Reading and writing at university – raising genre awareness as initiation into a discourse community (Pre-published version)

Abstract

The theoretical concepts of 'genre' and 'discourse community' will be drawn on in this paper to evolve a theoretical model that we hope to apply to the context of academic writing and to attainment at third level. Genre is a much talked about and less frequently used notion across a wide range of research and it has been criticised for offering a model that is not easy to operationalise (cf. Hasan 1992; McCarthy 2000). Latterly, the work of Swales has looked at genre in the context of 'discourse communities' offering a more socially-constructed basis for genre (see Swales 1988; 1990 and Askehave and Swales, 2001). For our purposes, the synthesis of the notions of genre and discourse communities offers a useful theoretical framework for our empirical research into the linguistic barriers posed by the academic institutional norms of the genre of writing required at university level. Essentially, we attempt to explore the discourse community of 'academia' within which, we propose, a certain linguistic level of competence is required in order to achieve high grades in essays and exams. We investigate the hypothesis that successful students are those who have intuited and mastered the generic norms of academic discourse and conversely, those who underachieve at third level are those who have not assimilated the norms in this discourse community. In this paper we will detail some of these 'norms' and, using student essay samples, we will explore the connection between essay grades and conformity to these norms.