Assessed student writing at the postgraduate level : education students' genre knowledge in assignment writing

Abstract

Students pursuing a higher education degree is usually assessed by writing; failing writing assignments can mean failing a degree or at least extending the time for completing a degree. For students in postgraduate programmes in particular, they are required to link theory and practice in various ways to fulfil the communicative purposes of different writing tasks. Research has generated descriptions and explanations of examiners’ expectation on what to be found in the assessed writing tasks and has produced effective genre-based framework of writing instruction. However, studies examining how students learn from the instructions and how they respond to those expectations for different assessed genre tasks are still underrepresented in current assessed student writing literature. The present study addresses this research need by examining writing practices of students to understand how they fulfil different genre tasks in the complex network of communication in the university context. The study utilises the database of an academic writing corpus which comprises exemplary MEd and MSc assignment papers gathered in the Faculty of Education of the University of Hong Kong. I examine the assignment papers using genre analysis and corpus methods with reference to assignment prompts and text-based interviews to understand what assessed genres are strategically important for students in these postgraduate programmes. In particular, I focus on identifying characteristic rhetorical functions of assessed genre tasks and their rhetorical moves and lexico-grammatical fulfilment across the texts composed for different tasks. The findings showcased the diversity of the postgraduate writing assignments, manifesting in the multiplicity of rhetorical purposes of assignments and the complexity in terms of how the rhetorical purposes can be achieved textually by students. Ten assignment genres are found in the target student corpus and, because of the similarity in broader social purpose of some genres and also to present the findings in a more organised ways, I further categorise the ten assignment genres into three genre groups. I choose the three genres (i.e. the Case Study genre, the Reflective Writing genre and the Design genre) in the third genre group for a detailed analysis because of time limit and also considering the growing importance attached to the linkage between the academic and the professional world. The findings unveiled that the students can achieve the rhetorical purpose of an assignment in a both conventionalised and dynamic way. The conventions of an assignment genre include the generic model of move structure through which the rhetorical purpose of the assignment could be textually achieved and the linguistic feature of all assignments of that genre as whole. At the same time, the dynamism is reflected in the flexibility in terms of how students can exploit the move structure in the generic model to achieve their rhetorical purposes in their own way and also in the way how students can textually realise each move. The current study sheds lights on how communicative purposes can be achieved textually in postgraduate assignment papers. The findings can feed into the provision of writing support targeting postgraduate students, which in turn would have implications for their communication success in both the academic and the professional world.

Key words: postgraduate study; assessed student writing; assignment tasks; corpus building; genre analysis