by Andrew Struan, University of Glasgow
‘Our students can’t write.’
‘What are they taught at school, anyway?’
‘Why can’t they write properly?’
‘It’s a comma and not a piece of decoration for the page!’
We’ll all have heard complaints about students’ writing. These complaints can range from a focus on the mechanical element of writing – let’s talk about the six main uses of the comma, shall we? – to the more abstract, rhetorical features in academic work.
More often than not, these complaints about writing come from a place of wanting students to do well. Our colleagues know that our students are smart, engaged, energetic, intelligent. Colleagues are frustrated, however, with the fact that our students often struggle to articulate their thoughts using the norms and practices within their disciplines.
For our students, there’s frustration and mystery around what we expect from and of them. Students coming directly from school suddenly find that all the rules they’d been taught no longer apply or are fundamentally ‘wrong’ for Higher Education. The standard pros-and-cons essay of high school, or the five-paragraph essay, are viewed as formulaic, descriptive, unengaging, and uninspired at university level – and are marked accordingly. Students coming in from different academic cultures, often after having gone through some form of English language qualifications or preparation course, find that those same qualifications and courses haven’t prepared them for the expectations of academic writing at university.
Those of us in the Learning Development community know this discussion very well. The issues here – around academic literacies, demystifying the academy, providing students with the tools and abilities to participate in their academic community – are well known and well documented.
At the University of Glasgow, we have taken an inclusive, all-institution approach to the enhancement of students’ writing. Glasgow is a large, diverse institution: we are a research-intensive institution but, unlike most other institutions of our type, we have a very large body of students from areas of multiple deprivation. We are also a heavily international institution; our postgraduate taught programmes in particular attract large numbers of international students. It is with these factors in mind, and with a dedication to enhance our students’ writing (and their experience(s) of assessment), that we adopted a university-wide writing course.
This course, called the Academic Writing Skills Programme (AWSP), is compulsory for all of our annual 16,000 new first year undergraduates and one-year Masters students. The course is run centrally by the Learning Development team: at its core is an academic literacies pedagogical approach that looks to embed understanding of academic writing principles (within a variety of disciplines) and foster student development.
The course runs in three stages:
- Students are enrolled from day 1 of semester and have immediate access to a variety of LD resources, materials, guided study options all around academic writing within their broad disciplines.
- Students can choose to work through as much or as little of this material as possible, but are encouraged from the start to engage with academic writing within their discipline as a new topic of exploration
- Students have a deadline for the completion of a range of multiple choice questions and the submission of their first essay/report. All students receive similar deadlines – almost always before their first summative assessments on their other courses – alongside guidance on expectations, marking criteria, feedback options, and so on.
- After submission, students receive bespoke, tailored feedback and guidance from the team of Learning Developers and/or PhD student tutors.
- This activity is no small task: we receive, mark, and provide feedback on thousands of essays within the first few weeks of semester. The process of providing feedback is sped up by providing markers with a range of pre-formatted feedback options that they can select, but each essay is still read and provided with individual commentary.
- The speed of turnaround time, and the quality of feedback provided, is testament to the dedication of the team. In particular, the PhD student tutors – of which there is a large team of approximately 40 staff – are exceptional, outstanding and deserve unending praise.
Our students receive feedback on their writing that targets the mechanical elements (grammar, punctuation, style and tone) as well as the argumentative and macro elements of their work. Students are provided with feedback that is designed to give them two or three ‘priority’ areas of work, plus resources for further development opportunity.
For the majority of our students, this is the end of the AWSP road. Students are referred over to the LD department’s range of optional courses, resources and classes, but need do nothing further to complete the programme.
Other students are referred to an entirely asynchronous, online course. This course is designed to give students the key areas of understanding of academic writing and academic literacies to enable them to succeed in their writing. The course takes the approach of putting students into the role of marker for work: it asks them to review work, provide feedback examples, and work through a variety of problems/tasks that encourage them to consider the ways in which their academic community functions.
A third group of students are referred to synchronous, face-to-face classes. These students are the ones identified from their submission most in need of targeted intervention to enhance their work. This referral usually is the result of a lack of understanding of the rules surrounding academic integrity and academic argument. Students attend a fortnight of classes in small groups (these classes are always capped at 15 students) with a dedicated LD tutor. At the end of the classes, students submit another piece of coursework to their tutor and receive further, in-depth feedback.
Running a course of this size presents a range of challenges:
- Administration and day-to-day management requires numerous staff who can respond to student queries, check student progress, update student records, etc.
- Designing a course that provides meaningful, targeted materials for students requires a whole-institution buy-in to the importance of the course and its work
- This has manifested in the sharing of materials for particular students, the setting of relevant essay/report questions, the provision of exemplars and examples for feedback, and more.
- Communication with students requires clarity of messaging, speed in response, reassurance for anxious students, and provision of a range of first-point-of-contact discussions. (AWSP is the first course for most students and, as such, often acts as a general ‘transitions’ point.)
While we may never be able to get all our students to love grammar or engage with the finer elements of rhetorical structures, in AWSP we provide all of our students with the opportunity to develop their writing, demystify some of the elements of academic writing, and engage with the Learning Development team from the very first moment of their matriculation with us.
For more information on the history and processes underlying AWSP, take a look at:
Boyle, J., Ramsay, S., & Struan, A. (2019). The Academic Writing Skills Programme: A model for technology-enhanced, blended delivery of an academic writing programme. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 16 (4). https://doi.org/10.53761/1.16.4.4.