and expectations of the academic discipline in the new context are but also what constitutes their prior academic writing traditions. These values should be investigated from the perspectives of both international students and lecturers in their discipline since they may be differently interpreted by individual international students and lecturers representing a specific discipline. The issue of Vietnamese and Chinese international students’ mediation of different writing values will need to be explored in relation to Vietnamese and Chinese writing traditions, which will be the focus of the following section.

Chinese and Vietnamese writing traditions This section will discuss features of Chinese and Vietnamese writing traditions and the underlying factors from which these features emerge. It will be argued that Vietnam and China belong to unique culturally, socially and historically based writing traditions. The review indicates the 11

Fox, 1994; Connor, 1996; Cadman, 1997, 2000 Cadman, 1997, 3. 13 Ibid, 8 12

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significance to take into account the fact that despite some similarities, there are subtle differences regarding the preferred writing ways and prominent factors shaping those patterns in the two writing traditions. Therefore, it seems important not to lump Chinese and Vietnamese students together under the group of “Asian” students or “Asian” students from Confucian cultures with the same cognitive and learning styles. The overview of Vietnamese and Chinese writing traditions demonstrates the significance of taking into consideration factors rooted in their social, cultural, economic, historical and religious conditions for a comprehensive explanation and interpretation of writing styles. This view has implications for any study on Chinese and Vietnamese international students’ writing since it suggests the need to look at the wider context shaping Vietnamese and Chinese written discourse in interpreting instances of Vietnamese and Chinese students’ writing rather than relying only on cognitive and linguistic factors. At the same time, the debates about Chinese written discourse indicate that “cultural” writing patterns do not appear to be fixed and static but seem to be contested and subject to individuals’ views as well. This leads to the need to avoid oversimplifying Chinese and Vietnamese students in English medium institutions with regard to their academic writing approaches and to be more aware of the variables they may bring into their writing.

Chinese writing tradition Chinese rhetorical practices appear to be embedded in indirectness tendency, politeness norm and respect in the relationship between the writer and reader and the preference for being uncritical in writing. 14 Chinese students have been brought up to value subtle and circular writing style15 and there are a number of reasons underlying this communication habit. It is argued that the Chinese norm of being indirect seems to be comprised of by a convergence of cultural, religious, schooling and writing instructions. The culturally embedded preference for writing indirectly in Chinese rhetoric is probably related to the notions of objectivity and credibility in Chinese written discourse. It is the very act of writing the text that enables the writer to be credited with authority and knowledge. Therefore, there is little need for the writer to make an effort in explaining the content, convincing the audience or “proving to be knowledgeable”. 16 Matelene and Oliver, contend that according to 14

Matalene, 1985; Gregg, 1987; Shen, 1989; Scollon, 1991; Hinkel, 1997, 1999 Kaplan, 1972; Hinkel, 1999. 16 Hinkel, 1999, 92. 15

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Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist assumptions, “the writer is assumed to be the champion of the truth that he or she announces to the reader”.17 In light of this, objective fact and persuasion in the written text are often considered “artificial, cumbersome and unnecessary”.18 This seems to be contrary to the writing norm in English-speaking countries which tends to put a lot of weight on the writer’s credibility associated with factual objectivity and convincing arguments.19 The tendency of not valuing the need for proof and persuasion in writing marks Chinese rhetorical tradition as favouring ambiguity and implicitness in writing. It has also widely recognised in the literature that the Chinese writing norm which prefers vagueness and indirectness may also spring from the nature of interaction and relationship between the writer and the reader in Chinese communication tradition. In cultures which are influenced by Confucian and Buddhist ideologies, the mutual understanding and respect between the writer and reader seems to be significant.20 The writer may bear in mind that the reader often understands and shares with him or her what he or she is intended to convey in written work. As a result, proof and overt persuasion tend to be unexpected or even avoided. In this sense, common background between the reader and the writer is important in interpreting the writer’s messages.21 The written text is developed around a theme with the writer’s rhetorical purpose to leave the reader to interpret the issue.22 In addition, the relationship between the writer and reader in Chinese writing may also be bound to the politeness norm regarding “face” value and solidarity in Chinese culture. 23 This cultural norm places great emphasis on the respect for the readers, which goes along with the expectation for the readers to infer the meanings from the written text and the tendency to avoid impositions on the reader. The notions of mutual understanding and respect which are often taken for granted regarding the relationship between the writer and reader in written discourse are shaped by Confucianism and Buddhism. This may lead to features such as vagueness and implicitness in Chinese writing. However, as maintained by

17

Matelene & Oliver, 1985 and 1971, cited in Hinkel, 1999, 92. Kincaid, 1987 & Bloom, 1981; cited in Hinkel, 1999, 92; Scollon & Scollon, 1995. 19 Hinkel, 1999. 20 ibid 21 ibid,363 22 Matalene, 1985; Hinds, 1987. 23 Scollon & Scollon, 1995. 18

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Hinds, 24 Classical Chinese differs from Modern Chinese in terms of typological style as the former tends to be a reader-responsible language while the latter appears to be writer-responsible language. It is argued that the moral ideology underlying Chinese schooling practice where the teacher is considered to be both the moral example and the provider of knowledge has contributed to forming Chinese rhetorical feature of being implicit in academic writing. 25 This cultural value is rooted in Confucian philosophy which places great emphasis on conduct and morality.26 The attitude towards the teacher is reflected in the Chinese saying the teacher who teaches him one day will be his father for his whole life.27 As the master of knowledge, the teacher is assumed to know clearly what his/her student is meant in writing. Therefore, the need to provide detailed explanation or persuasion in academic writing where the teacher is often the only audience of the written text seems unnecessary. The moral ideology underlying the schooling practice in China may help to form Chinese rhetorical feature of being implicit in academic writing. Another explanation for the indirectness in Chinese writing is given by Scollon 28 who attributes this norm to the concept of self-rooted in Confucius. Unlike the “Western” view of self which encourages the expression of individual voice, the Chinese self is embedded in the Confucian moral standard for society which is centred on four core relationships: affection between parent and child, rightness between ruler and the ruled, differentiation between elder and younger, and trust between friend and friend.29 It can be seen that individualism appears to have little place in this traditional social ideology of behaviour and conduct. This may result in a restriction for Chinese writers’ expression of individual views and being direct because their “self” must be bound to these above-mentioned moral relationships. Although a large part of the literature indicates that Chinese writing is marked by indirectness, such claim has not been supported by some researchers.30 For example, by reference to contemporary Chinese books, Wang and Yang31 claim that three out of four common ways to begin a Chinese composition tend to advocate a direct or linear approach. The first 24

Hinds,1987, 145. For example, Cortazzi & Jin, 1999; Mao-jin, 2001; Barker, 2002. 26 Cortazzi & Jin, 1999. 27 Mao-jin, 2001, 27. 28 Scollon, 1991. 29 ibid 30 For example, Kirkpatrick, 1997; Wu & Rubin., 2000; Cheng, 2003. 31 Wang & Yang, 1988, 76ff, cited in Kirkpatrick, 1997, 144. 25

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common technique is “to open the door and see the mountain”, that is, direct beginning to draw attention to the main point. The second one is related to the way to introduce clearly “the object and the scope of the discussion to come”. The third one is to explain the “background and motivations” for writing. Only the fourth way which expects the writer to begin a piece with “a tortuous and winding approach to the subject” seems to encourage indirectness. Although Wang and Yang based on their analysis of the styles represented in Chinese books rather than different texts written by Chinese learners or different groups of Chinese writers to make claims about Chinese writing, their study offers an important alternative view on Chinese writing style. These conflicting views indicate that cultural ways of writing do not appear to be fixed in different contexts and for different purposes of writing in real life. Another distinctive feature in Chinese writing tradition, as suggested in the literature, is the tendency to accept knowledge uncritically and avoid questioning some sources of knowledge in communication, both in speech and written discourse. This may stem from the Chinese traditional approach to knowledge, particularly knowledge provided by the teacher and knowledge in the textbook, and approach to knowledge representation and construction. As mentioned above, traditionally the teacher is the representative of authority and the embodiment of knowledge32 and thus questioning the knowledge provided by the teacher is unexpected. Chinese traditional approach to knowledge is believed to be bound to the ideology that knowledge is to be “transmitted” and “mastered” rather than “discovered”. 33 In other words, knowledge is learnt through steady accumulation, as mentioned in the following saying Mount Tai (a typical high mountain) makes itself high because it does not reject any tiny lump of earth; rivers and seas make themselves deep because they do not refuse water from any brooklet.34 Chinese writing in particular has been characterised as a means of conveying socially shared ideologies rather than what is individual and personal.35 Carson elaborates on how the social ideologies embedded in the educational system affect Chinese students’ ways to learn writing and reading. In her opinion, the moral principles embedded in social values and ideologies such as “patriotism, the collective good, group loyalty, and respect for authority” are taught at school.36 As a result, the function of 32

Cortazzi & Jin, 1999; Pratt, 1992, quoted in Barker, 2002. Pratt, 1992, p.313, cited in Barker, 2002, 181. 34 Mao-jin, 2001, 20. 35 Carson, 2001, 143 36 ibid, 143. 33

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Chinese education focuses on maintaining order and authority and language used in schools is not seen as a medium for individual expression. Her assumption may be misleading in the sense that maintaining order and authority might be true in the past but may represent only one of the functions of Chinese schooling nowadays rather than its focus. In the current modern Chinese society, the education system may be credited with many other functions. In a way, the fact that the teaching of the above moral values is maintained and preserved may involve the memorisation and absorption of these values on the part of the students. Thus students may make great effort to reflect and orient their ideas in written work in accordance with the spirits of these values and their individual meaning expression may be somewhat downplayed. Cai argues for the effect of the length, organisation and topics of the eight-legged essay as a Confucian literary form, which focuses on social harmony, on students’ idea expression style.37 In this spirit, expression of personal feelings or views which may lead to social disharmony is not encouraged. Rather than free expressions of personal views and feelings, Chinese rhetoric tends to rely on quotations, allusions, poetry and references to the past.38 Such an approach to constructing knowledge is considered cultured as well as respectful of authorities. The discourse organisation of Chinese writing has been a debated issue during the last two decades.39 Chinese students’ essays have been claimed to have improper unity and coherence from the “Western” perspective due to the influence of the literary form of the Confucian eight-legged essay (or ba-gu wen). This was the standard model of the civil service examination in the fifteenth century and maintained its acceptance as a literary form until the early twentieth century. 40 In fact, Kaplan’s assumption has been criticised by Mohan and Lo41 that this prose form is not the Chinese “typical example exposition” as it was hardly used for other purposes of composition beside Chinese civil service examination. Rather, it was employed as a means against Chinese intellectuals under Quing government and thus, “the form was so rigid in structure and style that meaning and content had to be sacrificed”.42

37

Cai, 1993, cited in Connor, 1996. Matalene, 1985; Cai, 1993, cited in Connor, 1996. 39 Mohan & Lo, 1985; Scollon & Scollon, 1995; Grabe & Kaplan, 1996. 40 Kaplan, 1966, cited in Mohan & Lo, 1985; Grabe & Kaplan, 1996. 41 Mohan & Lo, 1985. 42 Ibid, 518. 38

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Mohan and Lo go on to argue that the differences in terms of written discourse organisations between Chinese writing convention and the one preferred in English medium institutions arise from the teachers’ overemphasis on form correctness at the sentence level and insufficient instruction to structure rather than the “indirect approach” in Chinese language and culture. Their evaluation of Kaplan’s claim may be justifiable in the sense that the Eight-legged essay is not always a central model of Chinese writing, thereby exerting little impact on Chinese writing style and that Chinese students’ writing habits are marked by the teaching instruction. Moreover, Kaplan’s resorting on the eight-legged essay as the only explanation for Chinese writing tendency of being indirect seems to be over-simplistic as this is a complex issue. However, Mohan and Lo’s conclusion that Chinese discourse organisation is not shaped by Chinese language and culture43 appears to be inappropriate. In fact, research on Chinese writing tradition has established that Chinese writing has been influenced by its cultural norms, communication style, Confucian and Buddhist ideologies, and schooling tradition.44 The discussion above reveals that there are some underlying driving forces related to culture, religious ideologies, educational philosophy, social, political and historical circumstances which may contribute to shaping Chinese writing tradition. This suggests that research on Chinese students’ writing needs to take into account these factors as the possible clues for the interpretations of students’ writing negotiation of different ways of academic writing. The different views on Chinese writing patterns, at the same time, indicate that the so-called cultural ways of writing are not fixed and static but may be contested and changing.

Vietnamese writing tradition Unlike Chinese writing, there has been much less research on Vietnamese writing traditions, especially Vietnamese overseas students’ writing in English medium institutions. Vietnamese writing has been characterised by the tendency to maintain harmony in idea expression.45 This emerges from the principle of seeing and making sense of the world with which Vietnamese people have learnt and valued during their life. This principle originates from a number of factors ranging from the cultural norms, socio-economic features to political and historical circumstance. Those factors may be intimately interwoven with one 43

ibid. Scollon & Scollon, 1995; Cortazzi & Jin, 1999; Hinkel, 1999; Carson, 2001. 45 Ferguson, 1997; Tran, 1999; Phan, 2001. 44

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another and together they help to form the habit to maintain harmony including circularity and avoidance of disagreement or questioning in approach to knowledge and writing. The tendency to value harmony in writing is related to Vietnamese people’s attitudes towards knowledge in the textbook and teacher’s knowledge. Vietnamese cultural norms seem to be marked by respect for established truth and knowledge in textbooks. In fact, printed works and printed knowledge in textbooks are often assumed to embody knowledge and wisdom accumulated by scholars or experts during thousands of years in Vietnamese history. In addition, teachers are often considered to be both the moral guide and the representative of authority.46 These features are reflected in the proverb, “conduct should be learnt first and then knowledge” (Tiên hӑc lӉ, hұu hӑc văn), in the power distance between teachers and students and in the assumption that teachers are the master of the subject matter or knowledge in general. Thus, the teacher is traditionally expected to teach students both academic matters and moral conduct. The tradition of respect teacher, honour religion (Tôn sѭ, trӑng ÿҥo) or King-Teacher-Father (Quân-Sѭ-Phө), which the teacher was ranked just behind the king and above the father, also indicates the relationship between teacher and student and the place of the teacher in society. Contradicting and questioning the teacher’s opinions is thus not expected in terms of both knowledge and conduct as he/she is not only the embodiment of knowledge but also the moral parent. Students may hesitate to present their opinions when they are not sure of the teacher’s. The Vietnamese cultural tradition regarding the respect for knowledge in textbooks and for teachers’ ideas has led to the tendency to show appreciation and respect for others’ ideas rather than critically evaluating or criticising them in writing. This tendency is one of the dimensions of the rhetoric to avoid tension and maintain harmony in writing. The way that Vietnamese people are oriented toward maintaining harmony in expressing ideas and thus the way they engage with the world in this sense is also influenced by Taoism. The essential spirit of this belief is on the harmony between human beings and nature. Taoism has found its place in Vietnamese culture as its ideology matches with characteristics of Vietnamese agricultural life. This belief has been Vietnamised in that display of disagreement, no matter in spoken or written discourse has been seen as a sign of harmony breaking and lack of control or lack of discipline. Such a belief has to some degree led to the habit of being 46

K. V. Nguyen, 1989; Tran, 1999.

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circular and indirect in expressing ideas in both oral and written Vietnamese. Generalisation and description are marked by what counts as knowledge and appear to be considered logical ways of making meaning in the Vietnamese educational context.47 Such a tendency stems from both Vietnamese water paddy civilization and Vietnamese cultural norms. Water paddy is the main crop of Vietnam and its growth depends on natural phenomenon. So agricultural people always try to take into consideration all these natural conditions and bear in mind their interconnection. 48 On the one hand, people prefer combining and generalising different factors in life. On the other hand, they view these factors mutually interrelated rather than seeing them as separate and independent factors. These constitute the essentials of the educational tendency focusing on generalisation and description as a logical way of constructing knowledge and making sense of the world. The respect for knowledge in textbooks and teachers’ ideas also contributes to shaping the Vietnamese description and reproduction approaches to constructing knowledge. This is because knowledge accumulated from such sources as textbooks and teachers are often assumed to have a high degree of reliability and validity, thereby worth being appreciated, described and reproduced. Another characteristic of the Vietnamese writing style seems to be the preference of metaphoric expression with poetic and figurative language. This characteristic is rooted in the Vietnamese traditional writing in favour of poetry, which differs from “Western” writing with preference of prose.49 Vietnamese traditional prose is poetic prose with certain rules of creating rhythm and rhyme in a well-balanced and harmonious way. This tradition takes its strength from the fact that Vietnamese is a tonal language. Going hand in hand with poetic writing, the Vietnamese language is rich in symbolism. 50 This is manifested in the way people enjoy using symbolic words or symbolic expressions in writing. Following this symbolic style, concrete images are often employed to convey abstract ideas and different shades of meanings. The Vietnamese traditional symbolic style therefore appears to have a great impact on the Vietnamese way of making meaning in writing, which seems to be multi-layered and evocative. This feature tends to leave the readers with a lot of space to infer the meanings underlying the written text, which is in accordance with 47

Tran, 1999, 161. Ibid. 49 Ibid, 161-162. 50 Ibid 48

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the preferred writing style of some other Asian countries like China and Japan. 51 However, such a writing habit may contradict the “Western” rationality which appears to be in favour of explicitness.52 This aspect of Vietnamese people’s linguistic and affective preferences also shares a common feature with their cultural preference, which is deeply rooted in the Vietnamese tradition favouring playing with words. This tradition used to be cultivated at the communal meetings at the village’s well, the banyan tree, particularly the traditional communal hall or even in the rice field where Vietnamese people play with words through a variety of games, riddles, tales, folk songs, poems, mother’s lullabies and Hát Ĉӕi, the impromptu clever verses and couplets. 53 In Vietnamese writing, the nature of creativity is more oriented towards emotional expressions and imaginary richness embedded in word usage and flow of thinking rather than being associated with the logic of constructing arguments like in “Western” traditions.54 That is, creativity in Vietnamese written work is deeply bound to emotional feelings and subjective assumptions or even personal imagination. This tendency may be partly shaped by Vietnamese people’s experiences in real life where family or social conflicts at the local level have traditionally been resolved based on appeals to emotions rather than reasons.55 In observing Vietnamese students’ English essays, Ferguson states that Vietnamese writers seem to see the reader as “someone who needs emotional persuasion rather than logical argument”. 56 Thus, Vietnamese writing seems to be emotionally oriented. This is intimately interwoven with the fact that the Vietnamese language is marked by the expressive tendency, which is the natural product of an emotion-biased culture.57 Vietnamese writing characteristic preferring emotional expressions tends to make itself differ from Chinese writing which does not allow for much expression of personal feelings.58 In sum, Vietnamese social and historical circumstances have shaped and reinforced the tendency to maintain harmony and be circular in idea expression and knowledge construction. Also, Vietnamese students have been socialised into preferring and using the generalisation approach and poetic language to create sophisticated and elegant writing. Along with the 51

Hinds, 1987; Hinkel, 1999. Lillis, 2001, 115. 53 Kramsch & Sullivan, 1996; Tran, 1999. 54 Lillis, 2001, 115. 55 Brick & Louie, 1984, 73. 56 Ferguson, 1997, 33. 57 Tran, 1999, 163. 58 Matalene (1985); Schollon (1991) & Cai (1993, cited in Connor, 1996). 52

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impacts of formal education, Vietnamese students may form their preferred writing habits as part of what is taken for granted from their culture and up-bringing. Specifically, each Vietnamese was born and has been brought up with familiar cultural and linguistic codes embraced in mothers’ lullabies, folk songs, riddles, poems and folk tales. These aspects are regularly reinforced and valued in various community activities. Thus, these factors may play a role in nurturing inside Vietnamese students the preference for the use of symbolic words or symbolic images with different shades of meaning to express their thoughts in writing. These writing norms seem to be bound to different intentions of the Vietnamese educational system, philosophy as well as what is taken granted from their daily life. As a result, these are considered valid and meaningful in the Vietnamese context and for the purpose of conserving and developing knowledge in the orientation of Vietnamese culture and educational system.

International students’ writing viewed at the individual level The above sections indicate that the issues of Chinese and Vietnamese international students’ negotiation of their writing need to be examined in relation to what constitutes good writing in their prior literacy practice. This section will discuss why and how international students’ writing needs to be viewed at the individual level as well. Culture-situated ways of writing may affect international students’ writing but should also be viewed as possibly contested and variable amongst individuals rather than reified approaches. This is rooted in the fact that writing norms themselves are shaped by culture and culture is not a “set” or “fixed” construct.59 In fact, modern cultural theory tends to universally acknowledge that cultures are hybrid and heterogeneous. 60 The fluidity, diversity and hybridity of culture seem to shape the possible variables of individual writing practices. Connor, one of the pioneers in establishing theories of contrastive rhetoric, calls for the need to treat writers as individuals in groups that are subject to change rather than as belonging to typical cultural groups.61 In a study which examines the diversity of Chinese students’ attitudes towards academic study, Stephens 62 provides justification for the need to see 59

Stephens, 1997; Hyland, 2003a. Said, 1995. 61 Connor, 2004, 76. 62 Stephens, 1997. 60

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culture as a “contested area of discourse” rather than cultural description. He argues against the tendency to resort to oversimplifications of the culture-based writing styles for the interpretations of students’ writing practices. It is inadequate to rely only on the assumption that all students who come from the same culture group adopt the same distinctive cultural writing approach.63 Fox further argues: For although culture has a strong influence on the writing that all students produce, their writing ‘styles’ do not come in neat packages; they are as complex and varied as the personalities and life experiences of each individual in the human family.64

Both Fox65 and Stephens66 share the view that it is significant to explore the account of students’ writing based on their personal experiences and perceptions. According to Littlewood’s suggestion 67 , cultural assumptions should be viewed as “possible clues” for our interpretations of students’ particular ways of writing. There may be common trends in the two written discourses of China and Vietnam but they may vary to a certain degree amongst individuals and not all the students from Vietnamese and Chinese cultures will exhibit these trends in their writing. Thus, in addition to the review of students’ distinctive academic writing traditions and the investigation of these cultural writing norms from the students’ view, research on international Vietnamese and Chinese students’ writing should explore the gaps that may exist in their personal motivations, experiences, desires and personality. These aspects may lead to differences in their mediation between different values and their particular ways of constructing arguments in their writing. This suggests the need to look at particular texts by individual students from the perspectives not only of the lecturers relative to these students, but importantly of the students themselves, to understand how the texts may be mediated by the beliefs, values and subject positions of individual students. In other words, this view recognises the significance of listening to students talking about their own texts, which is at the centre of Lillis’ framework.68 This framework, which informs the data collection and data analysis methods of the study,

63

Fox, 1994. Ibid, xx. 65 Ibid. 66 Stephens, 1997. 67 Littlewood, 1999, 83. 68 Lillis, 2001. 64

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will be explored in Chapter 5 on the trans-disciplinary conceptual framework. Within the shifting and contested discourses of English-medium higher education, students’ cultural norms may be adopted and reproduced in diverse ways. In a discussion of the controversies in second language writing, Casanave highlights “the dangers of cultural stereotyping and the textual, as opposed to social, focus of the field”.69 Currently, the field of contrastive rhetoric is undergoing a “liberating movement”, which turns the spotlight to potential areas affecting student writing. 70 The need to integrate issues of gender, class and race into studies about second language writing has been recently addressed by Kubota71 and Kubota and Lehner. 72 Questioning the legitimacy of traditional contrastive rhetoric, Kubota and Lehner, 73 for example, offer an alternative conceptual framework called critical contrastive rhetoric. This model aims to locate student writing in the web of power relations, discursive construction of knowledge, rhetoric and cultural values while warning against the essentialist tendency of traditional contrastive rhetoric and its trend of perpetuating established power roles. In addition to the fact that cultural ways of writing are not fixed but may vary amongst individuals, they are also subject to changes due to time and changes of the related social, historical, political and economic context. Regarding Chinese cultures of learning, it is sensible to avoid predetermining Chinese students’ learning styles simply based on their nationality since “China is huge, diverse and changing”.74 The discussion in this chapter has also revealed that culture is only one of the factors shaping Vietnamese and Chinese writing traditions and influencing individual student’s writing in English medium higher education institutions. In particular, due to the economic reform and open-door policies of Chinese and Vietnamese governments, both countries have undergone a lot of economic and social changes in recent years. This may lead to new tendencies in writing and communication styles, particularly in the area of business, economics and foreign trade where both countries are making great efforts to integrate into the world economy. These facts are important considerations as they signal that the interpretations of Vietnamese and Chinese students’ writing should be located in the related 69

Casanave, 2004, 5. Connor, 2004. 71 Kubota, 2003. 72 Kubota & Lehner, 2004. 73 ibid 74 Barker, 2002, 182. 70

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social, historical, political and economic context. The view which sees cultural ways of learning and writing as a “contested area of discourse” also lends its support to the need to explore international students’ practice of learning and writing from different angles, among which the academic staff’s perspectives should be taken into account. This issue will be examined further in Chapter 4.

Conclusion The discussion in this chapter has shown that Vietnamese and Chinese distinctive writing traditions are oriented by their cultural, religious, social and historical conditions. These contextual factors help to form the beliefs and values about what constitutes good writing in the two cultures. The preferred writing norms, therefore, seem to be bound to different intentions of the Chinese and Vietnamese educational system, philosophy as well as what is taken for granted from their daily life. Based on this aspect of the literature, I have argued that the unfamiliar ways of writing Vietnamese and Chinese students employ in their Australian institutions may be an indication of their personal values as well as what they have been brought up to believe and value as sophisticated and meaningful writing in their cultures rather than the result of their incapability and confusion in writing. This matter is interwoven with how Chinese and Vietnamese students mediate between different ways of seeing the criteria of good writing rooted in their distinctive writing traditions and their current institutional writing communities. This is also influenced by how they wish to locate themselves in the culture of writing in their discipline. Even though Chinese and Vietnamese students may have their preferred approaches to writing, which may be shaped by their cultural experiences, their writing is also subject to other personal variables as they are individuals adapting to the new learning context. It is therefore important not to oversimplify national or cultural characteristics of Chinese or Vietnamese students with regard to their writing in the English medium institution. The study reported in this book is responsive to the growing currents of literature, which take into account the fluidity, diversity and hybridity of culture. The discussion in this chapter also indicates that it is significant to explore the gaps that may exist in Chinese and Vietnamese customs and students’ individual variables, including individual preferences, which may lead to differences in their mediation of different ways of writing. In order to capture the above aspects in students’ practices of academic writing, I have listened to students talking about

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their own texts, which is at the centre of Lillis’ framework75 employed in this study. In addition to issues of students’ distinctive writing traditions and individual variables, research on how international students engage in disciplinary writing in English medium higher education needs to take into account different approaches to academic writing in higher education in the host countries. This will be the focus of the next chapter.

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Lillis, 2001.

CHAPTER THREE DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO ESL ACADEMIC WRITING IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Introduction Academic writing is a major form of assessment in most English medium higher education institutions. Therefore international English as a Second Language (ESL) students’ views and experiences in writing academic texts in universities in English speaking countries have been a common theme across various studies. 1 The focus of a great deal of research has mainly been on the impact of ethnic values on international students’ writing and their struggles to accommodate the dominant conventions of academic writing in English medium institutions.2 In fact, the issues surrounding ESL students’ interaction with their disciplinary writing in an international and intercultural environment tend to be dynamic, multi-dimensional, wide ranging and subtle. It depends on a host of aspects such as the students’ personal preferences and identity,3 cultural values and approaches to knowledge,4 the lecturers' beliefs, power and the disciplinary assumptions of what counts as knowledge and good writing.5 There are different views of student academic writing in higher education. These range from traditional ones which see academic writing as mainly a cognitive skill to the sociocultural models of writing which conceptualise academic writing as a social practice and meaning making as being mediated. Several perspectives exist within the broad view of seeing writing as a social practice, namely socialisation approach, “academic literacies” model, socio-cognitive approach, genre-based approach and social interaction approach. Although all these perspectives 1

Basturkmen & Lewis, 2002; Canagarajah, 2006; Fox, 1994; Green, 2007; Ridley, 2004; Tran, 2011; Wang, 2011. 2 Fox, 1994; Basturkmen & Lewis, 2002; Phan, 2001. 3 Ivanic, 1997; Lillis, 2001; Tran, 2011. 4 Connor, 1996; Fox, 1994, Green, 2007. 5 Lea & Street, 2000; Street, 2009.

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tend to locate student writing in the wider social context, they highlight different ways in which student writing is represented in relation to issues of knowledge construction, power, beliefs, values and identities. This chapter highlights the move from the focus on the study skills perspective and the socialisation approach to the academic literacies model6 in viewing student writing, especially ESL student writing. This shift has marked the growing awareness of student writing in higher education as constructed in the disciplinary discourse at the levels of epistemology, agency, power and contestation over knowledge rather than merely at the levels of linguistic competence and cultural assimilation. The discussion indicates a critical need to re-conceptualise writing as a practice in which meaning making, whether more bound up with writer agency, individual cognitive constructs, socially valued knowledge, social interaction or relations of power, is not merely represented and fixed but tends to be constructed and mediated. The chapter first explores the traditional views of academic writing in higher education and critiques of these. Next, the shift from the academic skills and socialisation approach to the academic literacies model located within the broader social view of academic writing, which governs the written discourse community, will be addressed. Finally, the chapter discusses other sociocultural approaches to conceptualising academic writing, including the social-cognitive approach, the social interaction approach and the genre-based approach.

The traditional view of academic writing: The study skills approach According to the traditional skills-based approach, good writing is mainly attributed to the capability to learn and master the technical and transferable rules of writing such as grammar, spelling, language use and text organisation. 7 Thus, student writing is mainly viewed as an instrumental skill. In other words, the study skills model is ‘primarily concerned with the surface features of text’. 8 This has led to various attempts to engage international ESL students in study skills and learning support units in order to help them “correct” their problems with writing skills. The study skills approach, which to some extent shares a common ground with the EAP (English for Academic Purposes) tradition, appears 6

Ibid. Ibid. 8 Street, 2009, 4. 7

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to be the currently prevailing model of learning support in UK Universities. 9 Adopting this approach, academic writing support for international students draws on the assumption that specific elements of language including grammatical features and formal vocabulary, academic styles and text structures are major elements students should take into account when engaging in academic writing in the new learning environment.10 An important trend in the literature on student writing in English medium institutions has been concentrating on bringing to the fore the deficiencies of treating writing as simply a set of static skills or a “transparent” medium of meaning representation.11 It argues for the need to see writing at the discursive and social level. In an attempt to avoid making surface assumptions about student writing, these authors typically explore deeper aspects involved in the nature of student academic writing within institutional practices. These include: (i) (ii) (iii)

power relations - how student writing is shaped by the discipline and to what extent it can influence disciplinary practice the issue of epistemology - beliefs about what constitutes knowledge in writing practices the issue of identity - the presence of self and agency in written texts.

The socialisation approach The academic socialisation perspective, which focuses on the orientation of students into the academic discourse, has emerged in response to the critical need to deal with the deficiencies of the study skills approach. Proponents of this approach, for example, McCarthy,12 Marton et al.13 and Ballard and Clanchy14 perceive that student writing involves the process of socialisation to the dominant community. In accordance with this approach, students can gain access to the academic discourse by orienting towards its cultural context. Through emphasising cultural 9

Gorska, 2012. ibid 11 Clark & Ivanic, 1997; Ivanic, 1997; English, 1999; Hermerschmidt, 1999; Jones, 1999; Lea & Stierer, 2000; Lea & Street, 2000; Lillis, 2001. 12 McCarthy, 1987. 13 Marton et al., 1997, cited in Lea & Street, 2000. 14 Ballard & Clanchy, 1995. 10

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context, this approach indicates the possibility of student writers as learners of the norms and practices of written discourse. Accordingly the socialisation approach assumes that student competence in academic writing largely depends on lecturers’ efforts to make features and requirements of disciplinary writing explicit to them.15 However, the socialisation approach does not address adequately the complexities of institutional practices. That is, by suggesting students socialise into the institution through simply learning the conventions of discourse, this approach is not capable to relate the issues of ideologies and power relations embedded in the conventions of discourse practices. Furthermore, although the socialisation approach acknowledges the significance of contextual factors in student writing, it tends to see writing as a “transparent medium of representation”.16 The constructive effects of writing discussed by Fairclough 17 which are linked to the function of reproducing and restructuring meanings and social norms of written language seem to be neglected. In sum, the socialisation approach adopts the social view of writing in the sense that it highlights the roles of social norms and social practices in the participation of students into the written discourse. However, its social practice which characterises student writing as the learning and production of these norms demonstrates that it shares a common spirit with the skills approach which treats writing as a set of instrumental skills and a transparent medium of representation. In response to the drawbacks of the socialisation approach, Lea and Street 18 offer a broader model, which focuses on such aspects as agency, discourse power and ideologies surrounding student writing within the institutional practices.

The academic literacies model The “academic literacies” model of student writing promoted by Lea and Street 19 and Street 20 is influenced by the view of writing as a conceptualised social practice. This approach sees student writing as meaning making and contested. It tends to capture the merits of both a generic “study skills” model and a disciplined-based “academic socialisation” approach to student writing. Seeing literacies as social practices, the 15

Street, 2009. Hounsell, 1988; Taylor et. al., 1988, cited in Lea & Street, 2000, 35. 17 Fairclough, 1992a, 1992b. 18 Lea & Street, 2000. 19 Lea & Street, 2000. 20 Street, 2009. 16

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“academic literacies” characterises student writing in higher education as issues at the level of meaning making, identity, power, and epistemology, which is highly discipline specific rather than simply being viewed at the level of skill or socialisation. The issue of what “counts” as knowledge in specific academic contexts appears to be at the centre of the academic literacies model.21 As Starfield puts it, the academic literacies approach perceives student academic writing to be “shaped by complex interactions of social, institutional, and historical forces in contexts of unequal power”. 22 According to Street 23 , this model resembles the socialisation approach in many ways. Yet it reflects the institutional nature of meaning making in the academia more accurately because it views ‘the processes involved in acquiring appropriate and effective use of literacy as more complex, dynamic, nuanced, situated and involving both epistemological issues and social processes including power relations among people and institutions, and social identities’. 24 This model thus appears to acknowledge that student writing is positioned by discourse in relation to its power and the constructive effects of discourse in terms of shaping identity and systems of knowledge. The views underpinning the academic literacies model are significant for scholarship and research on the perspectives of the lecturers and international ESL students in terms of academic writing. In light of this model, in order to understand students’ viewpoints of discourse practices, it is necessary to take into account their different subject positions in the disciplines and the systems of knowledge and beliefs they have been socialised into. It is also important to view the academic practices around international ESL students’ experiences in meaning making as sites of discourse and power. This view has been embedded in my arguments for the development of the framework for discourse analysis based on Harre and van Langenhove’s positioning theory25 and Lillis’ talk around text26, which will be discussed in Chapter 5. Influenced by Bakhtin 27 and Foucault28, these authors see discourse as social practices rather than just a linguistic system and draw on this broader concept to develop their conceptual tools for analysing social episodes. 21

ibid Starfield, 2007, 875. 23 Street, 2009. 24 Ibid, 4. 25 Harre & van Langenhove, 1999. 26 Lillis, 2001. 27 Bakhtin, 1981. 28 Foucault, 1989. 22

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The socio-cognitive approach A number of scholars have explored meaning making in writing from a socio-cognitive approach. 29 This approach sees writing as situated cognition which refers to individual cognition situated and influenced by the social and cultural context of writing. Flower conceptualises meaning making in relation to discourse conventions in a model in which both readers and writers construct “socially shaped, individually formed meanings”.30 In Flower’s model, the cultural and social context, language context and discourse convention are interwoven in discourse construction. She argues that the personal cognitive constructs mediate the context and conventions which in turn influence writing. As the cognitive constructs differ significantly amongst individuals, the ways individual students interpret shared values, disciplinary conventions and teachers’ responses are different. The socio-cognitive approach to writing attempts to associate the relationship between individual cognitive constructs and context with the different interpretations of what constitutes conventions and valid knowledge amongst individuals in writing practice. In an explicit way, it is concerned with the issues of how individual writers locate themselves within and contribute to the construction of discourse practices.31 Hence, this approach is different from the above social approaches to writing with respect to its emphasis on the individual writer as an active agent in constructing meanings in social practice. In this regard, its orientation to writing is to some extent similar to the social view of writing which highlights writer identity promoted by Ivanic32 and Lillis.33

The genre-based approach Another strand of the social view of writing is rooted in the genrebased pedagogies which draw predominantly on systemic functional linguistics. Genre theory seeks to explore the ways to scaffold students’ learning and provide them with linguistic and cultural resources to help them accomplish a conscious understanding of the target genres and how language works to construct meanings in contexts. 34 There are three 29

Flower, 1994; Flower & Hayes, 1981; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1993; Riazi, 1997; Zhu, 2005. 30 Flower, 1994. 52-53. 31 Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1993. 32 Ivanic, 1997. 33 Lillis, 2001. 34 Hyland, 2003a.

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different traditions of genre theory.35 The first tendency, namely The New Rhetoric approach, which evolved out of the rhetoric composition studies and first language composition, often employ ethnographic rather than linguistic methods to examine the rhetoric contexts of genres. 36 The second approach, according to Hyon, is the Swalesian branch of genre theory which is based on the tradition of English for Specific Purposes.37 This approach deals more with the linguistic features of the texts and highlights the use of discourse conventions as the tool to help learners gain access to the discourse community whose members share broad social purposes.38 The third approach based on the notion of genre is known as The “Sydney School” which draws heavily on the theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics developed by Halliday.39 Seeing writing as staged, purposeful, socially situated activity, this approach focuses on the link between the context of culture and context of situation to actual language use.40 Although these three genre-based pedagogies are similar in that their broad aim is to empower students to engage effectively in target discourses using linguistic and cultural resources, their differences lie in the emphasis given to the text or context, the research methods and the types of pedagogies they promote. 41 Street observes that the genre approach is also intimately intertwined with social constructivist theory which places the notion of discourse community at its heart.42 In general, the genre theory shares with the above social perspectives the view that writing is socially and culturally contextualised. However, unlike the above perspectives, it is more concerned with the explanations of how language functions in human interactions or social contexts. In particular, the social view underpinning these approaches is embedded in how and why people make certain linguistic and rhetorical choice to achieve their purposes in particular social contexts. In addition, other perspectives of the social view of writing often tend to highlight issues of discourse, identity and power relations in writing but neglect the cognitive aspect of writing as a social practice. Both the social and the cognitive features are however interwoven in the genre theory since it is related to the ways language 35

Hyon, 1996. Freeman & Medway, 1994; Hyon, 1996. 37 Hyon, 1996. 38 Swales, 1990; Hyon, 1996. 39 Halliday, 1994. 40 Christie, 1993; Martin & Rothery, 1993; Yates, 1998. 41 Hyon, 1996; Hyland, 2002a. 42 Street, 2009. 36

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works to create meanings and construct experiences in certain social contexts.

The social interaction approach The social interaction approach is advocated by Hyland.43 Hyland is slightly different from other authors who also adopt the social view to writing as he places greater emphasis on the social interaction in writing. His social perspective, which views writing as the social actions of community-situated members, is grounded in the interpersonal function of language discussed by Halliday. 44 Claiming that research on academic writing has been more concerned with ideational function of language and the ways language reflects and constructs the experiences, Hyland45 seeks to highlight the interactive feature of language in written discourse in his recent work. His view which recognises the contribution of discourse to building up social relationship among discourse participants reflects the constructive effect of discourse, the relational dimension, discussed by Fairclough.46 Hyland’s view of social interaction in disciplinary writing is embedded in discourse analysis, which provides an insight into students’ awareness of the disciplinary epistemological conventions and interpersonal values. 47 Conventions and ideologies in discourse are the product of social interactions among discourse community members. 48 Thus, different forms of social interactions may result in different forms of knowledge. That is, forms of knowledge in written discourse are not simply given but it is through social interaction that they may be oriented or redefined in accordance to the social relations underlying the interaction.

Conclusion This chapter has reviewed the key approaches to academic writing in higher education. These range from the study skills approach which places emphasis on the cognitive views of academic writing to the various sociocultural models of writing which is centred around the nature of disciplinary written discourse and meaning making in writing as a social 43

Hyland, 2000, 2002, 2003. Halliday, 1994 45 Hyland, 2000, 2002, 2003. 46 Fairclough, 1992a, 2002b. 47 Hyland, 2000. 48 Ibid, 178. 44

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practice. Influenced by Bakhtin49 and Foucault,50 the authors who advocate the sociocultural views of academic writing see discourse as social practices rather than merely a linguistic system and draw on this broader concept to develop deeper understandings of ESL students’ academic writing. Although research in the area of discursive practices in higher education has signalled the various ways in which discourse is socially constituted and constitutive, little focus has been given to examining the characteristics of these two aspects reflected in the perspectives of both staff and international students who come from a specific discipline. The literature review regarding the issues of knowledge construction and ideologies governing academic writing as a social practice indicates the need to explore international ESL students’ academic writing in higher education in relation to the issues of epistemology and contestation in knowledge construction rather than only at the level of linguistic skills or cultural familiarity. This review also indicates the importance to examine how the disciplinary and institutional community may position international students writing and how students may exercise agency and reshape those positionings. This will be the focus of the next Chapter on international student writing within the institutional context.

49 50

Bakhtin, 1981. Foucault, 1989.

CHAPTER FOUR INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS’ WRITING WITHIN THE INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT

Introduction In recent years, there has been much written on the experiences of students engaging in the written discourse of a particular disciplinary community in universities in Australia, America and the United Kingdom.1 In fact, international students’ writing experiences are highly variable and depend on a host of factors ranging from their personal values, cultural norms, the lecturers’ expectations and disciplinary conventions. As writing is central to students’ success in higher education, it is naturally embedded in students’ attempts to write in accordance with the academic practices which are valued in a specific discipline within an institution. Writing in higher education is bound to the ways disciplinary and institutional discourse communities influence student writing. Thus, there is a critical need for research on international students’ practices to examine the related literature on how international students may be positioned by their disciplinary practices in terms of academic writing. Along with being shaped by disciplinary conventions, student writing may to some degree play a role in re-constructing the disciplinary writing culture. This is tied to the values shaped by students’ personal preferences and the cultural norms they bring with them into their act of writing in the new academic environment. It is the possible hybridity of their writing as the result of their attempts to negotiate different values that contributes to reconstructing the discourse and the heterogeneity of disciplinary cultures. The arguments about how a discourse community is influenced by student writing and how students can be empowered to draw creatively on discourse practice shed light on the investigation central to this study. That is, they offer groundings to explore the ways Vietnamese and Chinese 1 Leki, 1995; Ivanic, 1997; Leki & Carson, 1997; Lillis, 1997; Canagarajah, 2001; Lillis, 2001; Ridley, 2004; Gorska, 2012; Bailey, 2012.

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students themselves as language producers may also make contributions to the written discourse in their disciplines in the host institution. This chapter will first explore the ways in which a discourse community positions student writing. Next, the issue of student agency and how students may reshape discourse positionings through their writing in higher education will be addressed. The chapter concludes by discussing pedagogic implications to empower student, especially international ESL students, in relation to academic writing in higher education.

The power relations in disciplinary written discourse and student agency This section is concerned with exploring the aspect of power relations, which contributes to shaping student writing. One of the ways which discourse communities position student writing is rooted in the readers’ role in shaping disciplinary writing. Lillis2, Matsuda3 and Leki4 contend that writing in the discourse community is often associated with the learners’ effort to accommodate the dominant norms of the target discourse. These dominant norms in turn represent what is valued by community members. Thus, it can be seen that student writing is influenced by readers’ expectations regarding the ways of making meaning in a certain academic discourse, which are often termed as disciplinary conventions. The way in which writing is shaped by the expectations and the conventions of the discourse community is explicitly named by Raimes5 as the Reader-focused approach. That is, the writers tend to present ideas in conventional ways to engage with readers and to be accepted in the discourse community. In this regard, the community readers and what they value constitute discourse and thus discourse is seen as socially constituted. Since writing within a specific discipline is positioned by its community members and their values, discourse power is obviously bound to its members and its privileged conventions governing academic writing of that discipline. Disciplinary discourse power embedded in lecturers’ expectations and their perceptions of the disciplinary conventions are often communicated through their teaching, feedback and assessment. Such discourse power, to a certain extent, influences Chinese and Vietnamese student’ approaches 2

Lillis, 1997, 2001. Matsuda, 2001a. 4 Leki, 2003. 5 Raimes, cited in Canagarajah, 2001, 118. 3

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in writing. The view regarding how audience, in this case the lecturers, may shape disciplinary writing also suggests that in order to understand Vietnamese and Chinese students’ writing, it is important to explore their awareness of lecturers’ expectations in the disciplines they are operating in. Arising from the debate about student writing in discourse communities are also questions about what “counts” as good writing within a specific discipline. Lea and Stierer 6 have claimed that what constitutes good writing is bound not only to the matter of “how best to represent knowledge within that discipline” but also to the practices perpetuating privileged forms of knowledge of the discipline and individual lecturers’ preference for the “given” criteria of good writing. Relating this to the issue of assessment in higher education, Starfield7 argues for assessment as the outcome of a dynamic process in which texts are assessed based on staff’s “varying amounts of academic capital” rather than according to “a pre-agreed upon formula”. Academic writing may be influenced by discourse communities at different levels: the community members, the discourse community in general and the culture at large. Liddicoat argues that the culture of the discourse community shapes writing in terms of its professional and communicative goals.8 It is professional in the sense that it is valued by the community members and is driven both by social considerations (what the general culture expects) and by task considerations (what the discourse community aims at achieving). Its communicative goals are tied to the fact that how language is used in different circumstances depends on the topic and the target audience. In fact, a specific disciplinary practice is always embedded within wider social practices. What is valued by the community audience is in turn influenced by the social practices and the cultural norms at large. Thus, discourse power is also embedded in the social and cultural conventions and student writing in academic discourse is also governed by the broader social and cultural practices. This view implies the need to look at students’ understandings of academic writing in the Australian culture in examining students’ participation in academic writing practices at an Australian university. This view also indicates that any account of international students’ writing in Australia involves the issues of conventions in academic writing in their native cultures and in the target culture.

6

Lea & Stierer, 2000, 4. Starfield, 2001, 145. 8 Liddicoat, 1997. 7

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The relations of power and ideologies in discourse are elaborated by Norman Fairclough in his critical discourse analysis approach.9 Fairclough argues for the link between power and ideology and states that “the nature of ideological assumptions is embedded in particular conventions, and so the nature of those conventions themselves, depends on the power relations which underline the conventions”. 10 Thus, the ideologies embedded in discourse are framed by relations of power, which are exercised through the production of conventions in discursive practices. According to Fairclough, discourse is ideological in the ways the forms and meanings of discursive practices are related to constructions of reality such as the physical world, social relations and social identities which are decisive in producing or restructuring power relations. This view reveals that the ideological nature of discourse arises from the ways discursive practices operate to sustain or transform power relations. The production of ideologies through discourse is maintained in the ways conventions which represent relations of domination are exercised. For example, the power relations in the Economics discipline are maintained through the ways the preferred writing practices and norms are reproduced by students of Economics. These arguments provide the grounding to explore the deeper ideological force which underpins the conventions of the existing written discursive practices in the disciplinary context and how this works to position student writing in particular ways. Fairclough and Wodak argue that power relations are produced, reproduced and negotiated in discourse. 11 This is revealed in the ways discourse is shaped and constrained by social structure ranging from norms and conventions to class and other social relations at a societal level and the relations specific to particular institutions.12 Power in discourse is referred to by Fairclough as a form of hegemony because it is a mode of domination which is generated on “alliances and consent”. 13 That is, discourse rules and practices are characterised as domination since they come to be conventionalised and win acceptance within particular discourse communities. Fairclough also claims that discourse analysis involves not only power relations in discourse but also the ways power relations and power struggle influence social or institutional practices.14 Relating power to hegemony, Fairclough outlines a way of analysing 9

Fairclough, 1989, 1992a, 1992b. Fairclough, 1989, 2. 11 Fairclough & Wodak, 1997, cited in Paltridge, 2000, 155 12 Ibid, 64. 13 Fairclough, 1992b, 9. 14 Ibid, 36. 10

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discourse practice as a model of hegemonic struggle which involves “reproducing, restructuring and challenging” existing orders of discourse.15 This allows for the understanding of the explanatory connections between the written product and the discursive practice and social practice of discourse through exploring whether the text carries features which contribute to reproducing, restructuring or challenging existing discourse practices. Fairclough’s arguments reflect the postmodernist perspectives which link writing/speaking to a web of “shifting experiences, beliefs and ideological discourses” 16 and work against the essentialism of second language learners’ cultures. The power relations in discourse community in shaping academic writing have made the discourse community itself a site of criticism for a lot of theorists. Lillis, Ivanic, Fairclough and Ritchie17 are examples of writers who criticise academic discourses in higher education as being represented as fixed and homogenous. The act of writing for academic purposes is metaphorically described as the act of “inventing” the university and student writing as the struggle to carry out institutional “ritual” activities which provide them with access to a “closed society”.18 These metaphors signal the recognition of privileged conventions within a particular discourse students are expected to follow in order to achieve success in the academy. That is, there are differences in the ways of making meaning and constructing knowledge in different disciplines. As has been argued, the power of discourse community is embedded in its conventions and its power is thus partially maintained through the ways its conventions are expected to be put into practice in student writing. Ritchie19, however, claimed this view reveals that a discourse community is characterised as a “closed and unified system” and students must learn the forms of the language as well as ways of making meanings demanded in that community, which represents features of the transmission pedagogy. In this respect, discourse community is seen as homogenous and restricted since student success in participating in the written discourse community is mainly dependent on their effort to conform to its conventional practices rather than on their possibly diverse and valuable ways of constructing meanings. Students often struggle to “unpack” the institutional requirements and the various writing demands in different fields at different levels within 15

Ibid, 95. Leki, 2003, 68. 17 Lillis, 2001; Ivanic, 1997; Fairclough, 1995; Ritchie, 1998. 18 Bartholomae, 1985 & Harris, 1989, cited in Starfield, 2001. 19 Ritchie, 1998, 128. 16

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their discipline. 20 Lea and Street 21 raise the point that students are ambiguous about the variety of writing practices embedded in different writing models at four levels: institution, department, course and tutor. From Lillis’ perspective, within the current institutional practice, the language of students is often made visible and problematised while “the language of the disciplines and the pedagogic practices in which these are embedded usually remains invisible”.22 That is, according to Lillis, what is valued by a particular discourse community remains implicit in its pedagogic routine and is encoded in wordings which are assumed to be transparently meaningful rather than being explicitly taught to students. Lillis claims that this represents the model of teaching and learning as implicit deduction. This may also be manifested in two ways: lecturers may not often make their expectations explicit and there may be no concrete agreed criteria for student writing in a particular discipline. Students may also struggle to sort out what is really implied by their lecturers through feedback. The so-called conventions are often taken as common sense among the community members. Thus this may cause difficulties for novice students, particularly those who are not familiar with the wider social and cultural practice in which the discourse community is embedded. Coupled with the issues of power relations and the critique of discourse community represented as framed and homogenous, the question of the exclusive nature of academic discourse has also been raised in related literature. 23 In explaining the claim that academic discourse community is exclusive, Clarks maintains that the rules of the discourse community are often determined by the teaching staff of the community and thus “it is easier for staff to flout those rules than students”. 24 Fairclough25 and Lillis26 share the view that diversity in meaning making as the result of students’ attempt to tailor their communication in conformity with the context and audience is limited. This is because the notion of “appropriateness” in this regard is associated with the set of “clear-cut” conventions which hold for all members of the so-called 20

Arkoudis & Tran, 2010; Candlin & Plum, 1999; Lea & Street, 2000; Lillis, 2001; Ridley, 2004. 21 Lea & Street, 2000. 22 Lillis, 2001, 22. 23 Gardener, 1992, cited in Lillis, 2001; Fairclough, 1995; Lillis, 2001; Starfield, 2001. 24 Clark, 1992, 118. 25 Fairclough, 1995, 243. 26 Lillis, 2001, 24.

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homogenous community. Underlying this description is an evolving concern that the discursive practice embedded in the notion of “appropriateness” in higher education tends to promote the characteristic of the evaluation of student writing as gate-keeping; that is, it tends to exclude any alternative or non-standard norms in meaning making. The above critiques of the power relations in discourse communities suggest that the study of students’ mediation of academic writing should be linked to the issue of how their writing may be influenced by discourse practices. For this reason, the lecturers, who teach international students and to some extent, represent institutional structure, can offer important insights into how international students can negotiate the disciplinary writing demands. Also, it seems important to take into account how international students’ ways of accommodating or resisting those demands may vary amongst individuals. The notion of the exclusive nature of discourse community suggests the need to explore in what ways international students may be disadvantaged in dealing with the writing conventions into which they have not been socialised through their previous schooling in their home countries.

Students’ agency and how student writing may contribute to constructing discourse communities The issues of agency and personal transformations of Vietnamese and Chinese international students in their practices of participation in disciplinary writing practices are important concerns in this study. International student’s agency is understood in light of positioning theory, 27 which is used along with Lillis’ talk around text 28 to interpret data from the interviews. This theory is concerned with how individuals make choices among different courses of actions. Harré and Slocum argue that there is a distinction between what people believe they have or lack a right to perform and their acts in light of that belief. 29 Thus, students’ agency in disciplinary writing can be revealed through how they think they are expected to write, how they want to write and how they actually write. This aspect is also highlighted in Lillis’ framework for interpreting student writing. According to positioning theory,30 people's behaviour, in this case the students' behaviours, can be understood as being intentional. 27

Harré & van Langenhove, 1999. ibid 29 Harré & Slocum, 2003, 176. 30 Harré & van Langenhove, 1999. 28

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From the view of positioning theory, people, as agents, can act intentionally and have potential choice to make changes to the world in which they live. 31 In the same vein, through critical discourse analysis, Fairclough argues for individuals' capability to transform as well as reproducing discourse practices: Subjects are ideologically positioned, but they are also capable of acting creatively to make their own connections between the diverse practices and ideologies to which they are exposed, and to restructure positioning practices and structures.32

In light of these ideas, students’ intention in meaning making can be understood as being positioned by the structures and in the context of this study, the disciplinary requirements and the institutional regulations as well as by their own agency. At the same time, they have the capacity to reposition themselves in terms of transforming discourse practices. In this case, the agentive power they ensure over their writing and communication with the lecturers can result in the lecturers’ attempts to change their own practices, which may contribute to transforming institutional practices. The notion of power is a critical aspect of positioning theory. Within positioning theory, individual differences in positioning are elaborated by Howie33 as being related to the individual's ability to position oneself and others, the intention to position and be positioned and the power to carry out positioning acts. Power is hence defined as the capability of people to achieve positioning acts. According to Vitanova, the concept of agency appears to be challenging for scholars in finding the answer to whether agency is individual, collective, intentional or conscious.34 Fairclough is concerned with the relation between individual agency and discourse practice and points out three ways in which discourse is seen as socially constitutive.35 His view of the three dimensions of meaning is influenced by Halliday’s theory of the three functions of language: the textual, the interpersonal, and the ideational.36 According to Fairclough, firstly, discourse helps to construct “social identities” and “subject positions” for discourse participants. The way in which identities are established in discourse is termed by Fairclough as the “identity” function of language. In this regard, 31

New, 1994. Fairclough, 1992b, 91. 33 Howie, 1999, 53. 34 Vitanova, 2005. 35 Fairclough, 1992b. 36 Halliday, 1978. 32

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student-writers’ identities are constructed in discourse through the ways they position themselves by the stance they take towards the conventions and discourse practices. This argument supports Harré’s view about how individuals position themselves and exercise their agency through accommodating or resisting the discourse structure. Secondly, Fairclough states that discourse is socially constitutive as it contributes to constructing social relations between people, which is related to the “relational” function of language. 37 In academic written discourse, this refers to the aspect of social interaction in writing through which social relationships between people participating in discourse are negotiated. The third aspect of the constructive effects of discourse, according to Fairclough, is its contribution to the construction of systems of knowledge and beliefs, which is embedded in the “ideational” function of language. The constructive effect of discourse in this respect reinforces the view that written discourse not only reflects ideologies embedded in social conventions but also constitutes and constructs systems of knowledge and beliefs. In light of the “social” view of writing and identity, not only the “subject matter” but also “the writer’s portrayal of themselves, the reader, their relationship, the writer’s commitment to the ideational content and their assessment of the reader’s knowledge and belief are central to the text.38 Ivanic attempts to explore the critical approach to issues of identity in academic writing, which is centred on “a commitment to represent the world in a way which accords with the writer’s values, a refusal to be colonised by the privileged world views and discourses of privileged others, and a desire to open up membership of the academic discourse community”. 39 On the one hand, Ivanic’s view of identity reveals an acknowledgement of the significance of the writer’s values and of diversity in meaning making. On the other hand, given the possible discrepancies between what students value and the discourse community expectations in terms of academic writing and the current assessment practices of which student writing is placed at the centre, non-conformism of the conventions involves a kind of taking risk for students. That is, students may be disadvantaged in some situations or even being excluded from the expectations of the discourse community. As Ritchie40 observes, students may experience a conflict in their effort to negotiate a voice of their own and to satisfy the disciplinary or institutional requirements. 37

Fairclough, 1992b. Ivanic, 1997, 94, 95. 39 Ibid, 93. 40 Ritchie, 1998. 38

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The conceptualisation of writing as a process of mediating individual agency in meaning making is strongly supported by researchers such as Arkoudis & Tran, Gee Ivanic, Hyland, Lillis, Liu and Tran. 41 Ivanic 42 pointed out writers, their meanings, values and identities share a significant stake in shaping written discourse. Student agency can be referred to as “an enhancement” of their identity as an active and autonomous constructor of knowledge in discourse.43 Gee44 also elaborates on the writers’ commitment to fit in with the discursive context and their act of writing to help create the context at the same time. Based on the interactive as well as cognitive aspects of academic writing, Hyland observes that members of the discourse community make contributions to the discipline and construct meanings as “insiders” to engage with others in that discipline. 45 Also, the constructive nature of written discourse lies in the fact that academic writing is not monolithic. This is due to the social negotiations of disciplinary values reflecting the process in which knowledge is “constructed, negotiated and made persuasive”.46 Hence, international students’ process of making meaning at the tertiary level can also be referred to as a process of negotiation. This in part originates in their effort to meet course requirements and lecturers’ expectations, which to some degree represents the disciplinary systems of knowledge and beliefs. This process is also related to the values and beliefs shaped by students’ cultural and personal preferences. In this sense, it is the hybridity of their written product as the result of their negotiation of different values that contributes to reconstructing the discourse and the heterogeneity of disciplinary cultures. However, students can be in control of their writing practice, decide to accommodate, resist or challenge the conventional ways of writing in specific disciplines from an informed position rather than from the position of confusion or ambiguity.47 This highlights the need for them to be familiar with the common writing and literacy practices in their disciplines as a starting point. Learners’ agency is highlighted in activity theory48, which focuses on the mediation of mental functioning of individual learners. Drawing on 41

Arkoudis & Tran, 2007; Gee, 1996, Ivanic, 1997, Hyland, 2000, Lillis, 2001, Liu, 2008; Tran, 2011. 42 Ivanic, 1997, 96. 43 Scott, 2000, 114. 44 Gee, 1996. 45 Hyland, 2000, x. 46 ibid, 3. 47 Ridley, 2004, 92. 48 Lantolf, 2002.

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Vygotsky’s theory on mediated learning in the zone of proximal development, Lantolf proposes that activity theory is concerned with: theorising mediation as embedded in, and emerging from, the experiences of others in the present (social), the experiences of others from the past (culture), and the immediate experiences of the individual with these others and with the artefacts they constructed.49

In light of activity theory, international students’ writing can be viewed as a mediated process. This theory highlights the significance of learners in interacting with others in community practices. Thus, participating or engaging legitimately and peripherally in the communities of practices is “learning”.50 Activity theory matches with positioning theory since it also recognises the significance of students’ agency and their capability as active agents in mediating meaning and constructing their own world. The student-writers' agency can be understood to arise out of their acts of meaning making in the texts through which they actively negotiate imposed positionings from their disciplinary requirements for academic writing and reposition themselves through making choices about ways to construct meaning. Lecturers play a significant role in this process of students' repositioning and transforming. Lecturers and their expectations to some degree embody institutional regulations and practices, in which students attempt to engage to achieve their academic goals. Within the institutional context, lecturers help to shape students' negotiation but their practices and interpretations can also be transformed by students' process of repositioning and negotiating their agency itself.

Pedagogic implications: Towards ways of empowering students in academic discourse The previous section discussed the aspect of students’ personal agency embedded in how they make choices in meaning making in disciplinary discourses. This section will focus on issues concerned with facilitating student writing in academic discourses. The approaches to empowering student writing are consistent with what is discussed by Fairclough 51 regarding the constitutive nature of discourse practice. That is, written discourse can be constitutive not only in a conventional way through contributing to reproducing social identities, social relationships and 49

Ibid, 104 Lave & Wenger, 1991. 51 Fairclough, 1992b. 50

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systems of knowledge and beliefs but also in a creative way through contributing to transforming these values. In light of this, students should be given the opportunity to negotiate and draw creatively on the disciplinary practices rather than just merely conform to them. Questioning the exclusive nature of discourse and the transparency of language and texts leads to the tendency to appreciate the hybrid texts rooted in multiple voices. Canagarajah maintains that the academia needs to be more willing to accept that writing involves mediating the beliefs, values and subject positions of writers.52 In a triangulated study, Starfield argues for a re-conceptualisation of discourse community as “less a given than a goal to strive for”.53 That is, meaning is negotiated and generic conventions are formed by the “shifting power relations” in the process of talk among the academic staff rather than by pre-determined sets of expectations. In this sense, Starfield is strongly influenced by Prior54 who promotes the view of academic discourse as “complex, constructed, unfolding events” rather than “closed system susceptible to taxonomic and rule-oriented description”. In the same spirit, Ritchie55 suggests that the staff goal is not to fix students’ writing or thinking but enable them to become active participants in the evolving dialogue of making meaning in the discourse community. Canagarajah maintains that “if we can assume that texts and genres are changing, rather than static, we will adopt a teaching practice that encourages students to creatively rework the conventions and norms of each writing context”.56 These arguments reveal that rather than the rules and norms of writing in a specific discipline, strategies for rhetorical negotiation, which enable students to modify, resist and reorient to the rules, should be provided. In practice, teachers may help to engage students in academic discourse in various ways. Through the concept of “legitimate peripheral participation”, Lave and Wenger argue that learning is linked to increasing participation in the sociocultural community. 57 Cotterall and Cohen 58 propose the use of learners’ prior knowledge based on personal experience and talk in synthesising ideas in line with the new rhetorical context. Clark, Fairclough, Ivanic and Simpson, Canagarajah and Benesch discuss the 52

Canagaraja, in Matsuda, Canagarajah, Harklau, Hyland, & Warschauer, 2003. Starfield, 2001, 133. 54 Prior, 1995, cited in Starfield, 2001, 147. 55 Ritchie, 1998. 56 Canagarajah, in Matsuda, Canagarajah, Harklau, Hyland, & Warschauer, 2003, 162. 57 Lave & Wenger, 1991. 58 Cotterall & Cohen, 2003. 53

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ways to go beyond or find alternatives to the “dominant, institutionalised discourses” by employing the conflicting discourses in ESL academic writing as “a resource” for critical and creative expression, through which the issues of power and difference can be negotiated. 59 From another perspective, Casanave 60 , however, acknowledges the fact that critically examining and challenging the dominant and established rules of the discipline is very difficult for culturally-diverse students given their lack of power within their disciplines. Likewise, it is also hard for the staff to recognise that those students might contribute significantly to disciplinary writing practices in that way.61 The debate about the ways to empower student writing is centred on the view that socially valued ideologies and conventions can be negotiated and creatively adopted. This is suggested to be carried out through the roles of academic staff in accepting new forms of meaning making and encouraging students to transform the conventions. This view of empowering students informs the methodological approach of the study reported in this book given the fact that the practice of student writing in the institutional community should be seen as a site of negotiation and contestation over knowledge rather than a stable discourse. Cadman suggests that international postgraduates’ negotiation between different academic writing values can be facilitated if they are engaged in a reflexive personal composing process which can help international postgraduates to build a bridge between the internal dialogue of self-review which students exchanging cultures must experience and the external challenges presented by the new academic discourse community.62

As indicated in the above quote, Cadman has emphasised international students’ process of self-reflection on different writing values and challenges in their personal writing, through which students’ personal voice or sense of identity can be established. From this perspective, how international students mediate different writing ways is embedded in their personal reflection on their prior experience and the requirements of the discipline they are entering. Canagarajah acknowledges that international students’ prior writing experience from their cultural background can help to “enrich” their writing in the new discourse community. 63 However, 59

Clark, 1992; Fairclough, 1992a; Ivanic & Simpson, 1992; Canagarajah, 2001; Benesch, 2001. 60 Casanave, 1995. 61 ibid 62 Cadman, 1997, 12. 63 Canagarajah, in Matsuda, Canagarajah, Harklau, Hyland, & Warschauer, 2003.

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whether students from a range of cultural backgrounds can draw on their prior writing tradition as a strength rather than a hindrance is a complex issue in reality. In other words, these ideas can only be true in practice once lecturers are willing to value differences and to accept the diversity in meaning making rather than expecting international students to fit in the pre-existing cultures of the institution and sub-cultures of the discipline. The issue of how student writers position themselves in relation to privileged conventions has been pushed to the fore by tutor-led research in writing in higher education.64 In light of the “social” view of writing and identity, not only the “subject matter” but also “the writer’s portrayal of themself, the reader, their relationship, the writer’s commitment to the ideational content and their assessment of the reader’s knowledge and belief” are central to the text.65 Ivanic’s principal aim is to explore the critical approach to issues of identity in academic writing. This is centred on “a commitment to represent the world in a way which accords with the writer’s values, a refusal to be colonised by the privileged world views and discourses of privileged others, and a desire to open up membership of the academic discourse community”. 66 On the one hand, Ivanic’s view of identity reveals an acknowledgement of the significance of the writer’s values and of diversity in meaning making. On the other hand, given the possible mismatches between what students value and the discourse community expectations in terms of academic writing and the current assessment practices of which student writing is placed at the centre, nonconformism of the conventions involves a kind of taking risk for students. That is, they may be disadvantaged in some situations or even be excluded from the expectations of the discourse community. As Ritchie observes, students may experience a conflict in their effort to negotiate a voice of their own and to satisfy disciplinary or institutional requirements.67 The literature concerning ESL students’ academic writing also suggests an alternative view on the issue of student writers’ voice and identity. Stapleton offers a critique of the extended discussions about voice in the second language writing community. He mentioned “they lend power to the notion of voice that is far greater than it deserves”,68 thereby misleading students into seeing that rather than ideas and argumentation, identity should receive greater emphasis. In this sense, he tends to isolate the expression of identity from that of ideas or arguments. In practice, 64

Harklau, 2000; Matsuda, Canagarajah, Harklau, Hyland, & Warschauer, 2003. Ivanic, 1997, 94-95. 66 Ibid, 93. 67 Ritchie, 1998. 68 Stapleton, 2002, 187. 65

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however, the ways writers position themselves by their stance in writing naturally originate in their idea-expression and argumentation. Thus, research concerning students’ participation in disciplinary written discourse is intimately related to issues of how students are positioned by their disciplines and how they resist, accommodate and reshape those positionings.

Conclusion Student academic writing within a discipline tends to operate in a particular social context with its own practices and values.69 Contestation and challenges often arise as a result of students’ negotiation of prior knowledge and ways of writing in response to disciplinary requirements.70 It is hence necessary to explore the ways in which disciplinary discourse community positions student academic writing and how students may negotiate and reshape those positionings through their writing in the discipline. In particular, the discussion of students’ agency and academic writing signals how international students may be viewed as individuals who may be capable of seeking ways to participate in their disciplinary community rather than objects in the transition to higher education. During the last few decades, students have entered universities from a wide range of educational, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The learning contexts they are located in are diverse and no longer reflect the “traditional academic subject boundaries” with conventional values and norms.71 These changes have led to a growing awareness of the significance of supporting “non-traditional” students with academic writing and thus facilitating their participation in institutional practices as academic writing is the key dimension in higher education. In parallel with these important changes, in recent years in Australian, American and British higher education, there has been an expansion of the cohort of international students, who add to the heterogeneity of the student body. Thus, universities are making various attempts to help international students adapt to institutional requirements and contexts through language and learning skills courses and support services. The discussion in this chapter illustrates how students may be empowered in academic writing practices within higher education institutions. It also highlights the challenges facing academic staff and students in doing so. As discussed, how students can be encouraged to 69

Fairclough, 1995; Liddicoat, 1997; Lillis, 2001; Matsuda, 2001a. Lea, 1998. 71 Lea & Stierer, 2000. 70

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negotiate and draw creatively on institutional requirements appears to be important in their active participation in institutional practices. Thus, the study of Chinese and Vietnamese students’ mediation of academic writing needs to explore how students may in practice possibly be engaged in active negotiation and transformation of the conventions. Also, it seems significant to take into account the challenges facing international students and lecturers in this process of transformation and negotiation. The above discussion, which highlights the ways knowledge is constructed and negotiated, reflects the need to conceptualise student writing as a social practice. Based on the review of the key issues related to how student writing is influenced by disciplinary requirements and how they contribute to disciplinary writing, this chapter highlights the need to capture international students’ practices in disciplinary writing through their actual ways of mediating, accommodating, resisting or rejecting disciplinary practices. The next chapter will argue in detail the use of positioning theory 72 and talk around text framework 73 in exploring the students’ personal agency in their journey of participating in disciplinary writing discourse.

72 73

Harré & van Langenhove, 1999. Lillis, 2001.

CHAPTER FIVE THE TRANS-DISCIPLINARY FRAMEWORK FOR CONCEPTUALISING INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC WRITING

Introduction This chapter proposes a trans-disciplinary framework for conceptualising international students’ academic writing within the institutional structure. An outstanding problem in the field is the lack of theory and conceptualisation of international students’ writing practices and teachers’ reflection on student writing. This chapter aims to respond to this gap in the literature. Talk around text1 and positioning theory2 are the analytical tools proposed to interpret students' experiences in engaging in their disciplinary writing, their exercise of personal agency and the extent to what they can transform their own writing practice. Talk around text, with its focus on student-writers' experiences in writing their own texts, offers a framework to explore the students' views, personal desires and potential choices about making meaning in academic writing. However, research on students' academic writing experiences is tied to a two-way relationship which involves not only how the students mediate between different writing ways but also how the discipline and lecturers shape student writing. While the focus of talk around text is on students' writing in higher education and the institutional regulations influencing students' writing from the students' perspectives only, this study attempts to investigate these issues from the lecturers’ views as well. Positioning theory can help to enable an exploration of students' writing experiences and institutional practices from the lecturers' perspectives, which are not addressed by talk around text. At a broader level, positioning theory represents as an overall interpretative framework to investigate the issues of repositioning and 1 2

Lillis, 2001. Harré & van Langenhove, 1999

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personal transformations in terms of academic writing interpretations. These transformations may arise as students attempt to gain membership in their disciplinary written discourse. Positioning theory, which helps to bring into play these aspects, can thus be used as an analytical tool to complement Lillis' heuristic for exploring student writing. The merged framework allows for an exploration of how students mediate between different interpretations of academic writing and whether they go through any personal transformations related to their identity, values about writing and approaches to their participation in disciplinary writing practices. The integration of positioning theory and talk around text represents a trans-disciplinary approach for social analysis of texts, language and discourse. The ideas of Keeves and McKenzie, Leki, Fairclough and Matsuda have been adopted as the grounding for the development of the trans-disciplinary bridge of these two models. 3 Fairclough 4 calls for the need to promote trans-disciplinary dialogue within social theory and research with the aim of developing an approach to text analysis since texts are viewed to be situated in social interaction. According to Keeves and McKenzie, new approaches to educational research evolve from “fertilisation across disciplines”.5 They contend that there may be limited possibility to investigate and address certain issues effectively when those issues are viewed from the perspective of a single discipline. These authors highlight the need to build a bridge between related disciplinary areas to develop new and transformed conceptual frameworks and research approaches on multiple domains of knowledge rather than depending predominantly on a single perspective. In particular, Johnson and Roen argue for the significance of a broader and multidisciplinary approach to exploring second language writing as “no single theory from a single discipline can account for the complex and interacting social, cultural, cognitive, and linguistic processes involved”.6 In a similar vein, Matsuda7 argues that because of its complex nature along with its emerging disciplinary and epistemological shifts, the field of second language writing has emerged to become an interdisciplinary field of inquiry, which should draw on and contribute to other domains of knowledge. The socio-cognitive discipline appears to be one of the potential intellectual domains to be incorporated into second language

3

Keeves & McKenzie, 1999; Leki, 2002; Fairclough, 2003; Matsuda, 2003. Fairclough 5 Keeves & McKenzie, 1999, 210. 6 Johnson & Roen, 1989, 3. 7 Matsuda, 2003. 4

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writing research. 8 The study reported here is related to the issues of Chinese and Vietnamese international students writing in English as a second language in different subject disciplines within the social context of an Australian institution. Hence, at a broader level, it seems relevant to establish a trans-disciplinary tie by integrating the assumptions and logics of sociological theory, in this case positioning theory, into talk around text and developing a merged framework for discourse analysis.

Talk around text Lillis’ heuristic offers insights into the real accounts of the students as the “insiders” or “producers” of their own texts. It is useful for uncovering students’ individual reasons and intentions as their “hidden logics” in the construction of texts.9 This framework enables an exploration of not only the reasons underpinning their specific ways of writing but also their potential choices in constructing disciplinary knowledge, which Lillis refers to as “what the individual student-writers might want to mean in a transformed socio-discursive space”. 10 For instance, within this study, Lin's reason underlying her circular ways of writing the introduction and conclusion revealed in her talk around text, which appear to differ from what has been addressed in the literature about Chinese rhetorical norms, is invisible on the surface of her writing and would otherwise remain behind the scenes without the opportunity for her to reflect on it. Such insights contribute to deepening the understandings of the complexities of students’ accommodating process and their needs within the institutional context. Such insights also help to avoid simplifying and stereotyping national or cultural characteristics of Vietnamese and Chinese students as discussed above. The students’ complex journeys of writing revealed in their talk around text argue for the need to explore the silences in current practices and research on international students' ways of constructing knowledge and to problematise the surface assumptions made about student writing largely based on the analysts' or researchers' analysis of the linguistic features of students' texts.

8

Leki, 2002. Lillis, 2001. 10 Ibid, 51. 9

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Authority Who can you be? Who do you want to be?

Authorial presence How can you say it? How do you want to say it?

Authorship What can you say? What do you want to say? Text Context of situation Context of culture

Figure 5.1: Lillis' framework

Lillis' framework has been adapted to suit the aims and context of this study. Since the study is concerned with teasing out the underlying factors which shape why students choose and why they personally wish to write in a certain way, the “who” questions have been replaced with the “why” questions in the modified version. The why questions: “Why can the students write so?” and “Why do they want to write so?”, also help to reveal students' identities, which the “who” questions in the original framework aims to unpack. Also, the “how” and “what” questions have been focused. This aims to understand students’ negotiation of different approaches to academic writing through what/how they think they are required to write and what/how they desire to write.

Why can you say it? Why do you want to say it?

How can you say it? How do you want to say it?

What can you say? What do you want to say? Text Context of situation Context of culture

Figure 5.2: The modified version of Lillis' framework

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The modified version of Lillis’ framework is suitable for the research objectives of this study since it offers the opportunity to avoid “surface judgments being made about students” intensions through their writing”.11 Instead, it helps to search for deeper understandings of how Chinese and Vietnamese students mediate between different interpretations of academic writing in the host institution from their own perspectives and experiences in producing specific texts for their course. So far, research in the area has explored students’ written texts mainly from the view of an “outsider” like the analyst, the researcher or the teacher.12 In fact, even though students’ voices and experiences in engaging in academic writing practices have become areas of growing focus in recent research, students’ own reflection on their potential choices and their chosen ways of writing in specific texts has been little documented. Thus, listening to students as the “insiders” or the producers talking about their own texts enables the researcher to have insights into the underlying factors influencing their decision in making meaning in these texts. Such inside stories help to uncover the “hidden logic”13 of their writing about which the outsider analyst may not always get it right. Without the stories told by the students themselves, their intentions embedded in what/ how and why to write remain a mystery. Based on the modified version of Lillis’ model, I have asked the Chinese and Vietnamese students to talk about how they negotiated their writing of the first texts and adapted to disciplinary practices. Such a negotiation has been teased out through three main sets of questions: what you thought you were expected to write/what you wanted to write; how you thought you were required to write/how you wanted to write and why you thought you were expected to write so/why you wanted to write so. In constructing talk around text as a tool for interpreting students' accounts of writing in academia, Lillis draws on certain assumptions from critical discourse analysis and New Literacy Studies, in particular the works by Scollon and Scollon, Bakhtin, Fairclough, Gee, and Ivanic. 14 Central to Lillis' heuristic is the notion of language as discourse practice rather than a transparent, static and autonomous representational system.15 Fairclough's views seem to largely influence Lillis' theoretical tool. Acknowledging language as discourse practice, Fairclough proposes a model of critical discourse analysis to explore specific instances of 11

C. Jones, Turner, & Street, 1999, xvii. For example, Pilus, 1996; Tarnopolsky, 2000. 13 Flower, 1994, cited in Lillis, 2001. 14 Scollon & Scollon, 1981; Bakhtin, 1986; Fairclough, 1989; Gee, 1996; Ivanic, 1997. 15 Fairclough, 1989; Bourdieu, 1991; Fairclough, 1992b; Gee, 1996. 12

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language use. This approach highlights the interpretation of the language of the texts in relation to the conventions and explanation of the relationship between the discursive processes and the social practices governing the conventions.16 For example, the interpretation of Vietnamese and Chinese international students' written texts have been based on the explanation of the relationship between textual features, disciplinary conventions, institutional practices and their distinctive cultural writing practices. However, in criticising critical discourse analysis, Widdowson argues that rather than focusing on the analyst's view of the text alone, critical discourse analysis should take into account the perspectives of the “producers and consumers” of the texts.17 Lillis' framework helps to deal with Widdowson's concern by enabling the interpretation of the texts from the insiders' eyes, that is, from the perspectives of the Chinese and Vietnamese international student-writers who construct the texts. In this study, student writing is also looked at from the perspectives of the consumers of the texts, in the case of this study, the lecturers’ perspectives of the students' texts. Lillis' framework is also informed by the ideas of Scollon and Scollon and Gee about essayist literacy. 18 These authors argue that writing in formal schooling tends to privilege particular practices of particular social groups. Lillis integrates this perspective and views the institutional practices in higher education as restricting “those of people who, culturally and communally, have access to and engage in a range of other practices”. 19 This perspective can be seen embedded in her framework through the questions such as “What can the student-writers write? /What do the student-writers want to write?”, which offer clues for exploring the possible gaps between the disciplinary values and the students' desires in academic writing (see Figure 5.2). Lillis' framework is therefore useful for interpreting the possible differences between Chinese and Vietnamese students’ own values about academic writing and their interpretations of the specific requirements of the distinct discipline they engage in. This allows for a trace of the understanding of how Chinese and Vietnamese students negotiate different values of academic writing and factors underlying their intentions of meaning making and meaning negotiating in their distinctive disciplines. Of significance to talk around text is the notion of addressitivity. According to Lillis, addressitivity with regard to student meaning making 16

Fairclough, 1989; 1992b. Widdowson, 1998. 18 Scollon & Scollon, 1981; Gee, 1996. 19 Lillis, 2001, 39. 17

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in academic writing refers to “the voices that students-writers bring with them to their specific acts of meaning making in writing, as well as the voices they feel they must respond to”. 20 This view governing the talk around text model is important for exploring Vietnamese and Chinese students' voices from their socio-cultural life world as well as voices they attempt to respond to within their disciplines. Drawing on Bakhtin's argument 21 that voices in this context are multidimensional, Lillis distinguishes between voice as experience and voice as language. From her perspective, voice as experiences is tied to the configurations of life experiences the students bring along to their courses. This view helps to unpack dimensions of life experiences the Chinese and Vietnamese students may bring into their practices of making meaning. These life experiences may include being an international student with particular interests and motivations in taking the course at an Australian university, a teacher, a finance officer, an undergraduate student in China or Vietnam, a Chinese or Vietnamese. Voice as language sees specific wordings from the student-writers' texts as the mediational means through which they engage in the academic writing practice of their discipline.22 This view offers a pathway to interpret what the Vietnamese and Chinese students are doing in their writing and why they write as they do based on their account of constructing the specific words, phrases and paragraphs in their own written work. The discussion above has addressed the contribution of talk around text to the analysis of the students' accounts on constructing their texts. Talk around text highlights the need to listen to students as producers of the texts exploring what is involved in their own experiences of meaning making and engaging in their disciplinary writing practices. Extracts from the students' written texts and their reflection on writing these texts are fundamental to this framework. Talk around text is thus a powerful framework for linking specific instances of student writing to their values and interpretations of meaning making, which may be bound to their individual preferences, their cultural writing traditions, the disciplinary and institutional requirements. The students' perspectives on their own acts of writing and their relationship with specific wordings at any one time help to reveal both the meaning of the words as well as the meaning within the socio-cultural context governing their writing. It has been argued in the above discussion that talk around text examines the gaps between students' personal preferences and institutional 20

Ibid, 45. Bakhtin, 1986. 22 Lillis, 2001. 21

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requirements of meaning making. However, this framework does not focus on the issues of students' positioning and repositioning themselves when they first interact with different values of disciplinary academic writing and as they progress through their courses. Lillis' framework is designed to address the aims of her research, which are related to student-writers' desires for choices in meaning making in higher education and the regulations of meaning making in academic practices. In fact, in their attempt to respond to disciplinary requirements, international students may reposition their beliefs and interpretations of academic writing. That is, they can exercise power to better understand their disciplinary requirements and take control of their academic practices. These issues are central to the research being reported here because this study seeks to explore how Vietnamese and Chinese students exercise their personal agency and to what extent they may have power as well as how they use power to reformulate their understandings of meaning making in academic writing. In this study, in addition to students' talks about their accounts of writing their own texts, their reflection on their writing practices and on academic writing expectations is examined as they engage more in the course. The reflection conversations provide the space to explore how the Vietnamese and Chinese students shape and reshape their identities through negotiating the positionings in their discipline and whether they achieve any personal changes in terms of their interpretations of academic writing. Positioning theory proposes a broad framework for interpreting the student-writers' repositionings and how they exercise personal agency to increase their ability to understand and negotiate the disciplinary requirements for academic writing. Furthermore, in order to explore academic writing practices in higher education, Lillis places the experiences of student-writers in the central stage of the talk around text framework. This framework has been designed to look at the issue of student writing from the students' perspectives. The investigation of Vietnamese and Chinese students' academic writing is however linked to the interpretations of not only the students' own perceptions of academic writing but also the influences of the disciplinary and institutional writing practices, knowledge and ideologies upon students' writing. These influences can be seen through students' negotiation of disciplinary requirements as well as through lecturers’ expectations of their students' writing since in many ways, the lecturers represent the knowledge and institutional structures that support the discourse community of a given discipline. Thus, in order to have insights into international students' academic writing practices, it seems

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valuable to investigate the lecturers' comments on students' written texts and their perceptions of disciplinary writing requirements. While talk around text framework is not designed to address the lecturers' perspectives, positioning theory, which provides the tool to interpret how institutional structures position students' writing, can be combined with talk around text to explore the perspectives of both the lecturers and the students.

Positioning theory This section addresses the use of positioning theory as an analytical tool along with talk around text to investigate the issues around the Vietnamese and Chinese students' practices of academic writing within an institutional context. It begins with the discussion of the theoretical assumptions underpinning positioning theory. The discussion also focuses on the common threads underpinning positioning theory and talk around text. This section then presents the central aspects of positioning theory in relation with the context and aims of this research. It is argued that the concept of positioning provides a way of exploring issues related to individual agency and power exercised by the students in order to better understand and negotiate academic writing requirements. Also, positioning theory offers insights into how lecturers' expectations and awareness of disciplinary conventions shape student writing and how they exercise personal agency. The last part of this section discusses the analytical terms which are used in the analysis of the students' and lecturers' positioning.

Origins of positioning theory The theoretical orientations underpinning positioning theory spring from the philosophical hermeneutics of Gadamer 23 and the social constructionist views of Vygotsky24, Wittengstein25 and Bakhtin.26 Davies and Harré argue that individual positions in the social world are linguistically and socially constructed. 27 Social reality is constructed in human interactions and language is used to socially construct meaning in communication.28 Inherent in both positioning theory and Lillis' heuristic 23

Gadamer, 1975. Vӻgotsky, 1965. 25 Wittengstein, 1967. 26 Bakhtin, 1981, 1986. 27 Davies & Harré, 1990. 28 Rorty, 1979. 24

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are the fundamental views of language as a discourse practice and meaning making as a social practice. Through key notions of dialogicality and addressitivity, Bakhtin argues that language constructs meaning rather than simply conveys meaning.29 His view of language as living utterances signals the nature of language in social interactions as both dialogical and dynamic rather than unitary and fixed. Both positioning theory and talk around text framework share this dynamic conception of language in social interactions. Embedded in these two approaches is the integral assumption that meaning making, whether in conversations or in writing, is a social practice and meaning is constructed between participants in dialogue or interaction rather than being transmitted from one person to another. The other major influence upon positioning theory and talk around text is Bakhtin's (1986, p.95) concept of addressitivity: An essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance is its quality of being directed to someone, its addressitivity… Both the composition and particularly the style of the utterance depends on those to whom the utterance is addressed, how the speaker (or writer) senses and imagines his addressee and the force of their effect on the utterance.30

The above argument acknowledges the impact of addressitivity and the power relations upon the construction of meaning in interaction. Harré and van Langenhove refer to the notion of power relations as the “local moral order”. 31 Within positioning theory, this local moral order is associated with clusters of rights, duties and obligations, which contribute to the shaping of human interactions. Drawing on Bakhtin's concept of addressitivity, Lillis also highlights the influential role of the addressees along with their power, within the context of higher education, the lecturers and tutors, in and for meaning making in student writing.32 The overriding intellectual underpinning of positioning theory is situated in Vygotsky's model of thought and language in which individual and private use of language emerges from its social and public use. Positioning theory thus explores the view of dialogue as “involving oneself and the significant other in making sense of rules and meanings”.33 As discussed above, this is intimately related to the notion of addressitivity addressed by Bakhtin, which is fundamental to Lillis' heuristic. During the 29

Bakhtin, 1981. Bakhtin, 1986, 95. 31 Harré & van Langenhove, 1999. 32 Lillis, 2001. 33 Howie & Peters, 1996, 57. 30

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process in which the individual appropriates knowledge and makes it become his/her own, another individual involved in the interaction has a central role in the mediation of meaning.34 The role of the mediational means (mediators) in facilitating the process of transformation of meaning is acknowledged by Vygotsky. In a similar vein, Lillis explicitly challenges the binary position of language as either transparent or constitutive and takes up the view of the “individual-operating-with-mediational means”.35 The mediational means which are central to Lillis' model are specific wordings the students writers employ in meaning making.

Central aspects of positioning theory Aspects of discursive constructions of storylines, possibilities for individuals to reposition themselves and the notion of power are at the heart of positioning theory. Positioning theory enables an insightful representation of the students' inter-subjective worlds that would otherwise remain invisible, thereby allowing for an exploration of not only what the students do and why they do so in their writing but also their identity formation. Positioning theory refers to the discursive constructions of individual storylines and concepts through which a person's actions can be made intelligible and seen as social acts. 36 Harré and van Langenhove argue that “the constant flow of everyday life in which we all take part is fragmented through discourse into distinct episodes that constitute the basic elements of both our biographies and of the social world”. 37 According to the authors, the discursive practice of positioning can help to make personal identity visible in three ways: through displaying one's agency in presenting one's choice for some action among different possibilities, through expressing one's point of view on the world and by presenting some personal experience or past event in one's biography. Van Langenhove and Harré believe one's identity is also bound to one's personal experiences, a view not dissimilar to Lillis' view of voices as experiences, which emphasises the link between the dimensions of students' life experiences they bring into their practices of meaning making and their voices in writing. In the context of this research, the identities of the Vietnamese and Chinese students tend to be revealed in all the above-mentioned forms. Their identities can be inherent in the ways they stress their personal 34

Ibid. Wretsch, 1991, cited in Lillis, 2001, 46. 36 van Langenhove & Harré, 1999a, 16. 37 Harré & van Langenhove, 1999, 4. 35

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agency through making choices among their different interpretations of writing. They can express their identity by referring to their selfconsciousness through the use of grammatical device such as personal pronoun “I”. Also, the students' act of narration as one of the forms of displaying personal identities is related to their reflection on writing the first text for their course. This helps to reveal their experience as Chinese or Vietnamese international students engaging in disciplinary writing practices at an Australian university. These storylines embedded in the social process of discursive positioning allow for an exploration of how the students construct and reconstruct their identities. Similarly, the lecturers' identities can be made visible in these ways. For example, they can display their agency through claiming responsibility for a certain action such as evaluating students' texts, through expressing their statements on the views they have about the disciplinary requirements and through presenting a description of an episode in their teaching life. Positioning theory also refers to the possibilities of individual's multiple and contradictory interpretations and multiple identities within multiple discursive practices. Harré and van Langenhove contend, “Fluid positionings, not fixed roles, are used by people to cope with situations they usually find themselves in”.38 Positioning theory highlights the shifts in positions as the narrative unfolds and as people interact with artefacts within discursive practices. 39 Initial positionings can be challenged and this leads to the possibilities for individuals to reposition themselves, thereby reconstructing their identities. Hence people experience changes through the opportunities to act agentically and through the creation of new positions for themselves. Winslade 40 argues that the possibility of contradiction in discursive positioning is necessary for individuals to exercise agency and make changes. This view is relevant for the context of this multiple case study, which includes the possibility of the Chinese and Vietnamese students being able to confront different ideas about academic writing as newly enrolled students embarking on their first assignment and how these may change as they engage more in their course. As a result, their former interpretations of academic writing may be contradicted and challenged. The students may shift their beliefs and may actively negotiate ways of constructing meaning in light of different beliefs in the attempt to take control of their writing practice and thus their academic life. Through reshaping their interpretations and repositioning themselves, the students 38

Ibid, 17. Davies & Harré, 1999. 40 Winslade, 2003. 39

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are taking action to achieve their goals. In this way, positioning theory explores the multiple interpretations, intentions and possible changing positions of the Vietnamese and Chinese students as they participate in their disciplinary discourse community. Individuals’ multiple interpretations and changing positions are intimately associated with personal agency, which will be discussed next. This study is concerned with the issues of personal agency and personal changes with regard to the academic writing interpretations of Chinese and Vietnamese students in their disciplinary practices. In light of positioning theory, individual agency, including actions to transform society, always operates within and through a social structure.41 Within this study, students’ individual agency initiates take place from the social basis of their disciplinary and institutional structure. Their intentions in meaning making can be understood as being positioned by disciplinary requirements and institutional regulations as well as by their own agency, which emerges out of the social context of the institutional structure. At the same time, students also have the capability to reposition themselves in terms of transforming institutional practices. In this case, the agentive power they ensure over their writing and communication with the lecturers can result in transforming academic practices. Within the institutional context, the lecturers help to shape the students' negotiation but their practices and interpretations can also be transformed by the students' process of interacting with lecturers, repositioning and negotiating their personal agency. For example, the unfamiliar ways of constructing arguments which the Chinese and Vietnamese students may bring into academia help to open up the space for the lecturers to exercise personal agency through to what extent they accept the diversity in meaning making, thereby positioning and repositioning their interpretations and teaching practices in terms of academic writing. These offer possible conditions for the institutional practices to be transformed. Neo-Vygotskyan approaches assume that agency is the result of “a relationship that is constantly co-constructed and renegotiated with those around the individual and with the society at large”. 42 Student-writers' agency can be understood to arise out of their acts of meaning making in the texts through which they actively negotiate imposed positionings from their discipline through its requirements for academic writing and reposition themselves through making choices about ways to construct meaning. Lecturers play a significant role in this process of students' repositioning and transforming. The lecturers and their expectations 41 42

Bhaskar, 1989, 36-37. Lantolf & Pavlenko, 2001, 148.

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embody the institutional regulations and practices, with which the students attempt to engage to achieve their academic goals. The notion of power is a critical aspect of positioning theory. Within this theory, individual differences in positioning are elaborated by Howie43 as being related to individual's ability to position oneself and others, intention to position and be positioned and power to carry out positioning acts. Power is hence defined as the capability of people to achieve positioning acts. Power exists on several levels. As Howie and Peter emphasised: One is on the level of moral standing, the right which an individual has to position themselves and others, a moral authority. Another level is that of skill or capacity to utilise this moral standing or right.44

In this study, power is bound to disciplinary practices as well as lecturers' capability to shape students' writing and students’ ability to use skills to negotiate imposed positionings. In a certain way, power is inherent in lecturers' and students' negotiation of each other's roles, statuses or positions. Given the context of this study where the Vietnamese and Chinese students make efforts to gain membership and take control of their academic writing, some of the specific skills linked to positioning power would be consultative and negotiation skills, strategic planning and reflective and self-monitoring skills. For example, some students may ask their lecturers to explain more explicitly some requirements for their written assignments either directly during class discussions or through emails. Some may adopt consultative skills by discussing with their lecturers regarding the outlines or the drafts of their written work and then make attempts to redraft their writing. During the process of redrafting, students may tend to reflect on and negotiate lecturers' suggestions for changes and their original ways of constructing the texts. Also, students' attempts in making the outlines for their writing can indicate their strategic planning. These skills employed by Chinese and Vietnamese students demonstrate their efforts to position and reposition themselves as those who are determined to understand the disciplinary conventions and how to act on these, thereby achieving high results for their writing and becoming successful in their academic life. In this way, students’ actions may contribute to repositioning power relations in their academic context. That is, they actively exercise their own power to allow them to participate in shaping disciplinary written discourse and conventions, to which most 43 44

Howie, 1999, 53. Howie & Peter, 1996, 61.

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often students are expected to conform. Students' skills and capability to negotiate power relations lead to the possibility of repositioning lecturers' views through how to modify their writing instructions and make them more explicit, what to do to assist international students in terms of academic writing and how to refine their teaching in general. Seen in this light, students' participation in disciplinary writing and their actions can nurture the potential to change and transform academic practices. There are several forms of positioning which can occur during discursive practices.45 The most likely forms to emerge from the conversations of the students and the lecturers in this study are moral positioning and intentional positioning. Moral positioning is defined by van Langenhove and Harré46 as the ways people are positioned with respect to the moral orders in which they carry out social actions. In the case of this study, the term “moral positioning” can be understood to refer to the intentional actions of the students and the lecturers revealed through the ways they discuss their writing or teaching practices and thus build up their academic or teaching world. For example, Andy, the lecturer in Economics, refers to international students as those who have to follow “the rules of the game” at the Australian university. By positioning international students in this way, he implies that within the moral context of the university, students have the responsibility to conform to institutional requirements. Through Andy's positioning of international students, the institution appears to be the representation of regulation and authority. Van Langenhove and Harré also argue that when an individual positions somebody else, that is often associated with his/her self-positioning.47 In the example of Andy above, by referring to the students as being involved in the academic “game”, the lecturer also tends to position himself as someone who is responsible for regulating and ensuring the local moral order of the institution. Through this form of moral positioning, Andy is reproducing the institutional practices in which most often international students are expected to accommodate institutional conventions and lecturers' expectations. Positions are understood as clusters of rights, duties and obligations.48 Hence, the ways students and lecturers position themselves and each other are bound to their rights, duties and obligations within the moral order of the institutional context. Van Langenhove and Harré contend that “the rights for self-positioning and other-positioning are unequally distributed and not all situations allow for or call for an intentional positioning of the 45

van Langenhove & Harré, 1999. Ibid. 47 ibid 48 Harré & Slocum, 2003. 46

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participants”.49 According to them, there are four different categories of intentional positioning: situations of deliberate self-positioning, situations of forced self-positioning, situations of deliberate positioning of others and situations of forced positioning of others. Deliberate self-positioning arises when one wishes to express his/her personal identity.50 For example, in her account of writing the text about how motivation influences second language acquisition, Lin, the Chinese student in Education, often refers to her personal experience as an interpreter and positions herself as someone who is alien to the field of language teaching. She does this to demonstrate the challenges she encounters when writing her first assignment about language development due to her lack of personal experience in the subject area. With regard to forced self-positioning, van Langenhove and Harré propose that it is different from deliberate self-positioning in that “the initiative now lies with somebody else rather than the person involved”.51 In the case of this study, forced self-positioning is related to how students position themselves in the ways they think they are expected by their lecturers or their subject disciplines. For example, Xuân, a Vietnamese student in this study, has rich experience in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teaching but she avoids including it in her assignment about how age influences second language acquisition since she believes that personal experience is not welcomed by her lecturer in academic writing. Deliberate positioning of others is that one's intentional positioning of oneself in a certain way can lead to the positioning of someone else in the correlative position.52 An example of deliberate positioning of others is that during the consultation with her lecturer, Hao, the Chinese student in Economics, always positions herself as an international student who is new to the course. Her positioning in turn drives her lecturer into the position of being expected to understand the difficulties facing a newlyenrolled international student in the subject and to explain the assignment requirements to her more explicitly. The last form of intentional positioning, forced positioning of others, occurs in situations when an individual is forced by someone else to position another person. This category of intentional positioning is not relevant in this study, so it is not included in this discussion. In conclusion, positioning theory stresses the importance of how people's intentional acts can be revealed through the ways they position 49

van Langenhove & Harré, 1999, 23. Ibid, 24. 51 Ibid, 26. 52 ibid 50

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themselves and others. The student's world is woven in the fabric of storylines. The intentions underlying the individual student's ways of meaning making and her/his acts of writing can be made sense of within storylines which are seen to be unfolding from the perspective of positioning theory. Each storyline is associated with a certain positioning of the students in relation with their disciplinary requirements for academic writing and their lecturers, who in a sense represent the institutional structure and in this case the Education or Economics discipline within the Australian university.

The trans-disciplinary framework for analysing lecturers' perspectives and students' practices This section presents the interpretive framework developed for the analysis of the students' practices in engaging in their disciplinary academic writing and their lecturers' perspectives. This framework, which is presented in Figure 5.3, is a trans-disciplinary integration of the two analytical tools: Lillis' talk around text and Harré's positioning theory. I have constructed this interpretive framework based on the key ideas discussed earlier in the first part of this chapter. As has been argued in these sections, talk around text offers an analytical tool for interpreting students' specific instances of writing, their intentions underlying specific ways of writing and their potential choices about making meaning. Whereas, positioning theory allows for an insight into lecturers' views of disciplinary academic writing and students' personal agency as well as personal changes arising from their attempts to participate in the disciplinary written discourse. The two analytical tools, woven together, represent a frame for linking students’ specific instances in meaning making to how they mediate between different interpretations of academic writing and how they exercise their personal agency as well as power to gain access into disciplinary writing practices. Within the context of this study, the combination of talk around text and positioning theory as an integrated framework enables me to get inside the students' practices in constructing their own texts and the lecturers' views on disciplinary academic writing conventions, which are central to the research questions of this study.

The Trans-disciplinary Framework Students

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Lecturers

Disciplinary requirements Lecturers’ expectations and practices

Institutional regulations Students’ practices What they expect students to write How they expect students to write Why they expect students to write so

What they can write / What they want to write How they can write / How they want to write Why they write so / Why they wish to write so

Texts Students’ talks around texts Positioning conversations

Students’ Texts Lecturers’ comments on texts Lecturers’ conversations

Students’ repositioning

Lecturers’ repositioning

Agency

Discourse

Institutional practices

Figure 5.3: An integrated framework for interpreting students' academic writing practices and lecturers' views

The framework includes three layers, which represent three categories inherent in positioning theory: discourse, agency and institutional practices.53 The three dimensions of Lillis' talk around text are embedded in the second level of the framework, which is centred on the issue of agency. The first level of the framework refers to discourse. In this study, discourse for students is considered to be related to their written texts, their accounts of writing these texts and their latter positioning conversations on their writing practices. With regard to the lecturers, discourse is tied to the students' texts and their comments on the students' texts, their statements on their expectations and their disciplinary values. Discourse offers the context for the students' agency, the lecturers' agency and the institutional practices to emerge. The second level of the framework deals with the aspect of agency. Within this study, students' agency is understood as their intentions and personal choices in relation to meaning making in academic writing. The students' ways of constructing their texts can be bound to their awareness of their lecturers' expectations and the disciplinary requirements, their distinctive Chinese or Vietnamese writing tradition, their personal preferences in meaning making and their negotiation of these different interpretations of academic writing. The 53

Nellhaus, 1998, 18-19.

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lecturers' agency emerges from the reasons underpinning their comments on specific instances of students' writing as well as their views on students' writing experiences, their own teaching practice and the disciplinary values in terms of academic writing. Within positioning theory, individual agency operates within social structure but also helps to form social relations. 54 The institutional practices, which are addressed at the third level of the framework, can be interpreted in relation to the lecturers' expectations, the course guidelines, the disciplinary as well as institutional requirements for academic writing and the students’ practices. The structures of the disciplines can shape students' writing and at the same time offer the possibilities for the students to reproduce or transform the disciplinary practices. The integrated framework allows for an exploration of the agency of the Vietnamese and Chinese students and institutional practices through the students' texts, their initial positioning and their repositioning in the latter reflection conversations. The ways the students exercise their personal agency are embedded in their capability to act or to mediate between different interpretations of academic writing. The students' agency can be interpreted based on exploring Lillis' questions related to what the students actually write in their texts/what they desire to write; how they actually say it/how they want to say it and why they write that way/why they wish to write that way. The student's personal agency thus arises out of the ways they talk about their intentions and how they made choice among different ways of writing revealed in the talk around text. From the developed framework, the students' personal agency is also revealed from another dimension through how they reflect on and reposition their beliefs of disciplinary academic writing practices at six months of progressing through their course. Therefore, within this framework, the students' negotiation of different academic writing interpretations is explored not only through how they position themselves in their actual construction of their texts but also through how they reposition themselves and reconstruct their identities in relation with different values of academic writing over a six months period. The second level of the developed framework also addresses the lecturers' personal agency. Their agency can stem from their evaluation of students' written work, which reveals what they expect (do not expect) their students to write, how they expect (do not expect) their students to express it and why they expect (do not expect) so. At this level, the interpretative framework also allows for a comparison of the values and beliefs of the lecturers and the students with regard to academic writing 54

Ratner, 2000; Harvey, 2002.

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practices through exploring their views on specific instances of meaning making in the same written texts. In addition, the lecturers' agency can arise from their initial discussion about their expectations on students' writing and their perceptions of the disciplinary values. It is through the ways the lecturers position their students, their own teaching practice and their discipline that their personal agency emerges. Lecturers’ personal agency can also be shown through their repositioning of their own views of disciplinary academic writing and their attempts to change their academic practices based on their deeper understandings of students’ needs. At the third level of the integrated framework, institutional practices deal with the aspects of the context in which the Chinese and Vietnamese students' practices of academic writing are situated. The institutional practices are related to the disciplinary requirements for academic writing in Education and Economics within the Australian university, the lecturers' expectations, the institutional regulations and the system of ideologies and beliefs governing these regulations. The institutional structure is the representation of power as the students often make efforts to accommodate what it values. It is through the discourse tied to the students' texts, their accounts of negotiating different approaches to writing in constructing their own texts, their repositioning as well as the lecturers' discussion about student writing, their professional world and their discipline that the picture of the institutional practices surrounding students' academic writing is made visible. Students' writing practices are shaped by those structures through its requirements and conventions in terms of academic writing in the subject disciplines. The students may reproduce the institutional practices by conforming to those requirements and conventions, thereby furthering the academic routines and contributing to maintaining the power as domination of the structures. However, the institutional practices can be transformed because the students bring with them their personal aspirations as well as their cultural values in meaning making into their disciplinary writing practices and have the capability to interact with their lecturers in different ways.

Conclusion Research on international students' academic writing in English medium universities has tended to rely on the analysis of formal linguistic properties of the texts or the description of students' writing practices.55 While offering a general picture of the students' academic writing, it does 55

Nguyen, 1989; Ferguson, 1997; Phan, 2001.

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not comprehensively reflect students' intentions underpinning their particular ways of meaning making. Such a research approach does not tend to address a variety of challenges and conflicts that students may encounter when mediating between their different interpretations of academic writing and negotiating their multiple identities. The integrated framework developed in this book, which draws on Lillis' talk around text model and Harré's positioning theory, helps to move beyond these limitations. This framework enables the interpretation of the Vietnamese and Chinese students' intentions and negotiation of values in meaning making through specific instances of their writing, their discussions about writing these and their repositioning. These dimensions help to capture how Chinese and Vietnamese students exercise personal agency and go through transformations in terms of academic writing practices. The developed framework also represents as an analytical tool to interpret the lecturers' comments on the students' written texts and their perspectives of the disciplinary requirements. Positioning theory has been used to enrich Lillis’ model for the analysis of students’ voices within institutional context and how they may shift their perceptions of academic writing as they progress through their courses. Positioning theory is concerned with aspects of dominant discourse rules and conventions, rights, duties and obligations in discursive practices.56 This theory highlights students’ positions within the institutional structures and how they may reposition their ways of academic writing over a period of time. It thus allows an exploration of how the Chinese and Vietnamese students exercise personal agency through making choices among different ways of meaning making, accepting, accommodating or rejecting dominant conventions within the institutional realities of the university. Positioning theory is also adopted to interpret students' writing and the institutional practices from the lecturers' perspectives, which are not addressed by Lillis' talk around text,57 thereby adding an important layer to the analysis. The use of this trans-disciplinary framework in the data analysis demonstrates the benefit to build a bridge between related disciplinary areas in order to develop new and transformed conceptual research approach. The two analytical tools employed in this research have been shown to inform each other in powerful ways. The study therefore suggests the possibility and value of using such an analytical framework in investigating the experiences of a broader range of students in participating in disciplinary practices in higher education. 56 57

Harré & van Langenhove, 1999. Lillis, 2001.

CHAPTER SIX DIFFERENT FORMS OF ADAPTATION TO ACADEMIC WRITING PRACTICES

Introduction This chapter examines the complexities and the divergence of the adaptation process that international students go through in their efforts to mediate academic writing in English medium institutions. Individual students’ reflection shows the emergence of four main types of adaptation that they make in their process of participating in disciplinary writing practices. These are described in this chapter as: committed adaptation, surface adaptation, reverse adaptation and hybrid adaptation. The chapter shows that international students’ adaptation appears to be shaped by not only cultural aspects and external forces such as the institutional practices, disciplinary requirements and lecturers’ expectations but also internal factors such as individual desires, personal motivations and personal situations. While language and cultural issues tend to be often focused in the literature, students’ personal agency, desires and motivations, which are central to their experiences in knowledge construction in host institutions, appear to be less brought to the fore. The application of Lillis’ heuristic for exploring student writing reveals the significance of having insights into the real accounts of the students as the “insiders” or “producers” in producing their own texts and exploring students’ individual reasons and desires embedded in their construction of ESL texts.1 This model provides space for the students’ voices and their intentions in meaning making to be heard. The analysis of students’ reflection on their writing experiences shows the mismatches between what appears on their writing and their desires in what/how/why to write. The analysis also reveals the tensions between students’ intentions underpinning their specific ways of writing and their potential choices in writing. Such insights indicate a critical need to avoid simplifying and stereotyping national or cultural characteristics of Vietnamese and .

1

Tran, 2009, 2011.

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Chinese students. The students’ complex journeys of adaptation suggest the importance to explore the silences in current practices and research on ESL students' ways of constructing knowledge in academic writing. Their stories warn against the risk of making surface assumptions about student writing largely based on the analysts' or researchers' analysis of linguistic features of students' texts since these assumptions may not always truly reflect what the international student writers intended to mean or desired to mean.

Challenging the “deficit model” and re-conceptualising the adaptation of international students Over the past couple of decades, there has been a tendency in the literature to problematise international students. 2 Challenges facing international students during their adaptation process to English medium higher education have often been assumed to be predominantly related to language problems or cultural differences, which arise from the students themselves. This approach3 tends to view international students and their adaptation from a deficit frame and implies that lecturers should help to “correct” the problem. This approach also assumes the sole onus of adaptation on international students to adjust to what is required of them.4 In other words, the one-way adaptation of international students to institutional practices determined by power relations and disciplinary conventions rather mutual adaptation tends to be promoted. Extensive research indicates that language aspects tend to create the major difficulties for international students in adapting to their institutional practices. 5 Challenges facing international students throughout their adaptation to host institutions are also attributed to the unfamiliar learning styles and ways of constructing knowledge, the differences between “eastern” and “western” teaching and learning paradigms and their lack of the ability to adapt to what is expected of them.6 Authors such as Baker and Pratt have argued that in Chinese tradition, knowledge seems to be “transmitted” and “mastered” rather than “discovered”. 7 From the 2

Samuelowicz, 1987; Elsey, 1990; Lacina, 2002. Samuelowicz, 1987; Elsey, 1990; Lacina, 2002. 4 McLean & Ransom, 2005, 45. 5 Samuelowicz, 1987; Elsey, 1990; Ballard & Clanchy, 1995; Robertson, Line, Jones, & Thomas, 2000; Lacina, 2002; Sawir, 2005; Wang, 2011. 6 For example, Ballard, 1987; Samuelowicz, 1987; Ryan, 2000; McInnes, 2001; Barker, 2002. 7 Pratt, 1992, 313, cited in Barker, 2002, 181. 3

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perspective of the British tutors in Jin and Cortazzi’s research8, Chinese students’ problems in writing are related to their tendency to rely on proverbs and their difficulty to organise ideas in a logical way. This claim may be rooted in the fact that Chinese students in this setting adopt an approach to developing arguments which was considered logical in their prior writing experiences but unfamiliar to the new system. Phan recognises that Vietnamese writing approaches such as indirectness and circularity shaped by Vietnamese historical circumstance and culture have led to some generalisations about Vietnamese students in Australian institutions “as having a “lack of confidence” or “being passive” or “rote learners” who are good at only memorisation, reproduction and plagiarism”.9 Authors such as Volet and Renshaw 10 and Volet and Kee 11 have criticised the stream of literature that positions Asian students’ learning approaches as stable and fixed across educational contexts. In particular, these authors point out that the images of Southeast Asian learners have been portrayed based on a stereotyped, negative and static view of their learning styles. As a result, these above views may fail to consider how international students may be flexible in adapting their learning in response to the requirements of the new academic context. Some authors assume that Asian international students' learning approaches adopted in English medium institutions seem to be contextually based rather than culturally situated.12 In the other words, their learning styles have been tailored to meet the requirements of the specific learning context rather than being shaped by “characteristics of individual or cultural groups”.13 These studies thus highlight the flexibility and adaptability of international students in their participation in the host institution’s academic culture. Making a connection between international students’ experiences in the host institution and issue of cultural differences contributes to some extent to our understandings of the preferred ways of learning and values international students may bring alongside their international education. Yet, within the current changing global context, relying too much on the link between cultural factors and the adaptation of Asian students may limit the possibilities to explore the complexities, variables as well as

8

Jin & Cortazzi, 1993, cited in Stephens, 1997. Phan, 2001, 3. 10 Volet & Renshaw, 1996. 11 Volet & Kee, 1993. 12 Volet & Kee, 1993; Wong, 2004. 13 Volet & Kee, 1993, 3. 9

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invisible aspects in international students’ processes to participate in Australian institutional practices.14 Another trend in the literature therefore argues against the assumptions of international students as a homogeneous group or a number of groups with typical linguistic problems or learning style difficulties. Koehne15, for example, is one of the authors who call for the need to explore the complex web of subjectivities and identities of international students rather than locating them in certain cultural groups. This stream of research argues for the significance to link international students’ adaptation to their process of mediating identities. 16 Other authors also tend to challenge the generalisations of Asian students as passive and productive learners and illustrate their arguments by drawing on the successful academic performances of students from Asian backgrounds.17 The characteristics, needs and expectations of international students seem to be different and conflicting. Many studies18 seem to ignore the ways in which Asian identities may be constructed in relation to “Asian modernities and Asian diaspora spaces”. International students’ strategic agency, discursive power, individual intentions and personal motivations, which tend to represent what may lie behind their personal experiences to mediate their ways of constructing knowledge, seem to be rarely brought to the fore. What the students themselves actually said about their educational routes and adaptation has not been accounted for.19 Kettle’s research20, which examines how a Thai international student negotiated his academic identities in an attempt to engage in his disciplinary practice, is one of the very few studies exploring international students’ real “educational routes” and in particular, the ways they actually adapt to their institutional practices. Her research reinforces the image of an international student who could act as an “active agent” in gaining access to his academic world. This chapter is an attempt to follow Kettle’s call for the need to focus more on spelling out the complexities of international students’ process of adaptation to disciplinary writing practices. The dada from interviews with the international students in this research as explained in Chapter 1 and Chapter 5 indicated various points at which these students tended to adapt to their disciplinary requirements 14

Tran, 2007. Koehne, 2005. 16 Koehne, 2005; Fincher, 2011; Kuo, 2012. 17 Volet & Renshaw, 1996; Watkins & Biggs, 1996; Biggs, 1997. 18 Brah, 1996, cited in Doherty & Singh, 2005, 3. 19 Doherty & Singh, 2005. 20 Kettle, 2005. 15

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in terms of academic writing. However, the accommodating process they went through seemed multifaceted and they had different capabilities of doing so. Overall, there are four different forms of adaptation that the students have made in their journey to gain access to the new academic writing practice. These patterns of adaptation have been described in this book as committed adaptation, surface adaptation, reverse adaptation and hybrid adaptation.

Committed adaptation Committed adaptation involves students’ process of shifting their ways of writing and conforming to the writing conventions in the host institution to gain access to the disciplinary community. Those who draw on committed adaptation feel positive about the shift in their conceptual knowledge and ways of writing.21 For example, in the process of writing her first essay for her course, Wang, the Chinese student in Education, struggled to shift from her former habit of circular writing to the explicit approach expected in her discipline in Australia. Wang's initial interpretations of essay writing seemed to be challenged when she embarked on her first assignment at the Australian University. Narrowing down the introduction seems to be at the centre of Wang's struggle to be direct in writing her first text in English at the Australian university: At the very beginning when I wrote this article, I struggled to narrow it [the introduction] down down down until I want to talk about input... You can have a look at the beginning of this article [her argumentative text]. It's very direct 'There are many factors…'. In the very first paragraph, I just state the argument I want to do but in my Chinese way, I can never do something like this. There is a sort of flow and I have to give the background and maybe for one or two pages and then my argument or the topic will appear.

Wang seemed to be influenced by her Chinese tendency to include a lot of background knowledge as a lead to the topic, which she felt helped to create a “flow” for the essay. Her account of writing the introduction for the essay was in line with what is highlighted in the literature about the culturally embedded preference for being indirect in Chinese rhetoric.22 The above quote indicated that Wang was initially positioned by what she claimed as the Chinese indirect way of writing and brought it into her 21 22

Tran, 2011. Hinkel, 1997.

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drafting process. The talk around text23 revealed that her Chinese identity embedded in this habit of writing, which seemed invisible on the surface of her writing, was inherent in her struggle of writing her first assignment. Wang went on explaining why she decided to leave out the background she had introduced in the beginning of her essay, And then I read the model essay, I think 'Oh it's that direct, it's just something like this and it can be put in the 1st paragraph'. And then I just omit that whole paragraph about the background and said 'Okay I'll say something directly'. That's something I omit because I think the lecturer may not expect that.

As Wang mentioned, the model essay and her interpretation of the lecturer's expectation had a significant impact on her effort to be explicit in expressing the main idea. Her reflection highlighted how the relations of power embedded in the lecturer’s expectations were exercised and maintained through the way the preferred writing content and writing approach was reproduced.24 In the new academic discourse community, Wang actively reshaped her interpretation and self-positioned25 in a more powerful position through employing an accommodating strategy. It would appear from the above example that Wang's changing interpretations and changing positions in the drafting process of this specific instance of writing reflected her negotiation of different identities, being “Chinese” as she referred to herself and being an international student who was aware of the disciplinary requirement and determined to achieve her academic goal. These two identities seemed to be contradictory in this episode of her account and Wang adhered to the latter one as it enabled her to be empowered in the new community. Wang revealed that she valued those changes: “I am more than happy to change to the way to write like this”. She further explained in the repositioning interview 6 months later: “I think there is certainly, the Western and Chinese ways are different but I prefer the Western one.” Drawing on the talk around text model 26 to interpret the question how/what Wang can (not) say and how/what Wang (doesn’t) want to say in her disciplinary writing, the analysis reveals that the voice she felt she needed to respond to the institution, which seemed to be in conflict with her Chinese voice, turned out to be the voice she now valued. In 23

Lillis, 2001. Fairclough, 1992; Ivanic, 1997; Leki, 2003; Lillis, 2001; Ritchie, 1998. 25 van Langenhove & Harré, 1999. 26 Lillis, 2001. 24

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accordance with positioning theory,27 Wang actively exercised her agency by happily adjusting to the new way of writing she thought she was expected to follow in the new academic environment and empowering herself through such committed adaptation.

Surface adaptation In participating in the new academic discourse community, some students make surface adaptation and employ a coping strategy to position themselves in relation to disciplinary writing conventions. However, underneath their adaptation are the tensions between the ways of writing which they display in their texts or their public response to the disciplinary requirements and their personal values in meaning making.28 For example, in reflecting on her writing of the first text for her course in Australia, Xuân, a Vietnamese student in Education revealed she felt an obligation to adapt to the conventional ways of constructing knowledge in this context: Usually we think it's safe to go with that way [the way expected by her lecturer] rather than try something different… Like if you try to make a joke, you have to make sure that your joke can make people laugh, otherwise you don't make the joke. Yeah, sometimes I want to write in a different way... I wish it [the academic writing convention] were not so structured like this.

Xuân chose ways of constructing meaning in light of her new interpretations of academic conventions in the attempt to gain access to the academic world. That was reflected on the surface of her writing through her choice of a “safe way” which aimed to satisfy her lecturers’ expectations – make them laugh - but what seemed invisible from her writing was her desire for having space for being on her own: “be creative” as she referred to. The application of the talk around text model in interpreting Xuân’s account highlighted that what Xuân understood to be the disciplinary expectation and what she personally desired to write did not appear to concur. In light of Lillis’ framework, Xuân’s metaphor about “making jokes” illustrated how the dominant addressitivity, in this case the influential role of lecturer and disciplinary expectation, shapes the meanings that the student (doesn’t) makes. This was an instance of forced self-positioning, which van Langenhove and Harré29 referred to as how an individual selfpositioned in a particular way, which is initiated by an obligation from an 27

Harré & van Langenhove 1999. Tran, 2011. 29 van Langenhove & Harré, 1999. 28

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outside force. Unlike Wang, who was willing to adapt to the new requirement and happily shifted her former belief, Xuân still cherished her preference even though on the surface, she forced self-positioned30 as a student who conformed to what she perceived as being required of her in terms of academic writing. She thus made a superficial adaptation in her engagement in the disciplinary community. In the positioning interview six months later, Xuân however did not mention anything like a “change” or “be creative” as she passionately revealed in the talk around her first assignment. Rather, she clarified her view that she should follow the disciplinary writing conventions. Xuân also illustrated her point about the need to accommodate what the lecturers expect through telling her experience with one of her assignments. She did not get satisfactory result for this one because she thought that it seemed repetitive to state the main idea again in the conclusion while she had just mentioned it in her “combination” [Xuân's word which means the section summary] part. She revealed: I think in the conclusion, you just say things again, so I don't give a conclusion, so at the end the lecturer said that it seems that your paper is like a strong conclusion or something, it's so funny and then I think I lose marks because of that. You have to state it in the conclusion.

Xuân's usage of the modal verb “have to”' indicated the obligation she felt about conforming to the convention although she believed that it seemed unnecessary to restate her argument in the conclusion. Her account illustrated how she was disadvantaged by her personal rationale of meaning making, which was not in accordance with the expectations of her lecturer as the reader and assessor of her text. This links to Ivanic’s view 31 about how non-conformism of the conventions of the discourse community can lead to possibility of student writers to be marginalised. With regard to the power relations emphasised in positioning theory32, the lecturer's comment and the risk of losing marks were powerful in influencing Xuân’s belief in writing and resulting in her changing positions as she progressed through the course. Like Xuân, the talk around text33 analysis of the writing account of Lin, a Chinese student enrolled in the Masters of Education, revealed that there was a mismatch between what/how she thought she was expected to write and what/how she wanted to write. For example, she reflected on her way 30

ibid Ivanic, 1997. 32 Harré & van Langenhove, 1999. 33 Lillis, 2001. 31

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of constructing knowledge in academic writing in her discipline: “I tend not to use my own opinion because I think it’s not encouraged here. In Chinese writing, you can randomly invert your own experience and your own source into your article''. The quote indicated that Lin tended to abandon the way of writing which valued personal experience and personal source she had been socialised into in her home country. Thus, like the above students, Lin also empowered herself through making decision about how to write based on her perception of what was (not) encouraged to include in disciplinary writing. Unlike Wang who was satisfied with the shift in her accommodating process, Lin nevertheless did not feel so and expressed her wish to be able to embrace personal experience into academic writing in Australia. In the positioning interview, Lin revealed: I would like to do that [to include personal experience into writing] because while I am writing, I always want to write about something related to my background, something I am familiar with and something I can use later, something can be useful to my future.

Lin’s personal desire in constructing knowledge appeared to be contrary to her actual way of meaning making she employed in her text. Thus, she seemed to forced self-position34 as a student who chose not to refer to personal experience in academic writing. In fact, what/how/why she wanted to write was embedded in the purpose of her investment35 in the course and her long-term objective, which was linked to her plan for future career. The changing nature of higher education within the context of internalising the curriculum necessitates the articulation of both longerterm objectives and immediate needs of students.36 Lin’s account revealed that her attempts in accommodating what she interpreted as the disciplinary practices might satisfy her immediate need through enabling her to gain membership in her disciplinary community but did not appear to meet her long-term objective. Hao is a Chinese student doing Masters in Economics, who felt her adaptation to the way of writing expected in the Australian University to be like a coping strategy37 rather than a real transformation in her practice of meaning making. In her first text for her course at the Australian University, she tended to be direct in communicating her ideas and she often signalled what she was going to discuss through employing such 34

van Langenhove & Harré, 1999. Norton, 2001. 36 Doughney, 2000. 37 Leki, 1995. 35

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linking words as firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly to introduce her points. For example: Firstly, top management has few understanding and support for SHRM... Secondly, line managers lack commitment and involvement of SHRM... Thirdly, HR practitioners are not qualified... Fourthly, Cultural conflict leads to barriers... (Hao's text). However, in fact, she did not personally feel positive about her above way of expressing ideas. Of course, I think in Chinese, it's stupid to say first blah, second, blah blah... We should use some better words. We should use some different words to stand for firstly, secondly... But if you use first, secondly, thirdly like this [like what she used in the text at the Australian university], I think that is not good writing.

In the above specific instance of writing, Hao attempted to accommodate what she understood to be the expected ways of communicating ideas at the Australia University. However, her account of writing this was compelling. Even though nothing appeared to be unusual on the surface of the paper regarding the ways she adopted these linking words to express her points directly, the talk around text 38 revealed she did not seem to value the above way of writing. Upon reflecting and comparing this with her Chinese rhetorical convention, Hao did not perceive her way of communicating idea in the text to be good and sophisticated writing – “I think that is not good writing”. In light of positioning theory39, through Hao's act of employing what she did not personally value in her actual construction of meaning in her chosen course, Hao tended to forced selfposition as a student who made a superficial shift to respond to her disciplinary requirement to gain a satisfactory result for the assignment. In the positioning interview six months later, Hao indicated that she was determined to accommodate the direct way of writing, which she believed to be required in her chosen course.

Reverse adaptation Reverse adaptation occurs when students’ interaction with the disciplinary convention in the host institution contributes to changing their initial habit of writing in their mother tongue and they move towards internalising the preferred approach in their discipline as part of their style. Bình was a Vietnamese student enrolled in a Masters of Education. In her first essay for her course, she narrowed down the topic and mapped out clearly the 38 39

Lillis, 2001. Harré & van Langenhove, 1999.

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main points of the text. When reflecting on her experience in writing this text, she revealed that this has actually become her personal way of writing and it even influenced her writing in Vietnamese: Most of the time I do so because when I learnt about the theory about writing the English essay in general, so I do like that. Even now I write something in Vietnamese, this is the way I do... Actually it's really my way. From the time I was a third year student, I did something like that, every kind of essay. I do like that, usually the tunnel like this (she draws a tunnel). It means that you go from general until you come to the specific thing you want to talk about.

The above passage indicated that Bình appeared to be familiar with the linear way of writing before she enrolled in her course at the Australian University. She has followed this way of writing since she was in her third year of her Bachelor's degree in Vietnam. Bình further explained that she had more experience of dealing with similar requirements for ESL essay writing through her course in Vietnam, the pre-departure training course prior to her arrival in Australia and the IAP (Introduction to Academic programs) course. In accordance with positioning theory 40 , Bình thus tended to position herself as a student who did not struggle and was confident in employing the conventional approach to opening her essay, which was the first assignment at the Australian university. Her confidence seemed to emerge from the fact that what she interpreted to be required of her in terms of idea expression from her discipline was her preferred way of writing and she has had the experience in writing this way for some time. Bình argued that the introduction in Vietnamese was often longer: “maybe more images, yeah you just imagine something and you write about it and you talk a lot more about it and then I go to the point later, it's longer”. Bình's idea was in line with what was discussed in the literature about the preference for images and imagination in Vietnamese writing.41 However, when contrasting the Vietnamese way of writing with the writing required for her in her course, Bình pointed out “it's [the Vietnamese one] not kind of academic writing” (Bình's talk around text). Interestingly, Bình claimed that her habit of writing in Vietnamese which she described above tended to be shifted toward being influenced by her way of writing in English, as she stated “Even now I write something in Vietnamese, this [the English way of writing] is the way I do”. Bình clearly shows that she enacted reverse adaptation as she is determined to 40 41

van Langenhove & Harré, 1999. Tran, 1999.

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shift the initial habit of writing into which she was socialised towards a new way of writing even when she writes in her mother tongue. Bình's talk around text42 indicated that like the other students, she was initially socialised into the indirect way of writing in Vietnamese. However, unlike Wang who reported that her habit of expressing ideas circularly in her mother tongue to a certain extent shaped her practice of disciplinary writing, Bình believed that her interaction with the convention of writing in English in her Bachelor's Degree in turn helped to change her initial habit of circular writing in Vietnamese. Bình's deliberate self-positioning43 in the above way would again confirm that the linear approach to idea expression was the one she valued. Bình's personal voice as experience, her previous life experience as an English major student at the Vietnamese University and voice as language44, her preferred way of expressing ideas, appeared to be in agreement with the voice as a student she felt she must respond to within her disciplinary requirements. Therefore, in exercising her personal agency through employing the explicit way of writing required in her discipline at the Australian University, Bình did not have to struggle as some other students involved in this study.

Adaptation with hybrid subjectivity Hybrid adaptation occurs when students demonstrate strategic agency and create a hybrid form of meaning making in their writing. Their mediation of academic writing is embedded in their attempts to incorporate intentionally and strategically their understandings of the academic expectations while still retaining some of their personal preferences rather than exclusively following the academic requirements.45 Ying, the Chinese student enrolled in a Master of Economics, exercised her agency by creating a blending of the linear way of writing which she interpreted to be conventional in her discipline and her personal preference in using metaphors. Ying commented on her efforts in being explicit through outlining the main ideas in the introduction of her text: “Yeah, in the beginning it's hard, not because I don't know the point, just I am not used to this writing style and I feel it boring, always put the point here and then I'll tell you, because blah blah blah, Um, I don't like it.” The following instances of writing from Ying's text and her talk around these ways of meaning making indicated how her personality and 42

Lillis, 2001. Harré & van Langenhove, 1999. 44 Lillis, 2001, 45. 45 Tran, 2011. 43

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preference influenced her writing. For example, she used metaphoric images: Culture to an organisation is like DNAs to human being. It influences the behaviors of every single cell (employees) of that organisation. Soldiers are crucial determinants of success in any battle. This is also true for employees of a company in any business sector. Organisations have to be as dynamic as a living creature: quick response to environment, flexible, adaptable. (Ying’s text)

Ying explained her above way of writing: That's my understandings, that's my original. I'll use metaphors to explain things to people. It's my personality, my personal preference... Because without this, the content is very dry. Maybe I didn't start it well, so I want to make it interesting and I need to use words with imagination. This is really my understanding of things. Maybe the lecturer will only like facts, very scientific, not imagination, not artistic or anything like that in writing.

It would reveal from these above instances of meaning making that Ying employed metaphors to make her writing mode vivid and lively. She linked this to her personal interest and revealed she enjoyed expressing things in the poetic form and she loved music. Embedded in Lillis’ framework is the notion of voice as experiences, which she refers to as aspects of personal life experiences students embrace in their writing.46 Ying thus brought her voice as personality and personal preference into her disciplinary writing. For Ying, using metaphors and writing with imagination were the ways she showed her own original understandings of the subject matter. Otherwise, as she revealed, she felt she was repeating someone else's ideas: “You find out everything you wanted to write was written by somebody else, so I mean no real original thought from mine, so that's not a good feeling.” In commenting on her above instances of writing, Ying other-positioned her lecturer as someone who favoured facts and scientific ways of communicating ideas rather than what she referred to as “artistic” and imaginative expressions. She also deliberately selfpositioned as someone who attempted to show her original understandings of the issue and to add flavour to her writing even though she guessed that these features and styles might not be welcome by her lecturer. Ying's self-positioning showed that even though she felt forced to conform to linear writing, she used her own agency to write metaphorically. The ways Ying exercised agency illustrated the 46

ibid

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complexities of her process of mediating between the need to satisfy the disciplinary expectations and the way of writing which she personally found meaningful. In communicating ideas in her essay, Ying seemed to reconstruct a hybrid site of subjectivity, which was shaped by the external force embedded in her disciplinary practices as well as her internal voice and preference. Her reflection on producing this text supports the view that student writing is a site of multiple voices and contested discourse.47

Conclusion This chapter highlights specific instances whereby international students exercised their personal agency through shifting to the new ways of writing expected in the academic context in Australia and empowering themselves in an endeavour to fit in the institutional structure. However, their individual processes of adaptation appear to be multi-faceted and multi-layered. Overall, the main forms of adaptation that students draw on include committed adaptation, surface adaptation, hybrid adaptation and reverse adaptation. As reflected in the accounts of Xuân, Lin and Hao, their adaptation seems to involve changes at the face value only to enable them to participate peripherally and legitimately48 in the academic discipline and ensure good returns on their investment49 in the courses. In other words, they exercise their agency by disguising their beliefs 50 and resorting to accommodating as a coping strategy51 in order to engage in their academic community. Yet, their former interpretations of writing which seem invisible on the surface of writing are still emerging and nurtured as their personal values. In particular, the new ways of writing they follow are sometimes not what they believe and feel positive about. These overseas students employ a coping strategy associated with a shift at face value in their perceptions also because they are going back to China or Vietnam and might not want to adapt totally to the Western ways. Their accounts of constructing their own texts indicate the conflict between students’ desires to communicate meaning in a way which accords with their values and their commitment to respond to the disciplinary requirements.52

47

Canagarajah, 2003; Starfield, 2001. Lave & Wenger, 1991. 49 Norton, 2001. 50 Lillis, 2001. 51 Leki, 1995. 52 Ivanic, 1997; Richie, 1998. 48

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In the case of Wang who enacts committed adaptation, it is a distinctive shift in her perception from a certain value to a new one as she sees the latter as superior to her former one. The students can also adapt to their new written discourse through their attempts to create a hybrid space for meaning making and demonstrate hybrid adaptation, like in the case of Ying. Students’ adaptation can also occur in a reverse way when their interaction with the disciplinary convention in the host institution contributes to changing their initial habit of writing in their mother tongue. Overall students’ different journeys in constructing their academic identities indicate that when the students face new challenges in academic writing, their adjustment to the new requirement could be conceptualised as superficial adaptation, reverse adaptation, committed transformation or hybrid transformation. The talk around text analysis 53 also demonstrates background and cultural aspects seem to have impact on the accommodating process of the students from China and Vietnam in diverse ways rather than in a uniform pattern. For instance, the Chinese and Vietnamese students mediated the so-called circular writing approach, which has been characterised to be a distinctive feature in both Chinese and Vietnamese rhetoric traditions, in various ways. This indicates the complexities of how cultural norms are meditated and reproduced in contested disciplinary discourse. This links to Stephen’s argument that culture-situated ways of writing should be viewed variable amongst individuals because writing norms themselves are shaped by culture but culture is not a “set” or “fixed” construct. 54 Therefore, the students’ negotiation of cultural writing ways supports the view to “move beyond merely discovering, describing, and thus perpetuating cultural differences as given” 55 in research on contrastive rhetoric and international students’ participation in academic written discourse. The students’ journeys of constructing their own texts include different points where their cultural writing conventions are not just merely followed but also intentionally and strategically used or resisted.56

53

Lillis, 2001. Stephen, 1997. 55 Kubota & Lehner, 2005, 138. 56 Ibid. 54

CHAPTER SEVEN DISPLAYING CRITICAL THINKING IN ACADEMIC WRITING

Introduction Critical thinking is often viewed as one of the core skills that decide students’ academic success in the academia in English speaking countries. Yet there has not been a unified definition of the concept of critical thinking perhaps due to its complex nature. What constitutes critical thinking may vary in different cultures. Furthermore, the notion of critical thinking in the academic sense may be unfamiliar to not only international ESL students but also many students from English speaking backgrounds. Asian international students have been viewed from a problem-based vantage1 and described as those who lack the capability to think critically in the host institutions.2 International students are often assumed to adopt descriptive rather than analytic approach to learning. 3 According to Ballard and Clanchy, “Western” style seems to favour analysis and interpretation and “Asian” style seems to prefer reproduction.4 Although attention has been increasingly focused on problems facing international students in adapting to the new academic environment, there is little available in the literature exploring in detail how this student cohort reflect on their actual ways of demonstrating critical thinking in academic writing, one of the key assessment forms in the current HE context. This would seem critically important if we are to avoid making “surface” assumptions about students’ writing and to search for deeper understandings of their approaches to display critical thinking.5 This view highlights the need to go beyond the routine in studying student writing, which is mainly based on researchers’ analysis of students’ texts, to 1

Tran, 2012. Samuelowiz, 1987. 3 Ryan, 2000, 8. 4 Ballard & Clanchy, 1991. 5 Jones, Turner & Street, 1999, xvii; Tran, 2011a. 2

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identify new ways to gain insights into students’ actual writing experiences in producing their own texts and displaying critical thinking. Within this study, these principles recognise the value of listening to individual students talking about their own texts, which is at the centre of Lillis’ framework 6 for interpreting student writing in the institutional context. International students’ negotiation of critical thinking in English medium institutions is anchored in the intersections of cultural, social and academic fields and personal conditions. Their mediation of ways to demonstrate critical thinking is extricably intertwined with the cultural patterns into which they have been socialised during their previous schooling as well as with the academic requirements within the new institutional context. This process may be embedded in the interplay of students’ personal experiences and personal values in meaning making. International students’ personal attributes, their prior literacy and their awareness of the writing requirements in their disciplinary fields contribute to shaping their perception of academic writing in higher education. This chapter is concerned with exploring how Vietnamese and Chinese international students negotiate their ways of demonstrating critical thinking in academic writing. It examines not only their general perceptions of critical thinking but, more importantly, their real accounts of how they actually display critical thinking in their own written work. That is, students’ written texts, their potential choices and their intentions underpinning how to demonstrate critical thinking are placed at the heart of the discussion that follows in this chapter. By involving students in talking about their first texts at the Australian university and reflecting on their experience in negotiating ways to show critical thinking, the chapter aims to offer a grounding to unpack potential choices embedded in Chinese and Vietnamese students’ approaches to critical thinking.

Critical thinking in distinctive Vietnamese and Chinese writing traditions The tendency to avoid expressing critical thinking has been widely discussed in the literature on Chinese writing tradition. 7 Chinese traditional ideology in building knowledge appears to influence Chinese 6

Lillis, 2001. For example Baker, 2002; Cortazzi and Jin, 1999; Carson & Nelson, 1994; Maley, 1986; O’Sullivan & Gou, 2010. 7

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communication norms which tend to accept knowledge uncritically and avoid questioning some sources of knowledge. Chinese culturally embedded approaches to constructing knowledge have been described by Cortazzi and Jin as follows: They [Chinese students] apparently accept this knowledge from the textbook uncritically, but in their minds they have their own thinking. They hesitate to express this thinking because their culture of learning includes the notion that one can not really create or contribute something new until one has mastered the field or relevant techniques- that is, after long apprenticeship.8

One’s own thinking mentioned here may be related to what one thinks about knowledge in the textbook or in other words, one’s own critical evaluation of the ideas in the textbook. However, the valued learning style may restrain students from expressing this thinking until they think that it is valid. Reflecting on Cortazzi and Jin’s observation, Baker9 asserts that learning (xue) comes first and questioning or thinking (si) comes second in Chinese order of approaching knowledge. Thus, in this view, Chinese attitudes towards knowledge and approaches to knowledge may lead to students’ habit of avoiding being critical of knowledge provided by the teacher and in the textbook and of hesitating to express one’s own thinking in both spoken and written discourse. Moreover, Chinese students’ reluctance to write critically may be embedded in their own perception of their roles. Research has assumed that Chinese students tend to view themselves as “nurturers” rather than “critical”.10 Other authors identify the need to preserve “the collective good” which “places a great emphasis on harmony, ‘not losing face’ and avoiding open disagreements with others” as an important factor shaping their approach to reasoning.11 Moreover, the attitude towards knowledge in the textbook may reflect people’s respect for the wisdom of the past as their “spiritual” value and strength. What is printed may be reinforced and preserved by centuries as “classical works”. 12 The fact that books are not considered as simply sources of knowledge but representative of knowledge and wellestablished truth 13 has led to the tendency to appreciate rather than question knowledge in books. The hesitation in showing critical thinking 8

Cortazzi & Jin, 1999, 215. Baker, 2002, 181. 10 Carson & Nelson, 1994. 11 O’Sullivan & Gou, 2010, 69. 12 Barker, 2002, 181. 13 Maley, 1986. 9

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also appears to be associated with the traditional attitude towards the teacher and the role of the teacher. Traditionally the teacher is the representative of authority and the embodiment of knowledge14 and thus questioning the knowledge provided by the teacher is unexpected. Within Vietnamese tradition, the way harmony is preferred in the approach to building knowledge and writing is embedded in the Vietnamese socio-economic context. Vietnam is an agriculture-based society15 and farmers’ life and well-being are largely dependent on nature. Traditionally, due to the awareness of the significance of nature to people’s survival, the harmony and stability in the relationship between human beings and neighbourhood or nature have been always highly valued and longed for: Thiên thͥi, ÿ͓a lͫi, nhân hoà - the harmony between the sky, the earth and human beings. This feature of Vietnamese agricultural life is intimately related to Yin-Yang principle,16 which focuses on the relationship and balance between different factors containing yin and yang in life. This logic of thinking is marked by people’s attitudes towards nature and at the same time helps to characterise people’s distinctive social relationship. The balanced life philosophy - triӃt lý sӕng quân bình, which is reflected in the efforts to avoid tension or showing disagreement with others, is highlighted. One example of this belief can be seen in the following proverb which parents often use to teach moral conduct to their children: One time self-restraint from disagreement with others means nine times goodness - M͡t ÿi͉u nh͓n, chín ÿi͉u lành. This logical way of thinking and behaving in life has led to a tendency to avoid showing disagreement or opposite ideas regarding Vietnamese approaches to knowledge and writing. For example, a study by Nguyen, Terlouw, and Pilot has indicated that the more Vietnamese respondents were concerned with group harmony, the less they were willing to voice differences of opinions.17 This suggests that some Vietnamese students may employ this culturally situated logical way of thinking and thus tend to avoid making strong arguments or being critical in writing their argumentative essays. More importantly, Vietnamese students may be constrained in expressing any personal ideas which do not match those expressed in the textbook partly due to Vietnamese communal values. This is associated with a sense of community evolving from the 4000 years old agricultural civilization. One of the essential spirits of this communal approach is that individual needs, benefits and ideas are a part of and should be in line with 14

Cortazzi & Jin, 1999; Pratt, 1992, quoted in Barker, 2002. Tran, 1999. 16 Ibid, 59. 17 Nguyen, Terlouw & Pilot, 2006. 15

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the communal needs, benefits and ideas. This is partially related to the need to safeguard human relationship in communal life where individual welfare is so dependent on each other’s welfare and the whole community’s welfare. This has resulted in the fact that personal opinions and needs that one thinks may not match with those of his/her community may be restrained. For example, one of the participants in Phan’ study states “One has to write what all people or the majority think and value”.18 Vietnamese political and historical circumstance also appears to help nurture and reinforce the tendency to maintain harmony in idea expression and knowledge construction. Vietnamese history of four-thousand years is bound to continuing struggles against foreign domination. Due to this historical feature, an aspiration to maintain peace and harmony is embraced. Being a small nation in the South-East Asian region, Vietnam was under the domination of China for over one thousand years, the French colonisation for almost a century and American domination for nearly 20 years. Historical circumstances have helped Vietnam develop the political tactic which “pretends” to be obedient or cooperative with the “stronger enemies” on the outside but “inside struggle to maintain their identity and independence”. 19 This has contributed to strengthening the indirect style and the tendency to “pretend” unquestioning in Vietnamese writing approach. 20 This style also marks the way Vietnamese students present a thesis statement. As Ferguson comments, a soft indirect form of thesis statement such as a hedged form, an uncommitted assertion or a rhetorical question is often preferred by Vietnamese students and therefore, the thesis is often presented as “an issue for consideration” rather than a direct assertion.21 The tendency to be uncritical in Chinese writing tradition is similar to the one in Vietnamese tradition but the underlying factors shaping this tendency appears to be somewhat different. Vietnamese writing shares with Chinese writing the ideology of unquestioning teachers’ ideas and knowledge from the textbook, which is one of the key factors determining the habit of being uncritical in writing. However, in Chinese writing this tendency may to some extent be shaped by the approach to constructing knowledge in which the culturally preferred order is that “thinking” comes after “learning”. Yet, in Vietnamese rhetorical tradition, this appears to be more influenced by Vietnamese agricultural culture and historical and political circumstance. Regarding this point, the prominent factors shaping 18

Phan, 1999, 52. Tran, 1999; Phan, 2001. 20 Phan, 2001. 21 Ferguson, 1997. 19

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Chinese writing are more bound to Chinese schooling tradition and Confucian philosophy whilst those influencing Vietnamese writing are in turn more related to its historical and political conditions. These factors, though in different ways, have formed the tendency to “pretend” or “avoid” being critical or “restrain” oneself from being critical rather than being really uncritical in mind in both cultures of writing. What constitutes critical thinking and appropriate approaches to critical thinking seem to vary amongst different cultures. This in turn has an impact on international students’ interpretations of the ways to demonstrate critical thinking in English language medium institutions. Some research however suggests the need to treat this assumption with caution and indicates that individual factors seem to shape students’ writing more than cultural patterns. 22 Others argue against the cultural generalisations of Asian students as passive learners lacking in critical thinking skills.23 An emergent stream of literature has problematised the common stereotypes about the cultural learning styles and experiences of Asian students. 24 Highlighted in these studies is the need to avoid simply attributing learning styles to cultural backgrounds. Instead, these studies suggest the significance of exploring more adequately the complexities in students' processes of unpacking, interpreting and adapting to various disciplinary practices. This chapter contributes to this growing area of knowledge by examining how international students reflect on their specific ways of demonstrating critical thinking and the reasons underpinning their patterns of critical thinking. The discussion in this chapter acknowledges that international students bring distinctive cultural resources and literacy backgrounds with them into their courses in Australia. It also highlights the complex factors which affect how international students exercise personal agency in mediating their ways of demonstrating critical thinking and gaining access to their disciplinary discourse. By focusing on international students’ “personal agency”, the chapter offers a change from the dominant approaches on “problems”, plagiarism and policing of standards often circulating about international students. The following section focuses on how international Chinese and Vietnamese students in this research reflect on their specific ways of demonstrating critical thinking and to what extent their cultural

22

Sasaki & Hirose, 1996; Kubota, 1998. Littlewood, 2003; Stapleton, 2002. 24 For example, Volet & Renshaw, 1996; Biggs, 1997; Rizvi, 2000; Doherty & Singh, 2005b; A. Jones, 2005; Kettle, 2005; Koehne, 2005. 23

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tradition and personal values may impact on their approaches to critical thinking.

Critical thinking as ‘attacking’ others’ work? Lin is a Chinese student enrolled in a Master of Education. She chose the topic “How motivation influences second language” for her first assignment for the subject “Second Language Development”. Lin believed that making comments on others' studies and coming up with her own position about the subject matter was central to critical writing. In her first text for her Masters course, she focused on evaluating Gardner's hypothesis about the significance of integrative motivation in second language acquisition. She argued that his research tended to base on second language learning contexts while ignoring foreign language learning contexts in different countries: There are some misunderstandings according to my opinion... That’s why I state here that though Gardner uses it as an example of foreign language or as a representative of Asian country that learns English as a foreign language, I think Philippines is more like Singapore or more like those bilingual places but my lecturer may not think that... Actually this full article is based on a gap, on the ignorance of the EFL context.

Lin's explanation about her way of writing seemed to indicate that critical writing was tied to finding out the gaps in others' research. Through her argument about Gardner's research into Philippine context she made in the text “However, though the researchers admitted... they stuck to their original theory...” and her wordings in the talk about this argument “I think that Philippines cannot present the whole Asia...”; “I think Philippines is more like Singapore...”, she appeared to be very clear about identifying the contrast and the gap in Gardner's study where she assumed Gardner tended to misunderstand and generalise the role of integrative motivation in EFL contexts. Self-positioning arises when one wishes to express his/her personal agency in order to achieve a particular goal in discursive practice. 25 Lin exercised her agency and self-positioned as being more confident and authoritive than other students this study in expressing her views of experts’ studies. In light of Lillis’ talk around text model, it would appear that Lin managed to critique others' research in the ways that she found relevant and logical (what she wanted to mean). This perhaps reflects how her personal agency and motivation in taking the 25

van Langenhove & Harré, 1999, 24.

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course, which she imagined to enable her to “do something that you can have a stronger sense of responsibility, self-value, and achievement”, may to some extent shape her above way of writing. However, Lin at the same time highlighted: That’s why here I should state. I mean I am not attacking Gardner on his result but just… Maybe because of the historical reason or because of English development at this time is not so prosperous in developing countries or in foreign language countries; That’s why most of their research are focused on Canada and America, Philippines is also related to native speaking country.

Lin appeared to attribute the gap in the author’s (Gardner) research to historical or contextual factors which seemed to arise out of the researcher's control rather than to the limitation of his personal view and his research approach. She therefore stated that she was critical of these factors rather than the researcher's own view and his result. This seemed to contradict her argument in the text and her above explanation in the talk around text where she initially claimed that Gardner appeared to “misunderstand” Philippines as a foreign language context and generalise his finding based on this context. Lin's conflicting views might indicate that even though Lin was confident in her finding about the gaps in the researcher's study, she was still constrained by her prior interpretation in which being critical may mean attacking or thinking negatively of others. In evaluating her attempt to be critical in the whole essay overall, Lin stated: Though I give my own comment, the majority is not so critical, it's hard for me. Here they emphasise critical thinking a lot but… I mean we were taught to write in a certain fixed structure, in a conformed way and have exams in an oriented way... I mean you know what the answer is and there is only one you do not make further effort to exceed, you are not expected more than the answer... But now suddenly you are asked to have your own source, you are asked to read with critical thinking, you are asked to do your own research, to search in the library, no one gives you help... You are not critical for a long time and suddenly, you are asked to write critically and you do not know how to do it.

Lin asserted that her written text was not very critical since in order to achieve success, she was expected to change from her past habit of maintaining harmony to writing critically required in her course and she was unable to make such a “sudden” shift. She stated that in her previous schooling, students' success in writing was tied to their ability to articulate on and come up with a certain answer, which they had been taught or in

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some way they had known before. According to Lin, the transformation from this way of writing to the critical one requires time and practice rather than a quick sudden change like what she was expected in her first assignment at the Australian university. Her difficulty in dealing with this sudden shift was compounded by her situation as a newly-enrolled international student in the course and at the same time a new-comer in the Australian culture. She continued to talk about her difficulty in a disappointing tone: That’s my first semester I just arrived within two or three weeks and I had to write a 2000 word essay. I am really... I mean too many things for me to manage, to cope with. So though I attended those information courses, I get a vague idea and I was still not confident enough to start writing my own essay.

Through her repetition of “Now suddenly you are asked to...” (four times) to mention her experience in writing her first text and her word expression about her situation such as “too many things for me to manage”, “to cope with”, “vague idea”, and “not confident enough”, Lin appeared to demonstrate forced self-positioning26. This form of positioning is linked to her image as a student who had to accommodate the demand of her discipline. Her positioning in terms of critical thinking seemed very complex. She deliberately self-positioned as being confident in identifying the gaps in scholarly research but also drew on forced self-positioning to describe her overall struggle with critical thinking in writing her text. This showed how her past literacy practice, her view about what appeared to be logical in criticising others’ work and her interpretation of the disciplinary demand interacted in a complex matrix. Lin’s sense of Chinese identity as a result of her prior literacy in Chinese schooling and even the level of familiarity she had with critical thinking through her former literary course did not seem to position herself favourably when she was confronted with the requirement of her current course. In mediating between her Chinese identity and the identity of an international student who felt she had to conform to the disciplinary demand, Lin appeared to be put in a challenging situation since in the beginning she did “not know how to do it” and “no one gives you help”. Within positioning theory,27 Lin's account implied that she felt it was her responsibility to conform to writing norms of her discipline over a short period of time and even though support was offered, it was not adequate to meet her needs. 26 27

Harré & van Langenhove, 1999. ibid

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Lin tended to reposition her view of critical thinking six months later. She believed that in order to be critical, she needs to describe and compare different views: “I think it’s [critical thinking] something based on previous theory... I just compare, it’s more like a description of the previous theory at first. The main part of my writing is the comparison between different writers...”. In her account of writing the first text for her course, Lin related critical writing to identifying the gaps in the researcher's studies. Later on, she emphasised the need to read widely and compare different opinions about the subject matter. Her latter view of critical writing seemed to be more dynamic and rounded since she moved towards acknowledging alternative perspectives on the subject matter. Like Wang, the shift in Lin's perception may result from her deeper understanding of the disciplinary expectations when she engaged more deeply in the course over a period of time.

Critical thinking as a way to argue with oneself Ying is a Chinese student enrolled in the Masters of Commerce. She chose Human Resource Management as her first subject for her Masters course. She decided to work on the topic: “Strategic HRM (human resource management) can create sustainable competitive advantages for organisations”, for her first assignment at the Australian university. Ying was the only student in this research who raised the issue of self-reflection as a form of critical thinking. However, this approach did not seem to be highlighted in the literature as a remarkable feature of critical thinking in the academia. For Ying, critical thinking was related to the ways she judged authors’ work and posed questions to herself in order to work out the strengths and weaknesses of their work: “I have to evaluate other people's work, that's my critical thinking… You need to argue with yourself. When I write, of course I did argue with myself.” She believed that to be critical, she needed to be sceptical of others' opinions. She referred to her efforts in raising questions and answering these questions as the ways she argued with herself: “Is this valid?”, “Is this appealing to myself at least?”, “Do I trust this statement?”. In light of positioning theory, she thus selfpositioned as someone who is quite confident in her self-reflecting and self-arguing approach as a form of critical thinking. Ying also implied that it was important to compare and contrast evidence provided in different studies. Thus, she did not concur with the Chinese students in Education who claimed to be influenced by Chinese uncritical approach to

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constructing knowledge and tended to directly associate critical thinking with identifying only the negative aspects of others' work. Ying’s approach to critical thinking was to pose questions concerning the validity and reliability of others' work and judge them herself. The answers to these questions led to the identification of not only the weaknesses but also the strengths of others’ work. Ying's approach towards critical thinking, which differed from those of other Chinese students in this study (see the next sections), illustrated that her writing seemed to be more individual-bound. Her reflective account challenges the assumption that students from the same cultural group bring a similar interpretation of the concept of critical thinking, which seems to be characterised as distinctive in that culture, into their writing practice in the host institutions. This in turn supports studies by Biggs, Jones and Koehne about the need to avoid stereotyping international students’ learning.28 Other Chinese students claimed either that they were socialised into the uncritical approach to knowledge or that the concept of critical thinking did not seem to exist in their Chinese culture (for example, see the case of Lin in the next section). Nevertheless, in the repositioning interview, Ying believed that critical thinking appeared to be the same in her Chinese culture and the Australian culture. She pointed out: “I think critical thinking in Chinese culture is the same but how we express our critical thinking is different, compared to here, we are not so straight.” Thus, Ying implied that Chinese students might think critically privately inside like Australian students. But on the surface, the ways they manifested their critical thinking differed from what is often seen as critical thinking in the Australian academic culture. That is, they did not tend to express their critical thinking explicitly, which might lead to the assumption that critical thinking in Chinese culture was often avoided since harmony was the core value in communication.29 Ying's perception revealed that unlike in the cases of other Chinese students, critical thinking was not totally alien to her when she embarked on her course at the Australian university. This might account for the reason why she did not find it so challenging in her attempts to think critically in her academic discourse. Ying's different perception might be because unlike other Chinese students, she worked several years in a media centre in Hong Kong and might be more exposed to the “Western” style of displaying critical thinking. This demonstrates how the attitudes and ways of meaning making of students from the same national backgrounds may vary due to their different personal experiences. 28 29

Biggs, 1997; Jones, 2005; Koehne, 2005. Cortazzi & Jin, 1999; Hinkel, 1999.

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Negative comments on others’ work: Not from me Bình was a Vietnamese student undertaking a Master in Education at the Australian University this study focused on. After completing her Bachelor in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at Vietnam National University, Bình was recruited to be a lecturer at this university. Bình had three-year teaching experience before pursuing her study in Australia. She hoped the Masters course could help her enhance her future teaching. Bình planned to return and continue her teaching at Vietnam National University after completing her Masters of Education in Australia. She further revealed that “I also hope to carry out some research to investigate the teaching and studying of English in my college and country”. The text she discussed focused on the relationship between formal instruction and second language acquisition. Bình decided to write about this topic because it was related to her experience as a teacher of English for Vietnamese learners and thus she understood the significance of focus-onform instruction in helping learners develop their language ability. The analysis indicated that Bình did not struggle in writing her fist text at the Australian university since her interpretation of the disciplinary conventions matched with her personal value embedded in the voice as experience30 she brought along into her practice of writing. Though Bình felt anxious, she did not appear to find it difficult to display critical thinking in her first text for her Masters course. She exposed her personal agency by bringing her experience in dealing with critical thinking in the past into her writing at the Australian university. In so doing, she believed that she satisfied her disciplinary requirement. Bình elaborated on her perception of critical thinking: To be critical means that you can see the not very reasonable things in the other author and it also means that you can see the good points of this author, not only the not good points but also the good points and you can see the differences as well as the common points between different authors.

Bình associated critical thinking with identifying both the positive as well as negative aspects of scholarly research and comparing and contrasting different studies. Her belief about critical thinking in writing was markedly different from the one employed by Lin and Wang, who tended to relate critical thinking to commenting only on the flaws of scholarly studies and as a result, struggled to realise their belief in practice. Her approach to critical thinking in writing was also dissimilar to that of 30

Lillis, 2001.

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some other students in this study who attempted to be critical of the authors by looking only at the strengths of their work and avoiding commenting on the weaknesses. Bình expressed her feelings about how she applied her knowledge in terms of critical thinking in her first assignment for her Masters course: For this assignment because it's the very first assignment and the lecturer didn't mention any conventions about critical thinking we have to present in this assignment, so I just use my previous knowledge of this kind and I put in this and actually I was very very anxious about it because I didn't know whether the lecturer would be satisfied with it or not, but it turned out to be a very good starting point.

In light of Lillis’ analytical model, how Bình showed her critical thinking in her first text was shaped by her experience related to the Western way of critical thinking she was exposed to during her thesis writing for her undergraduate course, her pre-departure course in Vietnam and the IAP (Introduction to academic programs) course in Australia. She thus appeared to resort to her prior knowledge and her own experience in writing critically to locate herself favourably in the new discourse community. Although Bình did not experience any trouble in doing so, she did feel worried about whether her approach met her lecturer's expectations. Her concern revealed that like other students, Bình deliberately self-positioned 31 as a student who wished to accommodate what is expected of her and oriented herself toward a committed adaptation. She did not feel forced to adapt. Instead she was positive about her adjustment. It would appear from Bình’s quote that her way of demonstrating critical thinking turned out to satisfy her lecturer. Bình had “a good starting point” since unlike Lin, the voice as experience 32 she brought along into her practice of writing the first assignment at the Australian University matched with the voice she thought she was required within her discipline. In their struggle to be critical in writing their first written texts, Lin claimed to be influenced by their prior habit of being uncritical. As Bình revealed later, she also interacted with this tendency from her Vietnamese culture but in writing her first text, she chose to embrace her previous knowledge and experience in demonstrating critical thinking that she learnt from different courses undertaken both in Vietnam and in Australia before her enrolment for her Master’s program. The difference from Bình and these above-mentioned students with respect to how they initially positioned themselves and 31 32

Harré & van Langenhove, 1999. Lillis, 2001.

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engaged in their disciplinary practice seemed to arise from the different factors shaping their voices as experience embedded. As Bình progressed through the course, her initial perception of critical thinking remained unchanged and she again highlighted the need to acknowledge both the strengths and weaknesses of others' studies. However, she suggested that “It's better you just pretend that you don't know people of other side.” In Bình's view, it was better to ignore the perspectives which were different from the one she supported in order to make the argument more convincing. She, nevertheless, initially valued the acknowledging of the opposite views. Bình did not make it explicit about what led to the change in her positioning. Despite not claiming to be influenced by the communal and harmony approach to knowledge in her practice of writing like Lin, Bình seemed to be very aware of the tendency to be uncritical in Vietnamese writing. She revealed in her discussion with Xuân: Bình: In Vietnam, actually we are not encouraged to have that kind of thinking [critical thinking] I think. Ly: What if you have to comment? Xuân: Good thing, not bad thing Bình: Sometimes bad but you just learn it from someone else. You say it is bad, it is bad because you have just read somewhere else say that it is bad. You just use that, yeah, it is not mine.... I think it is because of the culture just wants to talk about good things and usually, for example, the literature pieces when they are put in the textbooks, they are nice and they are expected to be nice, so you should follow that direction.

According to Bình, in Vietnamese culture, people tended to avoid commenting on the negative aspects. But if they had to do so, it seemed necessary for them to stress that these negative comments did not originate from themselves. Thus, Bình's explanation implied the need to maintain harmony in communication, which was highlighted by Tran 33 in his discussion of Vietnamese culture. Bình raised an interesting point about her prior literacy background that the tendency to focus on the good aspects of the subject matter was to a certain extent shaped by the discourse constructed in the literature textbooks. It would appear from Bình's illustration that the “nice” or classic features of the literary work and thus the world represented in the textbooks might position and orient the learner-readers in particular ways, which led to their particular attitudes of judging the world as being uncritical. In sum, Bình's awareness revealed in the analysis indicated that she positioned herself as 33

Tran, 1999.

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conceptually being in control of both approaches to knowledge, her Vietnamese cultural norm and the Western way. In her new discourse community, she exercised her personal agency through applying her knowledge of the Western strategy of critical thinking in her writing and keeping her Vietnamese habit of being uncritical silent. Regarding what counts as evidence in supporting ideas, Bình positioned herself differently in the repositioning interview six months later: The articles, and sometimes you own experience, the anecdotes, just put something or a small story... because sometimes the evidence from the book is not appropriate in your own context, so you need something from your own to compare with their opinion, you can say that “it's nice in other context but in my case, my learners are blah blah..., so it's not appropriate”.

As Bình progressed along the course, the range of evidence sources which she thought she could integrate into her disciplinary academic writing seemed to be greater. She added that it might be possible to employ evidence from articles, personal experience, anecdotes and small stories in academic writing. Bình acknowledged the use of articles and books in building up her arguments but at the same time she did not appear to think that her personal experience and anecdotes might be irrelevant evidence as she used to when she was still new in her course. Bình turned her prior working experience to be valuable evidence to compare with and be critical of experts' opinion. Her initial interpretation of the source of evidence in academic writing might be rooted in her own respect for experts' opinions and the feeling of being inferior to them. In writing her first text at the Australian University, she seemed to manifest her agency by depending largely on the published research and keeping the fact that her previous teaching experience originally shaped her argument unrecognised in her writing. Later on, Bình positioned herself as a student who wished to adopt both published research and her personal experience in academic writing. The shift in her positioning perhaps arises from her being more exposed to the readings in her field, more critical of these readings and more aware of the gaps between published research and her Vietnamese context.

Conclusion This chapter addresses the complexities related to how the Chinese and Vietnamese international students in this research negotiate ways to demonstrate critical thinking. These Chinese and Vietnamese students

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appeared to share certain similar understandings of the tendency to avoid being critical in their culture and they demonstrate an awareness of the disciplinary conventions at the Australian university. However, at the level of practice, their actual demonstration of critical thinking in written texts was variable due to their differences regarding the strategies, motivations, values, personal experiences and approaches to locating themselves in the new context. These aspects of their negotiation often seemed to be invisible on the surface of their writing. Most often, complex aspects of students’ agency, power, values and strategies which underpinned their adaptation were little documented in the literature. Scott referred to those as “hidden transcripts”, which seemed to be “offstage, beyond direct observation by power holders”. 34 It is therefore significant to unpack how/what/why they adapted that way and how they constructed what was happening to them through their reflection on their own individual practice. Through examining how international students mediate between different patterns of displaying critical thinking in their written assignments, the chapter shows that international students’ negotiation of academic writing involves a complex web of factors. The chapter illustrates the complexities of how cultural norms are meditated and reproduced in contested institutional discourse, which involves shifting relations of power and the complex web of international student subjectivity. Thus, although trends in their cultural writing traditions need to be acknowledged, placing too much emphasis on them as the only explanation for international students’ writing can easily lead to ethnic or cultural stereotyping. This is important because national culture does not play a dominant role but instead was found to be inflected in these individual students’ writing and interact with other factors that shape their writing. The analysis of the students’ reflection on their practice of exercising personal agency and mediating ways to demonstrate critical thinking suggests a critical need for lecturers to articulate the underpinning constructs of critical thinking in more concrete ways rather than use abstract terms to refer to it. It is also crucial for lecturers to develop an awareness of the cultural and philosophical traditions that may impact upon international students’ ways of reasoning and meaning making. Yet at the same time, it appears important to recognise students’ practice of mediating ways of displaying critical thinking in their writing is also affected by other dimensions of the context including the disciplinary conventions and their personal subjectivity. It thus seems valuable to involve students in dialogues where they can share their understandings, concerns, hidden logics and experiences in displaying critical thinking and 34

Scott, 1990, 157.

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other aspects of meaning making in higher education. Nurturing such understanding, interaction and appreciation of different practices is an essential step towards working out effective ways to support international students in negotiating academic writing and adding value to their crossborder education.

CHAPTER EIGHT NEGOTIATING THE COMMUNAL APPROACH TO CONSTRUCTING KNOWLEDGE

Various studies on cross-cultural writing, contrastive rhetoric and intercultural communication have found that international students’ writing and learning practices in host institutions are influenced by their cultural traditions. 1 Therefore, research on Vietnamese and Chinese students’ academic writing needs to take into account the underlying factors that form the beliefs and values about what constitutes good writing in Chinese and Vietnamese traditions. It is essential to examine the context shaping these traditional written discourses in interpreting Chinese and Vietnamese students’ writing. At the same time, international students’ writing practices can be variable as these may also depend on their personal values, their individual strategies in locating themselves in the new institutional context and their language proficiency even though most need to meet the cut-off IELTS score of 6 to gain entry to most of Australian universities. Therefore, it is critical to have an insight into the web of personal variables, individual values and the disciplinary conventions that come into play in influencing students’ negotiation of culturally preferred writing styles and ways of meaning making in the host institution. This chapter focuses on how differently the students in this study draw on the collective approach to constructing knowledge, which are valued in the Vietnamese and Chinese cultures, in producing their first written texts at the Australian University. Thus, Chinese and Vietnamese composition traditions in relation to the collective rhetorical approach will be discussed in order to highlight what may constitute Chinese and Vietnamese students’ prior writing practices and how these may offer clues in interpreting students’ negotiation of disciplinary writing in Australian higher education. Based on the accounts of the Vietnamese and Chinese students, this chapter shows that cultural writing patterns are neither fixed 1 Fox, 1994; Connor, 1996; Cadman, 1997, 2000; Ryan, 2000; Connor, 2004; Green, 2007.

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nor static but appear to be subject to students’ specific ways of exercising these patterns in the new institutional context. The analysis of the students’ accounts will address how and why culturally preferred ways of writing should be seen as mediated, fluid and variable amongst individual student writers.

The collective approach to meaning making The communal approach and harmonisation tendency in meaning making have been regarded as integral to the Vietnamese and Chinese people’s cultural rhetoric tradition and ways of life. There are some underlying driving forces related to culture, religious ideologies, educational philosophy and social and historical circumstances which may contribute to shaping Chinese and Vietnamese writing traditions in general and the collective approach to constructing knowledge in particular. This suggests the need to look at both the wider context shaping Vietnamese and Chinese written discourse and personal variables in interpreting instances of Vietnamese and Chinese students’ rather than relying only on cognitive and linguistic factors. The way that Vietnamese people are oriented toward enacting collectivism and thus the way they engage with the world in this sense has been shaped primarily by its agriculture-based culture, its history against foreign invasion and Taoism. Vietnam is an agriculture-based society2 and wet paddy has been the main crop for Vietnam. Traditionally, farmers’ work and well-beings have been enormously dependent on nature. Thus, it has been essential for farmers to draw on the collective power of the whole community in order to protect the crops from the natural hazards they often encounter. In particular, the solidarity of the community has been fundamental for the building up and restoration of canals and dykes needed for agricultural work. Therefore collectivism has been regarded as a practical and effective response to the agricultural conditions. Nowadays, 80% of the Vietnamese population of 85 million still live in the countryside and wet paddy is still the main crop. Collectivism has been cultivated and developed along the history of thousands of years of Vietnam through the agriculture-based society and has become a distinctive cultural value of Vietnam. Collectivism has obviously grown out of Vietnam’s agricultural tradition. Collectivism has also evolved from Vietnam’s unique long history against constant foreign domination and invasion. Vietnamese historical 2

Tran Ngoc Them, 1999; Tran Dinh Huou, 2008.

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circumstance has been characterised by persistent struggles against the domination of its neighbour, China, for over a thousand year, the French colonisation for almost one century and the American invasion for three decades. Over its history, the nation had to tactically live with and fight against much stronger opponents for liberation and reunification. In such a warfare condition, how to effectively draw on the collective strength of the nation and the solidarity of individuals in the community has been amongst the most important warfare strategy. Gradually such a communal approach has become people’s way of life and way of making sense of the world around. That Vietnamese people are oriented toward enacting communality and maintaining harmonisation in expressing ideas and thus the way they engage with the world in this sense is also influenced by Taoism. The essential spirit of this belief is on the harmony between human beings and nature. Taoism has found its place in Vietnamese culture as its ideology matches with key characteristics of Vietnamese agricultural life which is interwoven with human solidarity and harmonisation. This belief has been Vietnamised in that displays of disagreement, no matter in spoken or written discourse, has been seen as a sign of solidarity breaking, lack of control and lack of discipline. Such a belief has to some degree led to the habit of being collective, circular and indirect in expressing ideas in both oral and written Vietnamese. The communal approach to knowledge building and the tendency to accept knowledge uncritically and avoid questioning certain sources of knowledge in communication has been regarded as a distinctive feature in Chinese tradition. This may stem from the Chinese traditional approach to knowledge, particularly knowledge provided by the teacher and knowledge in the textbook, and approach to knowledge representation and construction. Traditionally the teacher is the representative of authority and the embodiment of knowledge3 and thus questioning the knowledge provided by the teacher is unexpected. Chinese traditional approach to knowledge is believed to be bound to the ideology that knowledge is to be “transmitted” and “mastered” rather than “discovered”.4 In other words, knowledge is learnt through steady accumulation, as mentioned in the following saying Mount Tai (a typical high mountain) makes itself high because it does not reject any tiny lump of earth; rivers and seas make themselves deep because they do not refuse water from any brooklet. 5 Moreover, the attitude towards knowledge in the textbook may reflect 3

Cortazzi & Jin, 1999; Pratt, 1992, quoted in Barker, 2002. Pratt, 1992, p.313, cited in Barker, 2002, 181. 5 Mao-jin, 2001, 20. 4

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people’s respect for the wisdom of the past as their “spiritual” value and strength. What is printed may be reinforced and preserved by centuries as “classical works”.6 The fact that books are not considered as simply the sources but representative of knowledge and well-established truth7 has led to the tendency to appreciate and strengthen the collective knowledge threads rather than questioning knowledge in books.

How Vietnamese and Chinese international students mediate the communal approach to knowledge This section discusses the Vietnamese and Chinese students’ reflection on their intention underlying their ways of capitalising on the collective logic of meaning making in specific instances of their texts. Xuân, the Vietnamese student, and Wang and Lin, the Chinese students, negotiated different forms of the communal way to communicate ideas in their first written texts for their Masters courses. The students’ accounts indicate that on the surface, their academic writing in English appears to be influenced by their cultural group-oriented approach to knowledge. However, at a fine-grained level, their actual ways of mediating this cultural norm and the reasons shaping their decisions to do so appear to vary. Their differences in part depend on their personal perspectives on academic writing and previous experiences in writing. This indicates the critical need to unpack the complexities underpinning what has been taken for granted as cultural-situated ways of writing and to develop deeper insights into how individuals may exercise cultural patterns in different ways.

“Other people also think as I think” Lillis’ talk around text allows for an exploration of the hidden rationale for Xuân’s approach to supporting her ideas. The dimension “why the student wants to write so” of the modified version of Lillis’ heuristic8 is useful to enable Xuân to reflect on her account as an insider of her own process of negotiating meaning making in writing. She seemed to adopt the collective approach (Tran, 1999) to building knowledge and supporting her arguments by drawing on experts’ opinions as a supporting force for the opinion she put forward. The following extract is one of the paragraphs from her first text for her Masters course. Xuân ended this paragraph with 6

Barker, 2002, 181. Maley, 1986. 8 Lillis, 2001. 7

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a quotation from a famous author in the field of second language acquisition: The critical period hypothesis is associated with the name of a biologist, Eric Lenneberg (1925 _ 76). The critical period refers to a specific period of time in human development when the brain is predisposed for success in language learning. Based on his studies on human biology and neurology, he concluded that there is “an age limitation of language acquisition” (Lenneberg, 1967:142). According to him, this critical period exist from the age of two to around puberty. He explained: “After puberty, the ability for self-organisation and adjustment to the physiological demands of verbal behavior quickly declines. The brain behaves as if it has become set in its way and primary, basic language skills not acquired by that time” (Lenneberg, 1967:158). His hypothesis concerns primarily with first language acquisition. However, he also investigated into the field of second language acquisition. “Most individuals of average intelligence are able to learn a second language after the beginning of their second decade, although the incidence of “language-learning-blocks” rapidly increases after puberty. Also automatic acquisition from mere exposure to a given language seems to disappear after this age, and foreign languages have to be taught and learned through a conscious and laboured effort. Foreign accents cannot be overcome easily after puberty.” (Lenneberg, 1967:176). According to his view, children in the critical period acquire second language automatically because during that period their brain structures are specialized for language learning. After this period, when the brain becomes ‘set’, “older learners tend to employ their learning abilities and strategies to learn a second language _ the same abilities they would use to learn other skills or information” (Lightbown & Spada, 2001).

Rather than using a concluding sentence, Xuân ended her paragraph by citing a statement from one of the famous authors in the area of language acquisition. In our talk around the text, Xuân provided justifications for the above way of writing: “This is just like in the conclusion I just want to put someone's saying just to make the conclusion stronger, like that is what you think and then there is someone else also thinks that”. She believed that this strategy made her argument more convincing because this meant that not only she but others, especially the experts in the area, also had a similar view on the subject matter. In light of positioning theory,9 Xuân self-positioned as a member in the disciplinary community 9

Harre & van langehove, 1999.

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who has decided to draw on the collective strength to support her view and other-positioned the author as someone who shared the same view with her. Such a positioning is believed by Xuân to give credibility to her writing. Xuân thus did not accommodate the conventional Western paragraph structure but tend to build up her paragraph in the way she was familiar with in her previous schooling. Xuân linked her above instance of writing to her Vietnamese way of writing: “I remember, they [Vietnamese people] put the quotations right at the beginning and they also put a quotation at the end. Yeah, and I also did that, I sometimes put the quotation at the end and that makes the conclusion stronger because not only me think that but other people also think as I think.” Xuân revealed that this way of writing was shaped by her previous experience of writing, in which the strength of the argument originates from the way the community thinks and values. Tran10 characterises this to be the communal approach to making sense of the world, which is typical in the Vietnamese culture. Xuân’s selfpositioning and other-positioning of the author reveal that it is the harmonisation of the perspectives between herself as a student-writer and the author as an expert that is considered giving credibility for her writing. In this case, Xuân tended to bring along her voice as experience,11 which was embedded in her prior literacy background into her academic writing in English in the host institution. In other words, she seemed to draw on the intellectual resource from her previous schooling and her Vietnamese culturally-situated approach to knowledge to empower herself in academic writing in English. Lillis’ heuristic also helps to reveal that in this episode of negotiating academic writing, there appears no tension between the voice that Xuân wished to exhibit in her writing and the voice that she felt she needed to respond to.

“I should think as other people think” Drawing on Lillis’ heuristic, the account of Wang as the producer of her own text has been made visible. Wang was also influenced by the communal approach to meaning making but she exercised this cultural rhetoric in a different manner as compared to Xuân. Wang revealed for her first text at the Australian University, she hesitated to critically evaluate scholarly research since she was shaped by her Chinese group-oriented

10 11

Tran, 1999. Lillis, 2001, 46.

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logic of thinking. The following passage from Wang’s text illustrated how she attempted to comment on the related literature: Behaviourist model views second language acquisition as habit formation and they propose a direct relationship between input and output. Learners, after receiving input, imitate what they hear, and produce the output, then, either receive positive reinforcement or correction as feedback depending on whether they produce target language correctly or not. Ellis (1994:243) asserts that behaviourists emphasise the possibility of shaping L2 acquisition by manipulating the input to provide appropriate stimuli and by ensuring that adequate feedback is always available”. Behaviourists view input as stimuli and feedback. They put more emphasis on the role of habit formation rather than input in second language acquisition. Ellis also points out behaviourists ignores the internal processing that takes place inside the learner. From their point of view, acquisition is controlled by external factors and learner is viewed as passive medium, which we now perceive that it is not the case.

Wang elaborated on how she has evaluated relevant research on how input influences second language acquisition in her essay, “Actually I am not that confident because I am still in the stage of accepting other people's ideas… At that time I am not that critical, I mean I just repeat other people's words and I can't really give my own understanding.” The dimensions “how do you want to write” and “why do you want to write so” provide important insights into Wang’s underlying intention in this specific act of meaning making. In light of Lillis’ heuristic, Wang revealed that she was not confident enough to be critical of researchers’ work because she had been socialised into the practice of unquestioning others’ opinions. Wang self-positioned 12 as a novice in her field of study and otherpositioned her cultural experience as playing an important role in shaping her way of writing for her Masters course in Australia. She contended her writing experience is being affected by the Chinese cultural pattern of thinking: “This is very common and also Chinese way of thinking is the collective way of thinking. That means I should think as other people think… I just anticipated this sort of context for so many years.” What Wang refers to as her lack of confidence and her hesitation in displaying critical thinking reflects the collective ideology of constructing knowledge valued in Chinese culture.13 That is, knowledge tends to be built up with the efforts from the community members to avoid tension in 12 13

Harre & van langehove, 1999. Carson, 1992, cited in Connor, 1997.

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communication. Being shaped by this collective spirit, Wang's earlier way of developing arguments is thus tied to her attempt to avoid the tension in writing by accepting others’ views rather than criticising them. In light of Lillis’ heuristic, the way that this student developed her argument is largely shaped by what she felt she needed to respond to within her cultural frame. Wang’s effort to exercise her personal agency through her writing in the host institution is complex and multifaceted. She was determined to change to the new way of writing expected in the academic context in Australia as she claimed, “I am more than happy to change to the way to write like this” [what she perceived to be the writing requirement] and “Even I have to struggle and I consider the process of struggle as the ways to learn things and I don't want to stick to my own ways”. Thus, she preferred accommodating when confronted with the academic demand of her discipline. She, however, has not yet developed the ability to do so since this way of constructing arguments was previously unfamiliar to her. This was coupled with the fact that Wang was still shaped by her Chinese communal approach to knowledge and her own admiration for experts' ideas and writing. Both Xuân and Wang were influenced by the group-oriented approach to representing knowledge in writing but it seemed interesting that they applied this rhetoric in their writing in different manners. One adopted the communal ideology in relation with the use of quotation to support her ideas through drawing strength on what the group believed: other people also think as I think. Whereas, the other was shaped by its spirit and endeavoured to maintain harmony in writing by accepting others’ views rather than challenging them: I should think as other people think. In light of positioning theory, 14 under the same umbrella of the communal approach, one tends to exercise more self-determination and self-position as being more authoritative in knowledge construction while the other selfpositions as a junior who is subject to the commonality of the group.

Using direct quotations to add credibility to writing When discussing how to support her arguments in her academic writing in Australia, Lin stated that she often relied on researchers’ findings in books and their opinions rather than her own source about Chinese EFL situation as she used to be an English-major student in China. She indicated the reason underpinning her way of employing evidence to construct 14

Harre & van langehove, 1999.

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arguments was related to the collective approach to representing knowledge. The following excerpt from her written text illustrated how she used Dornyei's ideas to support her ideas about the limited aspects of Gardner's research: Therefore, from above it is not difficult to perceive that all the studies leading Gardner and his associates to prove the dominant importance of integrative motivation in SL learning tend to be in a SL context rather than a FL context. “Although it was partly inspired by an interest in the interrelationship of the Anglophone & Francophone communities in Canada, Gardner’s actual motivation theory does not address the complexities of this relationship and neither does it concern the varying social influences that can be found in different parts of Canada” (Dornyei, 2001, p.68). Even his Philippines case cannot serve as an epitome of other Asian countries as he expected. As a matter of fact, the researcher himself noticed the possible difference in motivation within different contexts, which can be indicated in his own analysis of the research findings of both the U.S. and the Philippines examples. However, for some reason further research to try out other more typical contexts for more types of motivational factors was not carried out, and the assertion that integrative motivation outweighs instrumental motivation in SLA remains consistent and unchanged.

Lin reflected on her intention underlying her way of writing: Because this comment from Dornyei can also support my view about Gardner’s choice in the context of his research. Dornyei said Gardner’s purpose is to reflect the interrelationship or complexity of this Canadian community but actually what he did does not address those complexities... Also it can support my idea that not only me that has doubt on Gardner, but there are many other researchers who have done quite scientifical research on it [motivation] and their research findings show the same result. (emphasis added).

Lin also explained her frequent use of Dornyei's direct quotations to support her ideas: Sometimes I use the quotation, some sentences are really fascinating me. It’s very concise and it expresses what I think in a very good way and I use it and sometimes since I have to use another sentence in a similar meaning, it’s better for me to use the author who is a native speaker and whose sentence structure and whose word choice I think will be better than mine. And I think it’s easier for me, I do not have to think of another kind of way; maybe I’m inferior to him and still I have to spend time thinking of it. That’s why.

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In the above extract, Lin drew on Dornyei's quotation to make her argument stronger even though she did not tend to paraphrase it or articulate on how that quotation helped to strengthen her idea. Lin clarified in her account of writing this passage that the use of Dornyei's idea showed that not only she herself but the other researcher, who was wellregarded and had strong expertise in this area, was also doubtful of Gardner's finding. As a result, this gives her argument more credibility. In light of positioning theory,15 Lin positioned herself as being inferior to the scholars, in this case Dornyei, in terms of disciplinary knowledge as well as language use and meaning expression. She other-positioned the authors as being powerful in shaping the way she supported her argument as they possess the authority of an expert in the disciplinary area and of a native speaker. Both Lin and Xuân appeared to adhere to the communal approach to supporting their ideas through the use of direct quotations from the experts in the related area because they believed that these sources of evidence added weight to their arguments. However, the underlying factors which helped to shape their belief do not appear to be similar. Xuân seemed to attribute this way of writing to her past habit of writing in Vietnamese. Yet, Lin argued that her way of using direct quotations from the experts in the area appeared to spring from her personal view of what was considered sophisticated writing. In accordance with Lillis’ framework, both brought along their voice of experience into their writing but one is shaped more by prior writing habit while the other is more influenced by their own personal stance regarding sophisticated meaning-making. Despite this difference, Lin is more similar to Xuân in her approach whilst Wang is shaped by the communal principle in the more conventional way through trying to avoid displaying critical thinking in writing. Even though Lin and Wang are from the same Chinese culture and both draw on collectivism for the credibility of their writing, their actual ways of meaning making reflected different dimensions of the collective way of thinking.

Conclusion This chapter shows that the Vietnamese and Chinese students’ negotiation of academic writing in the host institution is to a certain degree affected by the collective approach to constructing knowledge, which is often viewed to be a distinctive feature of the Chinese and Vietnamese cultures. 16 However, the specific ways they actually mediate this rhetoric pattern in 15 16

Harré & van Langenhove, 1999. Tran, 1999; Carson, 1992, cited in Connor, 1997, 205.

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their academic writing tend to vary somewhat. International students’ strategies to draw on evidence to support their arguments in academic writing do not tend to be passively positioned by their cultural rhetoric convention. The discussion of students’ writing excerpts and their reflection on the reasons underpinning their specific ways of writing reveal that they attach different meanings to their ways of employing the communal approach in academic writing. This moves beyond what is often assumed as the Chinese and Vietnamese collective way of thinking. In this regard, international students’ engagement in disciplinary writing in another culture indeed contributes to enriching their traditional distinctive rhetoric manner. The analysis also indicates these international students endeavour to strategically, intentionally and creatively adopt cultural rhetoric patterns in their academic writing in English. It is thus crucial for lecturers and the host institution to recognise the capacity and potential contribution of international students. Increased understanding of international students’ capacity to move creatively between their distinctive writing tradition and their discourse community in the new learning context is an essential step to work out effective approaches to help them capitalise on their intellectual resources and “hidden” capacity. Such efforts will contribute to enriching the written discourse of the host institution as well as the professional and personal landscapes of all members that are engaged in this academic transaction.

CHAPTER NINE LECTURERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ADAPTATION

Introduction As discussed in Chapter 4, international student adaptation to academic writing in higher education is shaped not only by their cultural writing tradition, their agency and personal experiences but also the disciplinary context within the host institution. Lecturers’ preferences and expectations are the central factors from the disciplinary community that influence student writing. Lillis 1 , Matsuda 2 and Leki 3 contend that disciplinary writing is often associated with the learners’ effort to accommodate the dominant norms of the target discourse. These dominant norms represent what is valued by disciplinary members. Since writing within a specific discipline is positioned by its community members and their values, discourse power is obviously bound to its members and its privileged conventions governing academic writing of a particular discipline. Disciplinary discourse power embedded in lecturers’ expectations and their perceptions of the disciplinary conventions are often communicated through their teaching, feedback and assessment. Yet there are “hidden features” that come into play in the assessment of student academic writing. These often remain implicit within the disciplinary culture.4 At the heart of the debate about student writing in higher education is the question about what “counts” as good writing within a specific discipline. Lea and Stierer claim that what “counts” as good writing is related not only to the matter of “how best to represent knowledge within that discipline” but also to the practices perpetuating privileged forms of knowledge of the discipline and individual lecturers’ preference for the

1

Lillis, 1997, 2001. Matsuda, 2001a. 3 Leki, 2003. 4 Street, 2009, 1. 2

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“given” criteria of good writing.5 Relating this to the issue of assessment in higher education, Starfield argues for assessment as the outcome of a dynamic process in which texts are assessed based on staff’s “varying amounts of academic capital” rather than according to “a pre-agreed upon formula”.6

Research on lecturers’ views and adaptation As universities in English speaking countries intensify their internationalisation strategies, there has been a growing emphasis on the development of teaching and learning within a broader internationalisation agenda. To date international education research has focused largely on issues related to international students. This stream of research has accorded emphasis on factors influencing their decisions on where to study,7 their experiences and perceptions in relation to study in the host institutions 8 and social security. 9 Much of this research has dealt with issues of international student adaptation and socialisation outside of classroom teaching and learning. Nevertheless, there has been limited scholarly research on academics’ responses to the diversity international students bring to the classroom context in host institutions. This chapter attempts to address this relative paucity by discussing the extent to which lecturers at a specific Australian university accommodate international students’ diverse ways of constructing knowledge when assessing academic writing. Marginson has pointed to the imbalance between the increase of international student numbers and the restricted capacity of teaching staff to develop pedagogic practices that cater appropriately for the academic needs of international students. 10 He has emphasised the importance of developing pedagogic practices that marry the established Anglo-American traditions, which currently dominate Australian tertiary education with ‘other traditions and especially those of East and Southeast Asia’.11 This, he has argued, is considered necessary in the process of enhancing educational quality, which is integral to creating competitive advantages for institutions in the global market of international education. 5

Lea & Stierer, 2000, 4. Starfield, 2001, 145. 7 Tekle et al., 2006; Pimpa, 2005. 8 Grayson, 2008; Johnson, 2008; McMahon, 2011. 9 Marginson et al., 2010; Nyland et al., 2007. 10 Marginson, 2007, 2008. 11 Marginson, 2008, 2. 6

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In his review of the myths about international students and international education, Marginson 12 criticised the lack of reciprocity demonstrated by the local teaching staff, based on the assumption that international students should change to meet the institution’s education requirements and conventions, while ‘we’ the Australian academics remain fixed. He argues that, “international education is – or should be a mutual process of adjustment, in which international students and educating institution continually learn from each other and adjust to each other’s requirements”.13 Yet existing research on international education offers very little in conceptualising what this ‘mutual process of adjustment’ may mean, raising questions about what these practices actually involve and how academics view the process of adjustment within their teaching, learning and assessment. This chapter will analyse the extent to which academics adjust their teaching, learning and assessment practices by analysing academics' views on international students’ diverse ways of meaning-making in academic writing. It will draw on positioning theory 14 to interpret two rounds of interviews with the four academics involved in this study. The chapter shows that regardless of the rhetoric that promoting an inclusive principle in curriculum development, assessment and pedagogic practices is imperative for working with international students and central for institution’s internationalisation agenda, there is evidence that lecturers’ own ethnocentric views seem to largely influence their own practices and their requirements of international student academic practices. A major concern of educational institutions that host international students is that their teaching staff often finds it challenging to effectively respond to international students’ diverse characteristics and needs. Frequently, the diverse ways of learning and constructing knowledge brought by international students to the new learning context are considered problematic or even inferior to the conventions and the “taken for granted” academic practices in the host institutions.15 In addition to ways of learning and constructing knowledge, their different experiences as a result of their prior schooling and socialisation in their home countries are often viewed to be limited or negative.16 If those diverse “unfamiliar” experiences are not recognised or left untouched in the educational transaction in the new context, this is a waste of pedagogical resource and 12

ibid ibid, 4. 14 Harré & van Langenhove, 1999. 15 Cochran-Smith, 2003; Carrington, 2007. 16 Carrington, 2007. 13

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cultural vistas that can be utilised to open up positive, new and challenging learning opportunities for international students, local students and teaching staff themselves. Furthermore, international students are often positioned as “problematic”, struggling to understand the norms and conventions of academic writing within their disciplines.17 Research on pedagogical practices in multicultural classrooms has also indicated that perceptions of what constitutes effective teaching and learning and what counts as legitimate knowledge are often shaped by teachers’ own ethnocentric views. 18 Ethnocentrism is considered as viewing and interpreting the views and ways of constructing knowledge of people from other cultural backgrounds through one’s own cultural filters.19 Based on a study with pre-service teachers, De Courcy found that teachers often expect students from non-English speaking backgrounds to read and interpret texts from the teachers’ cultural lens.20 Teachers may also judge international ESL students’ performance based on their real world knowledge from an Australian or Anglo Saxon perspective without taking into consideration that international ESL students may have different world experiences to those represented in the lesson.21 Research also reveals that teacher’s unawareness of their own ethnocentrism when dealing with international ESL students has resulted in their conflation of students’ English language skills with students’ real world knowledge and in their deficit view of students’ cognitive abilities.22 Research on academic identity has indicted that academic communities serve as filters through which academics refer to ‘sets of taken-for-granted values, attitudes and ways of behaving’. 23 Interactions with colleagues assist in develop a strong sense of identity in terms of what is important and by giving academics meaning and self-esteem.24 According to Belcher and Trowler, academic cultures and disciplinary epistemology are intertwined. Neither of the two dimensions is static and the agentive actions of academic staff can influence disciplinary epistemology and academic cultures. Therefore, in exploring the extent to which academic staff adjust their teaching, learning and assessment practices for

17

Morita, 2004: O’Loughlin & Arkoudis, 2009. Arkoudis & Love, 2008; Carrington, 2007; De Courcy, 2007; Tucker et al, 2005. 19 Matsumoto, 2000. 20 De Courcy, 2007. 21 Arkoudis & Love, 2008. 22 Ibid. 23 Becher & Trowler, 2001, 23. 24 Henkel, 2005, 173. 18

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international students, positioning theory of Harré and van Langenhove25 will be used as theoretical framework for analysing the interview data. Positioning theory is suitable to conceptualise academis’ professional practices primarily because it views professional identity as a fluid rather than a static concept. The theory also provides specific tools to analyse the actions of people within the context of the institutional practices within which they work. In the case of this study, this means the academic department and faculty. What follows is the discussion of the views of the lecturers, Lisa and Andy from the Economics discipline and Anna and Kevin from the Education discipline, on international student academic writing, in particular students’ diversity in meaning-making in their discipline. The positioning analysis reveals that while the academics self-position as understanding the needs of international students and accommodate some diversity in academic writing, they are constrained by what they consider to be the requirements of academic writing within their discipline. There were some minor adjustments of teaching and assessment from the lecturers but these are limited by their perceptions of their rights and responsibilities within the practices and structures of the university.

Andy Andy is an academic who has been teaching in the Economics discipline for 16 years. In discussing what constitutes a good piece of writing, he expected students to demonstrate the ability to build up an argument grounded in the underlying theoretical model. Andy stressed the need for students to adopt a variety of sources to support their opinions. With respect to the “form” aspects of writing, he focused on the essay structure and appeared to expect students to accommodate the linear approach to developing arguments. Language aspects were also taken into consideration in his evaluation of student writing. Yet as illustrated later on, he made it explicit that he would not fail students because of their linguistic weakness. Like Lisa, another lecturer in Economics, Andy appeared to reproduce the disciplinary practice which valued students “drawing on their own experience” from their home contexts. Andy explained why he expected international students to conform to the “Western” ways of constructing knowledge: I recognise the diversity but I insist on the Western style of logics and arguments. I am afraid that I would say “No you come to a very Western 25

Harré & van Langenhove, 1999.

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style University... and you need to learn to see the world as these people see it”… I do not mark people down to a fail when they have errors like what I call the mechanics of English... But I would give them a fail if they were not attempting to explain and make a logical connection in your argument and if you do not play that game, then you can get a fail grade.

Andy’s discussion of disciplinary discourse requirements stressed the issue of being for the “Western” discourse practices and rejecting the “non-Western” ones rather than the matter of creating meaningful opportunities for new understandings and new practices within his discipline. This view did not enable students to negotiate ways of constructing knowledge and moving creatively between different discourse practices. 26 Instead, international students here seemed to be treated as passive and conditioned by the requirements in the new leaning context. This deterministic view seems to be contrary to the aspect of nurturing inclusive supportive teaching and learning environments, which is central to the institutional agenda to internationalise the curriculum. Andy constructs the Australian institution as “our” Western style university where the international students as the “Others” who “need to learn to see the world as these people see it”. His positioning implies the superiority of the Self or the “Western” ways of thinking while viewing international students as being deficit and need to conform to these “desirable qualities” that “we”/the Self possess at the Australian university. In addition, through employing the metaphor of international students as those who played the academic game within the institution, Andy again highlighted their duties and obligations to accommodate the “Western” logic to make sense of the world and develop arguments. This accommodation allowed them to get access to the academic world at the Australian university. Otherwise, they would be marginalised with the risk of not passing the course, which negatively affected the returns on their personal investment27 in studying overseas. Van Langenhove and Harré28 argue that when an individual positions somebody else, that is often associated with his/her self-positioning. In the example of Andy above, by referring to the students as being involved in the academic “game”, he also tended to position himself as someone who was responsible for regulating and ensuring the local moral order of the institution. Andy’s discussion portrays an ironic relationship between international students and the institution. Despite the expansion of the 26

Canagarajah, 2006. Norton, 2001. 28 Van Langenhove & Harré, 1999. 27

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international student cohort in Australian institutions and the growing dependence of these institutions on international student dollar, they are still portrayed as “Others” who play the institutional game and have to “obey” its rules. There is limited reciprocal dialogic space to address international students’ needs in terms of agency and opportunities for negotiating different discourse practices. Despite multiple benefits international students bring to the institution, their participation in disciplinary practices may not be fully facilitated and their images and values are not often positively constructed in the realities of the institutional context. Andy seemed to other-position Chinese and Vietnamese students as those who lacked the mental map for some basic disciplinary knowledge presented in the course: “They think about the world in a different way and that's often a barrier for them when we talk about Western business school or sort of interpretation of the world”. According to this lecturer, Chinese and Vietnamese international students’ ways of interpreting the world, shaped by their distinctive political and economic culture, might disadvantage them in achieving their academic goals. In this sense, Chinese and Vietnamese students tend to be marginalised in their struggle to fully participate in their disciplinary community as compared with local students or students from other countries. Andy’s comments may reflect the conceptual barriers which, a decade ago, Chinese and Vietnamese international students might encounter. However, Chinese and Vietnamese economies have recently undergone a lot of changes and innovation. As a result, Chinese and Vietnamese students have been exposed to the marketoriented economy and may be able to internalise the structure and the concepts associated with it. Despite this, there are still differences between “Western business school”, as Andy referred to, and Chinese and Vietnamese economic realities. Thus, understanding new economic concepts in the course may still be a challenge to Chinese and Vietnamese students as well as students from other different countries. In assisting students in his course, Andy tried to modify his teaching in several ways: So how do I deal with this, it changes the ways I teach, I often speak too fast but I do try to slow it and I try to find different words that I try to explain a concept but I can't always do that because sometimes there is a term or word I must use, so I try to find different ways of explaining them in terms of example, what do I mean to make it as simple as possible.

Andy drew on various approaches to facilitate students’ interpretation of his lecture such as slowing down his explanation of concepts, using

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different words of similar meaning to make disciplinary concepts clearer and illustrating the concepts through concrete and simple examples. In talking about his intentional actions, Andy appeared to self-position as a lecturer who was active in seeking ways to assist international students. In particular, he opened up the opportunities for students to consult him about their essays and recommended students to seek help from the learning skill unit in his faculty to strengthen their academic skills. He also talked through the assessment criteria with students in class. After marking students’ assignments, in addition to comments on individual students’ work, he gave feedback in class about the determination of the grade and explained why some assignments got high grades and some others did not. Through his summary of the assessment criteria and the overall performance of the class, students could locate where they were up to in the grading scale and what might be the areas they needed to focus their efforts on. Andy communicated his feedback to the class both in oral and written forms. In terms of feedback provision, Andy appeared to be the most innovative and dedicated among the lecturers participating in this study. Despite his own efforts in accommodating students’ needs, Andy revealed that there was an absence of common criteria for evaluating student writing in his discipline: I don't discuss with my colleagues what my criteria are and what their criteria might be but some of my colleagues place much more emphasis on the academic writing skills... There are a lot of differences in the ways we expect our students to do and another impression is that some of my colleagues would put somebody to a fail grade if their writing has mechanical mistakes, like spelling grammar, so I am one of the softer people... At the moment, there is no common rule, and I suppose one reason for that is there are strong differences of opinions among the academic staff about what the rules should be and we face the difficulties of academic freedom, people feel that they have great autonomy not only on what they teach and how they teach but the assessment process as well.

In Andy’s view, lecturers in his discipline worked as individuals in setting out the guidelines for assessing student writing. He emphasised that this practice has led to variations in lecturers’ expectations of student writing. For example, while he did not place much emphasis on students' language skills, some of his colleagues did so and might fail students because of what he referred to as “mechanical mistakes”. In light of positioning theory, Andy self-positioned as being more understanding of international students’ struggles and other-positioned his colleagues as possibly a bit harsher when assessing international students’ language skills. While he

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encouraged students to draw on their own personal and professional experience in disciplinary writing, other lecturers might expect students to employ materials from the academic discipline rather than their own experience. Andy also pointed out two reasons why common rules for assessment have not been established. Firstly, it was hard for academics to reach an agreement about the assessment criteria while their personal opinions differed. Secondly, lecturers could exercise great autonomy and freedom in their decision concerning the teaching and assessment in the Management discipline. Through illustrating the possible differences in the expectations of individual lecturers and the constraints in establishing constructs for evaluating student writing, Andy appeared to reproduce his disciplinary practices as shifting and contested. This would disadvantage international students in their attempts to interpret and accommodate what was expected of them.

Lisa Lisa is an academic who has over 16 years experience teaching in higher education. The following quote shows what Lisa thought to be the constructs of a good essay in her discipline: I guess the most important thing we are looking for is whether they can understand the theories and whether they can apply them into practice. Then being critical in the sense of academic reflection to see whether the theories are valid or not but that of the secondary importance to the application of the theories. The third important thing is whether they are able to get their arguments across, whether they are able to write clearly, whether the assignment has a clear structure, whether they support their arguments or they just leave things as facts. Finally we also look at whether they reference properly.

From Lisa's point of view, students' abilities to apply disciplinary theories in practice seemed to be most fundamental to a good text. She further revealed: “we told them see, you have all these little experiences but you look at the theory, you can explain why all these happen”. As a requirement for the Masters course, students need to have at least two-year working experience. Lisa self-positioned as a lecturer who placed great emphasis on the need for students to interpret their own experiences within a more coherent theoretical framework. In light of positioning theory,29 through this form of deliberate self-positioning, Lisa appeared to reproduce the disciplinary practice which valued the students’ application 29

Harré & van Langenhove, 1999.

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of theories into their contexts. However, the two Chinese Economics students tended to position the disciplinary practice in a different way. In their view, students’ personal working experiences in their home countries were not encouraged in disciplinary writing. In the above quote, Lisa also referred to students' critical thinking, which was linked to their evaluation of the validity of the theories, as an important element in a successful essay. Another aspect which Lisa highlighted was whether students were able to elaborate on facts and build up their arguments. Lisa explained why it might be hard to articulate the writing requirements in her management discipline: In my opinion, it's difficult to put that into words; most lecturers know what is a good assignment when they see it but it's very difficult to explain what makes a good assignment... I think in management, the skill of argument is even more important than in accounting and finance and sometimes it makes it difficult for students because they think that these criteria are more subjective than the other ones. It's not as subjective as they think but it's more difficult for the lecturer to explain what a good argument is and why and why a particular articulation was wrong.

She raised an important point that most lecturers might know whether a particular assignment was satisfactory or not but they might not be able to use concrete language to explore and explain to students what constitutes a “good argument”. Her opinion matched with the argument by Lea and Street 30 that academic staff might find it difficult to articulate the constructs of a good assignment. According to Lisa, the complex nature of her management discipline makes it challenging for the lecturers' expectations to be clearly articulated to students. This seemed to disadvantage students, in particular international students, in their attempts to understand and accommodate what was expected of them in terms of academic writing. The analysis of students’ accounts also revealed that in many cases, they had to struggle to decode disciplinary ways of writing since these were not explicitly expressed. In other words, the conventions associated with the disciplinary discourse are often not transparent and students have to “learn by doing rather than seeing the discourse unpacked”.31 In a similar vein, Lillis claims that one of the characteristics of current institutional practice is one-side transparency because the language of students is often made “visible and problematised” whereas

30 31

Lea & Street, 2000. A. Jones, 2001, 186.

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what is valued by a particular discourse community remains to be viewed as transparently meaningful.32 Lisa was, however, the only one among the four lecturers in the study who thought that international students from Asian backgrounds appeared to have more advantage in cognitive thinking than local students: There might be some advantages in a sense that Chinese students or students with an Oriental relation background in general may think in a less linear way than Australian students… But they tend to think of things in a less linear and more holistic way, seeing things as being connected rather than seeing things as separate steps but probably in general their English skill prevents them from actually capitalizing their advantage if their language skill would be perfect, then they might write better assignments than the Australian students but because they are not, it becomes difficult.

It has been well established in the literature that students from Asian countries might not meet the expectation of English-medium institutions due to their failure in expressing and constructing knowledge in a linear way. 33 Lisa raised an interesting point that their holistic approach to knowledge, which allows them to view things to be interrelated, appears to be a valuable strength for them in constructing knowledge in the management discipline. However, as discussed in chapters 6 & 7, most students in Economics appeared to view their tendency toward thinking and communicating in a less linear way as being deficient in their course. Thus, there seemed to be a gap between Lisa’s perception and those of the students about what the students' strengths and weaknesses might be. Lisa tried to support students in terms of academic writing in two main ways. First, like other lecturers involved in this study, she included the assessment criteria for student writing in the course outline. Second, she stated: I think what is useful to get the students to get used to your expectations is to give them an assignment early on of the semester, so don't wait until week 8 or week 10 but give them the assignment on week 4 or week 5, mark the assignment and give it back to them within 1 week or 2 weeks at the most, mark the assignment and give feedback before they do the second assignment because that's the only way they can learn and if you have the assignment later on in the semester, they can't improve, they don't have the chance to improve.

32 33

Lillis, 2001. Kaplan, 1972; Hinds, 1987; Hinkel, 1999.

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According to Lisa, engaging students in the real practice of academic writing for their subject and giving them comments on their writing in early weeks of the semester help them learn about what they are expected to do. In talking about her teaching practice, Lisa seems to self-position as a well-intentioned lecturer who is dedicated in supporting students to understand academic expectations and improve their writing.

Kevin Kevin is a senior lecturer with 16-year experience teaching in the Education discipline. The following quote reveals his perception of a good essay in his discipline: A good piece of writing, in the first place, it answers the question and it’s got to take into account of the readings. When I mark I say, okay this student has read the key texts and thought about them, she hasn't just accepted everything that said there but she answered the question, she read the texts and she thought about what the texts said and she constructed a good argument. Whether I agree with it or not, it's irrelevant but is it a good argument? and has she followed the normal academic conventions of a Western essay, the structure, the referencing and citations.

Students' ability to read critically, interpret and evaluate key studies related to their topics was central to a satisfactory essay, according to Kevin. Regarding the form of writing, he referred to such aspects as essay structure, referencing and citations. Thus, Kevin's criteria for a good essay in terms of form seemed to be largely similar to those mentioned in the departmental guidelines for student writing. In particular, Kevin thought that students' accommodation of “Western” academic writing conventions appeared to be necessary. In light of positioning theory, Kevin’s expectations support the reproduction of disciplinary practices,34 in which students are expected to accommodate what is often taken for granted as “Western” academic conventions and students' unfamiliar ways of writing appear to be unexpected. One of the overriding concerns Kevin had when teaching and dealing with international students' writing was tied to the approach to critical thinking and integrating personal experience into writing. He said: I don't want students to accept everything and I don't want them to agree with the experts... That's why I like to see the draft because if I have the draft before the students put in the final assignment, I would say for 34

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Chapter Nine example, I am very interested in this paragraph here but why do you agree with it, are you sure that this is correct, would this work in your context? And then the students often say “Oh well maybe not”. How this work in your context? I think I try to encourage students to sort of, I think we need another word because if we say be critical I think students sometimes misunderstand what that is… I can't think of a better one but what it means is not accepting at face value what you are told just because it is told by an expert because as I said, the expert hasn't taught everywhere and faced all the constraints. People are worried about ‘critical’, you can criticise David Nunan without attacking him as a person. I don't think there's an answer for it but I think university lecturers need to be aware of these issues.

Kevin is the only lecturer involved in this study who offered to look at students’ drafts and posed questions to guide their process of redrafting their written assignments. Through his questions, he encouraged his students to build a bridge between the disciplinary theory and the professional practice in students’ home contexts. Kevin raised the point that students might misinterpret what critical thinking means and feel anxious about how to apply this approach into their practice of writing. His view seemed to be congruent with the Chinese students' feelings about how to be critical in writing their first texts at the Australian university. For instance, viewing critical thinking as identifying flaws in experts' studies, Wang felt intimidated and drew on “pretension” as her approach to critical thinking. Whereas, Lin felt uncomfortable in evaluating others' research and justified her criticism of Gardener's research by stating that “I meant I am not attacking him [Gardener]”. Thus what is meant through the phrase “critical thinking” does not seem to be transparent to students, which caused ambiguity, misunderstanding and anxiety for them. This signals the need for lecturers in specific disciplines to articulate to students the specific ways critical thinking can be incorporated in their disciplinary writing. Kevin appeared to be critical of the conventional way of communicating ideas in the academic essay in English: Again I had conversations with students over a year, it sounds crazy but an academic essay in English, I can see why some students can get repetitive or redundant because you have to start off by saying what you are going to say and then you say it and then at the end you say what you have just said and it seems crazy because you have to have those signposts very clear there. Otherwise, the marker, the native speaker, starts thinking that this is not coherent.

According to Kevin, the so-called logical and coherent way of constructing meaning in the English text with a lot of signposts tended to

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make it look “repetitive or redundant”. Through his critical reflection on what was valued in English-speaking institutions in terms of idea expression, he self-positioned as someone who was able to question what was taken for granted as the writing conventions in his discipline. Kevin appeared to see that what was considered as a logical approach to knowledge seemed to be bound to a distinctive disciplinary and cultural context. His critical awareness is similar to Xuân’s and Lin's feelings about the ways of communicating ideas in the introduction of the academic text. These students find it either boring or irrelevant to signpost the main argument when it has not yet been convincingly argued. Kevin reflected on his own professional practice and was critical of his role as a university lecturer in assessing students' essays: It's an unusual situation there and sometimes I feel a bit uncomfortable about it, sometimes I wonder how much of this work is the student's and how much is mine. After you have been to a process of drafting, redrafting and discussing. Sometimes I feel in a way I am kind of taking over from the student I am taking away her autonomy. I find it difficult to know exactly how much guidance to give because you want to guide, you want to lead but you don't want to dominate but then at the same time, I guess the fact that I am a lecturer and the student is student, there is an assumption made about my skills and the student's skills... But here I am expected to make judgment about your writing in a second language on a topic I know a little bit about but I am not claimed to be an expert.

In the above quote, Kevin attempted to problematise the current academic pedagogy and practice. He described the role of the lecturer as someone who often decided on the assignment question and criteria, guided students' writing and finally evaluated students' essays. Through his positioning of his own expectations and other-positioning of the institutional practice, he tended to portray the institutional structure as an intellectual circle whereby students' writing practices were largely regulated by the lecturers who embodied that structure. Kevin indicated that there was too much control over students' practice of academic writing and thus insufficient space for students' autonomy. He was concerned about how to offer guidance to students in a meaningful way without dominating and limiting their creativeness in writing. By referring to the assumptions about lecturers' and students' skills, he seemed to imply that he should not go beyond the circle and the routines set in the university context. In sum, according to positioning theory,35 Kevin selfpositioned as a lecturer who was active in critically reflecting on his role 35

Harré & van Langenhove, 1999.

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but subject to the conventional practices in his institution. However, his ways of questioning the current academic pedagogy and his own practice signalled the potential to transform the institutional practices.

Anna Ana is a senior lecturer in TESOL with 13-year teaching experience. Anna accords great attention to students' ability to evaluate and criticise current research: “Something that I am really looking for is the ability to synthesise and evaluate and being able to read critically, identifying contradictions and so forth”. She regarded critical thinking as being related to the identification of the gaps of the literature. However, the two Chinese students, Lin and Wang, appear to link critical thinking to searching for the weaknesses in experts' studies. Anna stated her expectations of how students communicate their ideas in academic writing: When I see the cover sheet that's from one of my international students and I think that I need to be alert to some of the things like perhaps there may be a different discourse structure within the paragraph, so if I don't have a topic sentence at the beginning, I can look for it at the end. But then I know that they are writing in a Western academic context, so one thing I do warn them to guide them toward is that in this context, the expectation is that there will be a topic sentence at the beginning of the paragraph rather than at the end.

In the above quote, Anna explicitly stated that she accepted international students may bring a different way of communicating ideas in written texts but attempted to train them toward a more conventional way in the “Western academic context”. According to positioning theory, 36 she positioned herself as someone who was sensitive to different ways of constructing meanings possibly embraced by international students. But at the same time, she was determined to ensure the “local moral order” of her institution, by training international students to write in accordance with the disciplinary convention. In particular, through her self-positioning as a lecturer and primary audience of her students' writing, Anna tended to position her students as those who have the responsibility to accommodate her expectations to communicate meanings successfully and thus gain access into the academic discipline. Through her self-positioning and her other-positioning of international students, the institutional structure was reproduced, in which she as the lecturer represents the gatekeeper to 36

ibid.

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student writing and the students are responsible for conforming to what was expected of them. In the following quote, Anna stated her awareness of Chinese international students' needs: I haven't got this difficulty with Vietnamese students but with Chinese mainland students, it's different. The Vietnamese students don't make forced assertions like this is true but the Chinese, I have noticed the tendency to do that, which comes from Chinese discourse conventions where something that you think everybody knows you can do that or you are allowed to quote items from the text without citing it.

In Anna's view, Chinese mainland students tended to make assertions without referring to sources. This appeared to be shaped by the Chinese discourse convention embedded in the communal value in which the text was the property of the community. Whilst she thought that this seemed to be a tendency of Chinese mainland students, the two Chinese students did not name this as a problem. One of the Chinese students claimed that the Chinese communal value in fact affected her critical thinking in the Australian institution, rather than her acknowledgment of sources, since she was socialised into the idea that she should think as the expert who wrote the text thinks. Moreover, though one of the Vietnamese students did mention that quoting ideas from another writer’s text without citing them seemed to be acceptable in Vietnamese schooling, Anna referred to this as a Chinese discourse “tendency” rather than as a pattern in the Vietnamese writing tradition. The comments from the lecturer and the students would suggest that there are differences with regard to the understandings of students’ writing habits and challenges between the lecturer and students involved in this study. Anna attempted to support international students enrolled in her subject in several ways. She tried to make her expectations clear to her students by giving them a criteria sheet, which she developed with her colleagues, for each assignment. Also, she felt it was very important to inform international students of the support services available for them. Anna “publicised” and tried to encourage her international students to participate in lunch-time seminars run by the learning skill unit and the orientation program run by the graduate school. In addition, she revealed: Another collaboration is what I do with the learning skill centre is for the written assignment scheme (WAS) and in that scheme the students put the assignment in for one of the tutors at the learning skills centre on time and the tutor give me a piece of paper saying that the student has submitted the essay to them and the staff there work with the student on things in the

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essay about organisation, coherence, syntactical things and then the student has a few days to work on those before handing it to me.

Anna stated that she collaborated with the learning skills centre and encouraged her international students to seek support from this service in terms of language and organisation aspects of their assignments. Through recalling her activities to assist international students, she self-positioned as a lecturer who was willing to support international students and actively cooperated with other support units within the University to facilitate students’ participation in disciplinary community.

Conclusion The positioning analysis37 of the four lecturers shows that they appear to understand the needs of international students and are determined to accommodate them in many ways. Yet, the lecturers also highlight the need for international students to explicitly communicate ideas and develop a logic argument in accordance with the “Western style”. Once international students are positioned as having the duty to follow the “Western” rhetoric convention, the quality and effectiveness of teaching is less problematised and the students’ conformity to the existing practices is more emphasised. Thus, this may restrict possibilities for transformation in terms of pedagogical practices among the lecturers and within the curriculum. Even though the lecturers attempt to find ways to facilitate students’ understandings of the conventions, there is little mutual transformation occurring in terms of negotiating different ways of constructing knowledge. The lecturers appear to be well-intentioned and try to communicate their expectations of student writing through the assessment criteria included in course outlines. However, with regard to some aspects of disciplinary writing, they do not always use explicit language to articulate specific concepts. This issue is also reflected in the students’ comments on the ambiguous wording of the writing criteria. In addition, the two lecturers in Economics tend to separate language and disciplinary content and stereotype Chinese or “Asian” students. The dissimilarity between the lecturers suggests that what constitutes a “good essay” is contested or at least remains unclear. Even though both lecturers in Education think that students' personal experience and knowledge from their home context should be encouraged in academic writing, their perceptions of the relevant ways of integrating 37

Harré & van Langenhove, 1999.

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this source of knowledge into writing the literature review are different. The mismatches in the display of disciplinary knowledge emerge from the expectations of lecturers which might not be made explicit enough to students. This makes it challenging for students to understand what is required of them. However, in the relevant literature, what challenges international students is often attributed to such factors as English language, study skills and cultural adaptation, which arise from international students themselves.38 The present study has found that there is little focus by the lecturers on negotiating disciplinary conventions. In addition, the inconsistency and subtlety of lecturers’ explanation of academic expectations make it more challenging for international students to make sense of what is required of them in specific disciplines. The discussion shows various points in which disciplinary practices seem to be reproduced differently from the lenses of the students and the lecturers. This suggests the need to create more space for communication to develop mutual understandings between students and lecturers. Opening more opportunities for students to consult their lecturers about their essay outline, confusion and questions during the process of doing a specific assignment is one of the ways to increase international students’ understandings of what is expected of them and thus their participation in disciplinary practices. Concrete steps to inform students of the support programs available and encourage them to make use of the services are needed. Given the inherent unequal power relationship between international students and lecturers, the onus seems to be put on lecturers in taking the initiative to help international students feel welcome, comfortable and confident to participate in the interactive process with the university communities. These steps can help to make the curriculum and institutional practices more accessible to the increasingly diverse student population. These steps can also contribute to ensuring mutual adaptation between students and lecturers and making international students become truly valued members of the institutional communities. The lecturers self-position as being aware of the need to adapt their teaching and become active in seeking ways to facilitate students' understandings of what is required of them. For example, Lisa tried to give students assignments in early weeks and offered feedback within a week so that international students could learn from this experience while Andy attempted to link abstract concepts to specific examples to make disciplinary theories more approachable for international students. Positioning theory refers to the possibilities for individuals to reposition 38 Samuelowicz, 1987; Elsey, 1990; Ballard & Clanchy, 1995; Robertson, Line, Jones, & Thomas, 2000; Lacina, 2002; Sawir, 2005.

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their views and take action to transform institutional practices when encountering new challenges. 39 In light of positioning theory, the lecturers’ changes are examples of how the growing number of international students presents an opportunity for the lecturers to transform their own teaching and the departmental practices to be restructured in order to make the curriculum more accessible for students from diverse backgrounds. However, as revealed by the lecturers, good practices remained largely at the individual level rather than becoming common or shared practice at the departmental or faculty level. Also, staff’s academic autonomy tends to hinder their intention to establish agreed criteria on evaluating students’ writing in their discipline. These findings indicate that although the lecturers are well-intentioned and aware of the significance to accommodate the diverse needs of international students, their shifts in terms of pedagogy are to some extent held back by institutional practices. Moreover, the lecturers reveal that through conversations with international students who actively discussed their needs, they increase their understandings of the needs of international students and how to accommodate these needs. Email dialogues with international graduates who returned to work in their home country was another source for increased understanding. This illustrates how student’s agency enacted through their interaction with lecturers impacts on staff’s positioning, which leads to the changes in their teaching. In other words, students’ ability to exercise personal agency through taking the initiative to communicate with staff helps to create the conditions for individual lecturers’ practices to be transformed.

39

New, 1994; Harré & van Langenhove, 1999.

CHAPTER TEN CONCLUSION: THE DIALOGICAL PEDAGOGIC MODEL FOR MUTUAL ADAPTATION

This book has focused on the adaptation of international students from China and Vietnam to academic writing practices in higher education. It has also explored lecturers’ views and expectations of student writing. The study reported in this book employs a trans-disciplinary framework for interpreting student writing within institutional structures. The framework has been developed by infusing a modified version of Lillis’ heuristic 1 for exploring students’ meaning making with positioning theory. 2 In order to unpack the negotiation practices of international students in their disciplinary writing, the book focuses on investigating how they exercised personal agency through mediating their writing of the first texts for their Masters courses. In addition, it examined to what extent the students reformulated their views of disciplinary writing as they progressed through their course after a six-month period. This concluding chapter first draws together the key issues that have emerged in this book. Based on the findings from the study reported in this book, a dialogical pedagogic model for mutual adaptation and changes has been developed. This is followed by a discussion of the transdisciplinary framework used in the study and the contribution it makes to research on international student practices and lecturer perceptions within the institutional structure.

The students’ adaptation This book discusses different patterns of adaptation emerging from the ways the Chinese and Vietnamese international students exercise personal agency in writing their first essays at the Australian university. These have 1 2

Lillis, 2001. Harré & van Langenhove, 1999.

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been identified within this book as surface adaptation, committed adaptation, reverse adaptation and hybrid adaptation. Initially, the students have attempted to accommodate the writing approaches which they think are expected in their disciplines. This process of adaptation arises from their intrinsic motivations to be successful in their courses and to become fully fledged members of their disciplinary community. Where they differ is however in their internal struggle related to what they really value amongst the possible disciplinary writing requirements. The accounts of some students seem to involve surface adaptation, or change at the face value only, which enables them to gain access to their academic discipline and ensure good returns on their investment3 in the courses. These students disguised their beliefs and only accommodate themselves to the changes required as a coping strategy in order to engage in their academic community. In other words, they restrain their agency and feel an obligation to respond to the requirements of the disciplinary practice. In particular, the new ways of writing they follow are sometimes not what they believe and feel positive about. Their accounts of constructing their own texts indicate a conflict between their desires to communicate meaning in a way which accords with their values and their desire to be counted as a member of their academic discipline. By contrast, other students mainly demonstrated committed adaptation. This involved a profound transformation in their writing replacing their existing writing practice with the new one which they judge to be superior to their former one. These students also showed their agency, however, through their deliberate self-positioning as consciously choosing to fully accommodate what was required of them. These students feel positive about their shift because the ways of writing which they think they need to respond to the institutional structure are in harmony with what they desire to be and what they value. Reverse adaptation is the result of students’ engagement in the disciplinary convention and their determination to change their initial habit of writing in their mother tongue to the new way that they adopted in the host institution. Some students engage in hybrid adaptation to their new written discourse through attempts to create a hybrid space for meaning making. They may exercise their personal agency by self-positioning as someone who is able to create a blend of the linear way of writing, which they interpreted to be conventional in their discipline, and their personal preference for using metaphors. Within this form of adaptation, the students engage critically and creatively with the disciplinary requirements and treat their native language and culture as a resource rather than a problem. 3

Norton, 2001.

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In particular, the students’ journey of adaptation is influenced not only by institutional contextual factors such as their lecturers’ expectations, the disciplinary practices and their ethnic writing ways but also by factors such as individual personality and aspirations and their background experiences. A large body of literature has been devoted to describing general challenges international students encounter in the host higher education environment.4 However, little is known about the complexities of students’ process of adaptation where they often struggle to mediate between different ways of constructing knowledge in specific disciplines. Moreover, whilst cultural and language aspects have often been highlighted, the personal factors involved in students’ journey of adaptation are rarely brought to the fore. This book is a contribution to this area of knowledge. The students' divergent practices in engaging in academic writing within the disciplines of Education and Economics confirm the need to avoid essentialising Chinese or Vietnamese students into a homogeneous Asian group or even homogenous national groupings. This finding is congruent with an emerging theme of the scholarly research which challenges the generalisations of Asian students as passive learners5 and calls for the need to explore the issues of individual subjectivities and identities of international students rather than just simply locating them in certain cultural groups. 6 It is also noticeable from the analysis of the writing accounts of the students in this study that learners’ background is not the only factor that influences their practice of disciplinary writing. Rather, the study finds their internal struggles in mediating between different ways of writing involve a complex web of factors, which appear to be unrecognised on the surface of their writing. Thus, although trends in Vietnamese and Chinese writing traditions need to be acknowledged, placing too much emphasis on them as the explanation for students’ writing can easily lead to ethnic or cultural stereotyping. This is important because national culture does not play a dominant role but instead was found to be inflected in these individual students’ writing and interact with other factors. As such, a conclusion from the study is that since the students do not perceive themselves and their academic writing in purely national and ethnic terms, it is desirable for research to do likewise. Also, in any case when culturally influenced ways of writing are reproduced,

4

Ballard & Clanchy, 1995; Robertson, Line, Jones, & Thomas, 2000; Vandermensbrugghe, 2004; Wong, 2004; Sawir, 2005. 5 McKay & Wong, 1996; Watkins & Biggs, 1996; Biggs, 1997; Doherty & Singh, 2005a; Koehne, 2005. 6 Koehne, 2005.

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they are not typically in simple and uniform ways but rather are personalised or personally adapted by the students. The book highlights challenges for international students such as their unfamiliarity with some of presumed common ways of accessing disciplinary requirements, the assessment criteria coded in abstract wordings and inconsistency in lecturers’ expectations on ways of constructing and representing knowledge. However, the positioning analysis 7 of the students' practices indicates how they exercise personal agency by drawing on various strategies to facilitate their understandings of disciplinary expectations. The discussion of the students’ interviews shows six ways of learning about the academic expectations which individual students mainly draw on: the writing guidelines, dialogues with the lecturers, support services at different institutional levels, the writing model, the reading of materials in the field and the lecturers’ personal preferences revealed in class. All students in the study find the opportunities to establish interaction and dialogue with their lecturers valuable in helping them increase their understandings of the academic expectations on specific assignments. Three main forms of dialogues, which the students established with their lecturers, have emerged from this study. These induce face-to-face consultation with the lecturers, emails to the lecturers and discussion with the lecturers in class. In particular, the students transform their own practices through seeking ways to contact their lecturers, either through written forms or direct dialogue. These aim to deepen their understandings of the disciplinary expectations, ask for feedback on draft versions of writing assignments and go through the redrafting process. They are quite successful in using different ways to increase their understandings of the disciplinary expectations and even found the process rewarding. The findings indicate that the Chinese and Vietnamese students in this study do not appear to be passive learners as being described in much of the literature about “Asian” learners. This shows that contrary to popular belief, international students in this study are able to demonstrate problemsolving skills and actively exercise their own power as students, which allows them to participate in their disciplinary written discourse. The findings also show that what is of paramount importance to students’ success is the interaction and conversations they establish with their lecturers. The students’ varying practices in teasing out what is expected of them establish a case for the importance of individual factors of each

7

Harré & van Langenhove, 1999.

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student and that success or failure is likely to relate to the possession of certain dispositions, regardless of one’s ethnic background. 8 The study reported in this book offers a glimpse of how institutional practices can be transformed. The students’ interaction with their lecturers helps to provide a space where the students' struggles can be made visible and the gaps between the students' and lecturers' expectations can be identified and possibly bridged. However, these conversations need to be ongoing and not one-off exchanges with individual students. Students’ capability to unpack disciplinary practices and the agentive power they exercise over their communication with lecturers establish the conditions for individual lecturers’ practices to be transformed. This involves lecturers in seeking ways to make their expectations more explicit to students and to adapt their teaching practices to respond better to students’ needs. These steps facilitate the participation of diverse student population in higher education. The challenge for lecturers is to open up the dialogic space in their teaching and learning practices. Yet, the agency which the students in this study exercise is still restricted as they mainly seek opportunities to unpack and conform to lecturers’ expectations rather than to negotiate a wide range of potential choices and to advocate their personal values in writing. In fact, for the institutional practices to be transformed, the discussion on disciplinary discourse requirements should become less a matter of being for or against certain discursive practices and more of creating new understandings and practices within the academic environment.

Dialogical pedagogic model for mutual adaptation between lecturers and students The discussion in this book suggests valuable implications on how a dialogical pedagogic model for reciprocal adaptation can be developed between international students and lecturers rather than the onus being on total adaptation from the students. This research has found that student’s agency embedded in their communication with staff as the point where the two groups, students and lecturers, can interact so that the possibility of changes may occur in terms of pedagogy and curriculum. A dialogical pedagogic model for mutual transformation has been developed by modifying Harré’s two-dimensional conceptual space,9 the public/private and the individual/collective. This model is presented in Figure 10.1. 8 9

Tran, 2008. Harré, 1983; van Langenhove & Harré, 1999b.

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Drawing on Vygotsky, van Langenhove and Harré10 use the public/private dimension to represent the degree to which the display of the attributes of lecturers and international students is public or private. The individual/collective axis refers to the degree to which “some attributes can be realised as the property of the discursive interactions of one or many persons”.11 Public Publicization – Conventionalization Transformative disciplinary and instructional practices

Interaction Students: Exercise agency by communicating with lecturers Lecturers: Open up opportunity for interactive process

Individual

Collective

Repositioning Students: Reposition by using strategies for making choices of ways of writing Lecturers: Reposition by attempting different approaches to accommodate international students

Appropriation Students: Increase understandings of institutional practices Lecturers: Increase awareness of issues for international students

Private

Figure 10.1: The dialogical pedagogic model for mutual adaptation

The model includes four quadrants: interaction, appropriation, repositioning and publicisation. The first process, interaction, is illustrated in the upper right hand side corner of the model. The interaction quadrant represents how knowledge and experience may be shared between lecturers and international students. Interaction occurs when lecturers create opportunities for international students to communicate with them and students exercise agency through their attempts to communicate with lecturers. This interactive process is collective and public. 10 11

van Langenhove & Harré, 1999, 131. Ibid, 131.

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The second process is appropriation, which is represented in the lower right hand side quadrant of the model. The appropriation of knowledge of the discursive practices of lecturers and international students within the institutional structure can be represented as the transition from the interaction quadrant to the appropriation quadrant. This appropriation is reflected in how knowledge gained from the interaction with each other would enable lecturers to deepen their understandings of the issues related to international students and would assist international students to increase their awareness of the institutional practices. This process marks the move from the public to the private quadrants. The third process, repositioning, is represented in the lower left hand side quadrant of the model. Transition to the repositioning quadrant links to the privatisation and habituation shift in which lecturers would rethink and critically reflect on their teaching practices. This goes along with their attempts to change their practices and adopt teaching approaches to better address international students’ needs. In this process, international students would exercise strategic agency to facilitate their participation in institutional practices based on their insights and understandings. International students can transform their own practices if they are provided with the resources and opportunities to make changes. Different types of relationships and interactions will enable different ways of appropriating knowledge and different responses to be made. This process highlights how the expectations and needs of lecturers and international students can be included and addressed. The upper left hand side quadrant represents the publicisation/conventionalisation process. When lecturers and international students have internalised the new understandings and transformed their own practices, this may lead to the transformation of disciplinary and institutional practices. Appropriated and privatised knowledge and experiences thus become publicized and even conventionalised in the institutional discourse. This model is not an one-way cycle. It can go back and forward between quadrants before it leads to publicisation. These interactive processes appear to be fundamental towards enhancing the quality of learning and teaching within the current context of international education and need to be nurtured by the university.

The trans-disciplinary framework This book has presented a framework for conceptualising students’ agency in mediating academic writing and lecturers’ views on student writing and disciplinary practices. The conceptual framework draws on two

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interpretive tools, a modified version of Lillis’ heuristic12 for exploring student meaning making and positioning theory.13 The integration of these two analytic models represents a trans-disciplinary approach for social analysis of student writing practices, lecturers’ views and discourse. Lillis’ heuristic offers insights into the real accounts of students as the “insiders” or “producers” of their own texts. This conceptual tool helps uncover students’ individual reasons and intention as their hidden logics in the construction of texts. This framework enables an exploration of not only the reasons underpinning their specific ways of writing but also their potential choices in constructing disciplinary knowledge, which Lillis refers to as “what the individual student-writers might want to mean in a transformed sociodiscursive space”. 14 For instance, within this research, Lin's reason underlying her circular ways of writing the introduction and conclusion revealed in her talk around text appears to differ from what has been addressed in the literature about Chinese rhetorical norms. However, her reason is invisible on the surface of her writing and would otherwise remain behind the scene without the opportunity for her to reflect on it. Such insights contribute to enhancing our understandings of the complexities of students’ accommodating process and their needs within the institutional context. Such insights also help to avoid simplifying and essentialising national or cultural characteristics of Vietnamese and Chinese students as discussed above. The students’ complex journeys of writing revealed in their talk around text indicate the importance to explore the silences in current practices and research on international students' ways of constructing knowledge. These also point to the need to problematise the surface assumptions made about student writing largely based on the analysts' or researchers' analysis of the linguistic features of students' texts. Lillis' framework has been adapted to suit the aims and context of the study reported in this book. Since this research is concerned with teasing out the underlying factors which shape why students choose and why they personally wish to write in a certain way, the “who” questions have been replaced with the “why” questions in the modified version. The why questions, “Why can the students write so?” and “Why do they want to write so?”, also help to reveal students' identities, which the “who” questions in the original framework aim to unpack. Also, the “how” and “what” questions have been focused. This aims to understand students’ 12

Lillis, 2001. Harré & van Langenhove, 1999. 14 Lillis, 2001, 51. 13

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negotiation of different approaches to academic writing through what/how they think they are required to write and what/how they desire to write. Positioning theory has been used to enrich Lillis’ model for analysing students’ voices within institutional context and how they may shift their perceptions of academic writing as they progress through their courses. Positioning theory is concerned with aspects of dominant discourse rules and conventions, rights, duties and obligations in discursive practices.15 This theory highlights students’ positioning within the institutional structure and how they may reposition their ways of academic writing over a period of time. It thus allows an exploration of how the Chinese and Vietnamese students exercise personal agency through making choices among different ways of meaning making, accepting, accommodating or rejecting dominant conventions within the institutional realities of the university. Positioning theory is also adopted to interpret students' writing and the institutional practices from the lecturers' perspectives, which are not addressed by Lillis' talk around text, 16 thereby adding an important layer to the analysis. The use of this trans-disciplinary framework in the data analysis demonstrates the benefit to build a bridge between related disciplinary areas to develop new and transformed conceptual research approach. The two analytical tools employed in this study have been shown to inform each other in powerful ways. This research therefore suggests the possibility and value of using such an analytical framework in investigating the experiences of a broader range of students in participating in disciplinary practices in higher education.

15 16

Harré & van Langenhove, 1999. Lillis, 2001.

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INDEX

academic literacies model, 35, 36, 38, 39 academic discipline, 4, 11, 20, 94, 132, 138, 144 activity theory, 5, 53-54 adaptation adaptation to academic writing, 4, 13, 16, 124, 143 committed adaptation, 4, 81, 85, 87, 94, 108, 144 hybrid adaptation, 4, 81, 85, 94, 144 reciprocal adaptation (also mutual adaptation), 6-7, 16, 82, 141, 143, 147-8 reverse adaptation, 4, 81, 85, 91, 94, 144 surface adaptation, 4,81, 85, 87, 94, 144 appropriateness, 50 Asian students, 8, 9, 83, 101, 145 Bakhtin, 39, 43, 64, 66, 68, 69 buddhism, 22,26 Chinese culture, 22, 106, 119, 122 Chinese rhetoric, 21, 25, 85 choices about making meaning, 60, 76 circular writing (also indirect writing), 18, 21, 26, 85, 92, 95 collective thinking (also communal approach), 5, 16, 99, 100, 109, 113-122 communication style, 2, 26, 32 Confucian, 21, 22, 23, 25, 101 contrastive rhetoric, 17-9, 30, 32, 95, 113 conventions of academic writing, 3, 35, 127 coping strategy, 4, 87, 89, 94, 144

critical contrastive rhetoric, 32 critical thinking, 4, 5, 16, 96, 97, 98, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 119, 120, 122, 133, 135, 136, 138, 139 cultural cultural assimilation, 36 cultural background, 8, 19, 5657, 101, 127 cultural context 37-40, 137 cultural group, 30, 83-84, 106, 145 cultural difference, 2, 9, 82-83, 95 cultural familiarity 43 cultural learning style, 8, 62, 65, 98, 99-101 cultural negotiation, 3 cultural norm, 5-6, 18, 20, 2122, 24, 26-29, 31-32, 44, 46, 95, 101, 106, 111, 113,116, 118-120 cultural resource, 8, 40, 41, 81 cultural rhetoric, 114, 118, 123 culturally response practice, 7, 101 cultural stereotyping, 5, 32, 111,145 cultural value, 3, 5, 22, 31-33, 53, 79, 101-102, 114 cultural experience, 33, 119 multicultural classroom deficit model (also deficit view), 2, 82, 127, 129 deliberate self-positioning, 4, 75, 92-93, 104, 108, 132, 144 dialogical pedagogic model, 7, 143, 147, 148

International Student Adaptation to Academic Writing in Higher Education disciplinary academic writing, 16, 67, 76, 78, 79, 110 disciplinary community, 5, 10, 12, 44, 58, 85, 88, 89, 117, 124, 130, 140, 144 disciplinary conventions, 12, 40, 44, 45, 65, 68, 73, 82, 107, 111, 113, 124, 141 disciplinary discourse, 8, 11, 16, 36, 58, 72, 95, 101, 129, 133, 147 disciplinary knowledge, 6, 62, 122, 130, 141, 150 disciplinary requirements, 4, 5, 11, 16, 19, 51, 54, 58, 59, 67, 71, 72, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 84, 87, 92, 94, 144, 146 discourse community, 36, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 67, 86, 87, 88, 105, 108, 110, 123, 134 eight-legged essay, 25, 26 emic perspective, 3 English as a Second Language, 35 English medium institution, 1, 3, 33, 79, 81 federal government, 1 first language, 4, 18, 19, 41, 117 fluidity, diversity and hybridity of culture, 30, 33 forced self-positioning, 87, 104 forced positioning of others, 75 Foucault, 39, 43 genre-based approach, 35, 40 global neo-liberal globalisation, 1 global world, 9, 83 global market, 125 harmony, 25, 26, 27, 29, 98, 99, 100, 106, 109, 115, 120, 144 Harré, 15, 39, 50, 52, 59-60, 68-80, 86-91, 102, 104, 108, 117, 119, 120, 122, 126, 128-129, 132, 135, 137, 140, 142-148, 150151 hidden logics, 62, 111, 150

167

identity, 2, 3, 11, 20, 35, 37, 39, 40, 41, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57, 61, 70, 75, 86, 100, 104, 127 implicitness, 22, 23 inclusive practice, 10 indirectness, 21, 22, 23, 24, 83 institutional practices, 8, 9, 11, 37, 38, 47, 51, 58, 59, 60, 65, 72, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 128, 138, 142, 147, 149, 151 intercultural intercultural communication, 17, 113 intercultural learning, 17 intercultural environment, 3, 35 international pedagogy, 8 international student enrolment, 1 internationalisation of higher education, 1 language and learning skills, 9, 58 language proficiency, 2, 17, 113 learning needs, 1 lecturers’ positioning, 7 Lillis, 3, 7-8, 11-12, 15, 29, 31, 3435, 37, 39, 40, 45, 48-50, 53, 59-81, 86-93, 95, 97, 102, 107108, 116, 118-120, 122, 124, 133-134, 143, 150-151 medium of meaning representation, 11 moral positioning, 74 oriental style, 9 other-positioning, 74, 118, 137 personal agency, 3, 4, 5, 8, 50, 54, 59, 60, 67, 68, 71, 72, 76, 78, 80, 81, 92, 94, 101, 102, 107, 110, 111, 120, 142, 143, 144, 146, 151 personal desires in meaning making, 5 personal preferences, 3, 4, 10, 35, 44, 53, 66, 77, 92, 146 positioning theory, 7, 8, 15, 39, 50, 51, 54, 59, 60, 61, 62, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 80, 87, 88, 90, 91, 104, 117, 120, 122,

168 126, 128, 131, 132, 135, 137, 138, 142, 143, 150 power relation, 8, 11, 32, 37, 38, 39, 41, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 69, 73, 82, 88 prior literacy practices, 2 process of transformation, 59, 70 Reader-focused approach, 45 responsibility of adaptation, 7 rhetoric styles, 3 social interaction approach, 35, 42 socialisation approach, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39 socio-cognitive approach, 35, 40 students' writing experiences, 17, 44, 60, 78 study skills perspective, 36 sustainability of the education export sector, 1 talk around text, 7, 8, 19, 39, 50, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 76, 77, 78, 80, 86, 87, 88,

Index 90, 91, 92, 95, 102, 103, 116, 150, 151 taoist, 22 the issue of epistemology, 11, 37 the study skills approach, 36 trans-disciplinary framework, 7, 15, 16, 60, 76, 80, 143, 149, 151 transmission pedagogy, 48 van Langenhove, 7, 15, 39, 50, 5960, 69-71, 75, 80-92, 102, 104, 108, 122, 126-129, 132, 135, 137, 140, 142-143, 146-148, 150 Vietnamese culture, 27, 30, 108, 109, 115, 118 voice as experience, 66, 70, 92-93, 107-108 writing across cultures, 17 writing convention, 26, 87 writing traditions, 5, 10, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 26, 31, 32, 33, 34, 66, 97, 111, 114, 145