WRITING CENTRES AS THE DRIVING FORCE OF PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT: FROM AD-ON STUDY SKILLS COURSES

Writing in and across Disciplines Writing Centre Development

WRITING CENTRES AS THE DRIVING FORCE OF PROGRAM DEVELOPMENT: FROM AD­ON STUDY SKILLS COURSES TO CONTENT AND LITERACY INTEGRATED TERTIARY EDUCATION

Susanne Göpferich

Justus­Liebig­Universität Gießen, Zentrum für fremdsprachliche und berufsfeldorientierte Kompetenzen (ZfbK)/Institut für Anglistik, Giessen, Germany

Academic writing courses and subject­matter courses have been taught independently to a large extent at many universities although there are a number of advantages of integrating literacy development, both in students’ L1 and in English (if this is not their L1), into subject­matter courses. These include an increase in students’ motivation to complete assignments, exploiting the epistemic function of writing, acculturation into discourse communities and time economy (Kellogg 2008; Beaufort 2012; Craig 2013; Byrnes/Manchón 2014). The lack of integration that can still be observed has a number of causes, among them the belief that the integration of literacy development into subject­matter courses would take away time for the teaching of the subject matter itself, a lack of cooperative teaching models (Craig 2013:154), and administrative barriers.

Against this background, a three­level model of measures in tertiary education will be presented which aims at the development of writing centres into motors of literacy development across curricula in all disciplines. The macro­level encompasses university­wide services and policies. These include writing centres cooperating with teaching centres to provide support for program development, policies which comprise incentives and training for teaching writing­intensive seminars in the disciplines and the definition of quality criteria for good teaching and assignments. The meso­level addresses program development towards content and literacy integrated teaching and learning, and the micro­level, curriculum and syllabus development for individual courses. The application of the model will be illustrated with reference to the university of Giessen (Germany), where it has been introduced since 2012 (Göpferich 2015).

References

Beaufort, A. (2012) ‘College Writing and Beyond: Five years later’. ​ Composition Forum ​ [online] 26. available from <http://compositionforum.com/issue/26/college­writing­beyond.php> [09 January 2014]

Byrnes, H. and Manchón, R. (eds) (2014) ​ Task­Based Language Learning – Insights from and for L2 Writing​ .

Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Craig, J.L. (2013) ​ Integrating Writing Strategies in EFL/ESL University Contexts: A Writing­Across­the­Curriculum Approach​ . New York, London: Routledge.

Göpferich, S. (2015) ​ Text Competence and Academic Multiliteracy: From Text Linguistics to Literacy Development​ . Tübingen: Narr.

Kellogg, R.T. (2008) ‘Training Writing Skills: A Cognitive Developmental Perspective’. ​ Journal of Writing Research ​ 1 (1), 1–26.