Transgeneric Assessment: Modernist Affordances for the Student Essay (original) (raw)

CONSTRUING CRITICALITY IN ESSAY GENRE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

International Journal of English Learning and Teaching Skills, 2019

Criticality is established as one of most important characteristics of university essay genre. Students are required to demonstrate their critical thinking in their writing. However, criticality is a concept, which is less understood among students and tutors. Further, there is a little agreement among researchers on how to investigate the linguistic features associated with construing critical stance. Therefore, this paper demonstrates how criticality is achieved in essay genre in the discipline of English literature. The argument in this paper is that the linguistic features traditionally associated with enacting criticality interact with other linguistic features to achieve critical stance in a written text. A systemic functional analysis of essays in English literature drawn from British Academic Writing English (BAWE) corpus demonstrates this interaction. Specifically, the findings show that the linguistic resources for the creation of ideational meaning interact with those for critical positioning to achieve critical thinking in university essays. These findings have implication for teaching academic writing in the discipline of English literature. Keywords: Academic writing, criticality, essay genre, stance

'Accounting for Taste' - The Case for Creative Writing's Inclusion within High-Stakes Assessment

2021

Despite studies indicating numerous benefits to be gained by creative writing’s inclusion in high-stakes assessment, there are crucial issues related to the practicality of such an inclusion. These issues concern the prospect of standardisation and accounting for artistic taste. In this paper, these issues are contextualised within aesthetic philosophy, contemporary Australian-based academic work, and by examples from literary art itself. Particularly, the aesthetics of philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, specifically those within his theory of hermeneutics, provide a novel and unique possibility for the genuine inclusion of creative writing within high-stakes assessment. In addition, while Gadamer’s hermeneutics demonstrate usefulness for this inclusion it also shines a light on pre-existent tensions within high-stakes assessment proper, providing a critical perspective on the currently dominant theoretical approach to text-based response of critical literacy, an approach which is argued to be complicit in the aforementioned paralysis of creative writing’s inclusion in high-stakes assessment.

Time to Ditch the Traditional Essay!

: Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Volume 11, Number 2, 2018, pp. 267-273(7), 2018

The traditional essay has long established itself as a stable and reliable assessment within higher education. However, it reinforces an uneven power balance whereby the tutor passes judgement on a student’s written work according to a set of criteria. Drawing on the work of Fiona English, I have experimented with a ‘visual essay’ assessment as this affords students more opportunities to express their knowledge. They write this from the perspective of a literary figure, so that they are able to have a more emotional relationship with the text they are studying. To demonstrate this process I put forward my argument from the perspective of Arthur Seaton, the anti-hero of Alan Sillitoe’s 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning'.

Reconfiguring academic knowledge : transforming learning through regenring the student essay

2007

This thesis, which is located in the current socio-political context of British university study, investigates how genres act on the production and communication of academic knowledge. It explores the work of a group of first year undergraduates from a range of disciplines including social anthropology, economics, religious studies, linguistics and politics. The data consists of pairs of written assignments; a conventional essay and a version of that essay reproduced with a different genre. Emerging from the analysis a new theorisation of genre which views it as a semiotic resource used in the process of communicating meaning is proposed, drawing on the work of Kress (e.g. 2003) and Kress and Van Leeuwen (e.g. 2001). In contrast to other genre discussion?, which consider what genres look like, as in structuralist approaches or the purposes they serve, as in functional approaches, this study is concerned with the affordances of genresi that is what genres allow in the production of t...