Hi Andrea,

Personally I like to have both experiences. I think it is good for students from different disciplines to talk to each other about how things are done in their field. It provides a natural information gap and helps them to see that these things are not rigid conventions but adapted to the needs of the discourse community. Also, research trends these days are towards multi / cross-disciplinary projects so they are starting out as they mean to go on.

However, I think you can go deeper into the conventions and meanings in one field if all students are studying the same or broadly similar subjects.

I guess for most teachers the reality is more likely to be the first not the second and is one of the constraints we have to deal with, especially on pre-sessional courses.

Olwyn

Related to this question, I attended a plenary at the BALEAP conference in Reading, given by Chritine Feak, whom  many of you will know from Swales and Feak, Academic Writing for Graduate Students.

Her talk was called Culture Shock? Genre Shock? and was about the difficulties of students who study in multidisciplinary degrees. She told the story of a very strategic and motivated student from Korea (with a good level of English) who tried to prepare to write her PhD proposal by attending classes in the two different disciplines that she thought would be relevant. However, the feedback she got after handing in a paper for each of these classes was at odds with the other and both told her to 'work on her grammar' when in fact the problems lay not with the student or her grammar but with the different expectations that these different disciplines held about how to write the genres of the discipline.

She learned the hard way to pay attention to audience and to give each professor what he/she wanted.

Have you had experience of this kind of conflicting advice from subject lecturers?

Olwyn

Hi all. The title of the plenary is wonderful. Yes, I think Genre shock should be given much more importance than it has been given in the past probably, as in fact it also reflects Culture shock, culture meanng here the culture inherent to each discipline. The only worrying thing here is the tutors telling the student that the problem was her grammar. This could lead to frustration, the student fails to capture the generic differences, and therefore, no learning at all! I guess training courses should be given to lecturers in general about what genres are, and how their discipline uses these genres, and why.

Best

Andrea

Hi Olwyn,

Nice to see you here. I had not heard about the Peasron test but definitely is  a good option. This is more so in the Indian system where exams are mostly about cramming and reproducing. In fact, so strong is the weshback effect of exams that teachers spend a large part of the acedemic years getting students to practice for the exams.

Susmita