The next meeting of the Forum for Academic Language and Literacy (FALL) takes place
on 25th October 2013, 13.00 – 14.30, in King's College, Waterloo Bridge Wing/Franklin
Wilkins Building, Room LG1. Lunch will be provided.
FALL was created in 2007 by Professor Brian Street with the aim of facilitating work in
academic language and literacy amongst staff at King's through meetings, workshops and
co-publications. Since then, FALL has been opened to writing researchers and practitioners
from other institutions. In 2012, we had participants from seven universities.
The presenters on 25th October will be Professor Maria Lucia Castanheira from the
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, and Dr. Jo Lewkowicz from King’s College London.
Maria will talk about the academic literacy development of non-traditional students,
particularly of Angolan students studying in a Masters programme at a Brazilian university.
Jo will present an analysis of conclusions in PhD dissertations written by Polish students.
Please see their abstracts below.
If you wish to attend, kindly contact Ursula Wingate at ursula.wingate@kcl.ac.uk
ABSTRACTS
Maria Lucia Castanheira, Faculdade de Educação, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)
Examining challenges of teaching and learning academic writing in a Brazilian university
In recent years, the presence of non-traditional students (e.g., low-income family students, African
descendants, indigenous or campo students) taking degree and graduate courses in Brazilian
universities have increased significantly. This situation highlights the importance of examining how
university tutors help students to understand the situated nature of academic writing. This paper
explores the Academic Literacies approach to examine wider issues of tutor/student relations and
the tutors' own expectations according to the discipline within this changing educational context. I
will report on analysis of interview with students about the feedback they received from tutors in
the process of writing academic texts and interviews with tutors about the challenges they face in
this process of supporting students in their academic writing. I will focus on the experience of
African master students as they enter a Brazilian graduate program and on the collaborative work of
tutors in support them to make this move. Such analysis aims to contribute to the understanding of
demands and expectations on students, as they navigate across cultural and academic settings to
become researchers in the educational field.
Jo Lewkowicz, Department of Education and Professional Studies, King’s College London
Concluding Your Thesis
In this paper I explore EFL postgraduate students' difficulties in mediating knowledge and ideas
through English. In particular I report on some research I conducted through text analysis of Polish
students' theses conclusions, looking particularly at how they present the last chapter/section of
their work. I suggest that although their writing reflects some of the features of conclusions
reported in the literature (e.g. Bunton, 2005), it also displays numerous features that can be
attributed to local/national expectations of concluding an academic piece of writing of this nature.