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Published as a short report in Journal of Second Language Writing, 12, 2003, pp. 313-16.
Academic Writing: A European Perspective
Ann Johns, San Diego State University

In June 2003, I was invited to be one of the plenary speakers at the Second Joint Biennial Conference of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW) and the European Writing Centers Association (EWCA), held in Budapest and sponsored by the Central European University. Because this is an important conference, and a new field of interest for Europe, I have prepared this report and commentary so that the JSLW journal readership, which is principally North American, can benefit from this experience—and perhaps become involved in the European discussions.
Conference Attendance and Presentations

About 200 faculty, graduate students, and administrators attended the conference. Western, Central, and Eastern Europe were well-represented, of course, but there were participants from South Africa, Australia, Israel, Singapore, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, as well. North Americans also attended, principally faculty and administrators involved with Writing-Across-the-Curriculum (e.g. Martha Towsend, University of Missouri; David Russell, Iowa State University), English for Academic Purposes writing at the graduate level (e.g., John Bean and Theodora Rutar Shuman, Seattle University), and writing centers (e.g., Stephen Newston, William Paterson University; Emmy Misser, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada). However, none of the other North American participants seemed to be principally interested in the teaching of writing to ESL/EFL undergraduates.

About 100 papers, workshops, and demonstrations were offered, some of which emphasized topics that do not get much play in conferences held in the United States. First among these concerned the situations in specific countries. Presentations included “The Price of the Freedom to Write: Lithuanian Experience,” “Perspectives on Plagiarism from the Ukraine and the U.S.,” “Teaching Academic Writing to …Students in Russia,” “Cross-cultural Perspectives on Academic Writing Instruction: Anglo-American/Hungarian,” “Academic Peerage: Student Writing and the Politics of Knowledge in Central Asia,” and “Against All Odds? Academic Writing Development in a De-centralised, Open Learning Context—South Africa.”. These discussions highlighted differences: in contexts, in students, in ways of reading and writing, in the texts themselves, and, of course, in the socio-political histories that contributed to the current educational circumstances.

Another topic frequently raised at the conference involved the “ways of being” (Geertz, 1983) that influence epistemic and cultural approaches to texts within academic disciplines. Discussed at the first EATAW meeting (2001) in Groningen (The Netherlands), and still a matter of interest was the putative dichotomy between “Anglo-American” and “Continental” texts and the disciplinary communities and practices out of which these texts arise. In their chapter from the first conference volume, Rinecker and Stray Jörgensen (2003) argued that the Continental Model, inspired by German Romanticism, is “interpretive, hermeneutical and epistemological” in nature. It is concept-laden and theoretically heavy—ripe with metaphors and belletrism. Diametrically opposed to the Continental Model is the Anglo-American model: problem-based, methodological, concise, and written in an accessible register. The authors argued that Continental texts, assigned by faculty in the humanities courses such as philosophy, history, and English, lack a stated problem or question, focus on interpretation of a particular thinker’s ideas, and allow for a broad range (perhaps too broad for students) of possibilities for discussion, e.g., “the meaning of human existence.” The authors commented that this model is very difficult to produce for most students, particularly undergraduates. I took issue with this putative juxtaposition in my plenary, arguing, using Prior (1998) and others, that the situation is much more complex than this dichotomy can explain. However, my colleague, Betty Samraj, who is investigating thesis writing in North American universities, has also heard about the “Continental Model,” especially from faculty in philosophy departments. So this bi-polar approach has salience within departments on several continents—and it certainly was a subject of interest in Budapest.

Another difference between the EATAW presentations and those at most conferences in North America derives from the European approaches to literacies in post-secondary education. European institutions tend to be more selective than many of ours. The tests and other gate-keeping mechanisms can be quite demanding. Secondly, there is no tradition of freshman composition, and thus the European models for writing instruction, if they exist within an institution at all, are considerably more varied than in North America. Thirdly, the literacy emphasis in European universities is upon academic writing, not student discovery, expressivism, critical literacy or other approaches that might be favored by the freshman composition teacher in North America. More than once, a European presenter would make a comment such as, “We are discussing the teaching of academic writing here, which, as we all know, is different from the teaching of writing in general.” Why is the concern with academic writing central? In Europe, as many other parts of the world, students immediately enter their majors when they enroll, without the foundation courses in general education that exist in most of North American institutions. As a result of these factors, European presentations at the conference tended to focus on issues that are specific to a discipline or for advanced writers , e.g., “Visual Practices and the Teaching of Writing to Art and Design Students,” “Thesis Writer’s Block: Text Work that Unblocks,” “Justifying Research through the Literature Review”, and “Writing for Oral Presentation: Fostering Professionalism.”

The absence of freshman composition classes in Europe stimulates increased interest in other instructional approaches. Thus, a number of the conference papers dealt with delivering instruction through technology, e.g., “Teaching Writing in the Computer Lab: Choices to be Made,” “Using Technology to Build Better Language Teaching Tools,” and “Blended Learning: Creating Space and Time for Reflection through Computer Technologies.” Others focused upon the ways in which writing centers could be made productive---and attractive to students and disciplinary faculty, e.g., “Developing Writing Skills in a Writing Center,” and “Writing Center and Classroom Faculty: Working Together on Intellectual Property.” Even more pervasive were the presentations on tutor training and one-to-one tutoring, approaches through which effective teaching of academic writing can be delivered to students outside of a formal classroom situation.

Other topics from the conference are quite familiar to North Americans. Since elements of writing process are relatively new in Europe, there were papers on peer review and teacher feedback, reflection, and other contributions of the North American process movement. Presentations on genre analysis and “socio-rhetorical” writing were also given, though they were not as common as one might expect in an academic writing conference. As is the case in many conferences of this type, assessment got the short shrift. One topic that is seen more commonly in L1 conferences in America was the interest in improving teaching across the curriculum; therefore, Writing-across-the-Curriculum and professional development papers were also offered.

One North American’s Involvement

The conference planners at Central American University invited me to speak after they read my Cambridge volume, Text, role, and context (1997); however, none had ever met me, so they were concerned about what I might present. They knew from reading the volume that I teach freshman composition to a remarkably diverse group of American students who, in several cases, are not well-represented in Europe. As the conference approached, they became increasingly concerned about what I would say, since as can be seen from the discussion above, the interests of the EATAW audience did not necessarily parallel those of the North American teacher of freshman composition. After the conference chair attended the Conference on College Composition and Communication in the United States in Spring 2003, he e-mailed me with some concern, reminding me that my California university students are not like those in Europe, and the approaches to personal writing—or to the writing process—found in North American universities would not be a topic of the conference.

Fortunately, I was able to acquire the publication containing papers from the first EATAW conference (Björk, Bräuer, Rinenecker and Stray Jörgensen, 2003), and after trying out some ideas with the conference organizers, I developed my talk. Rather than examine the differences between the North Americans and Europeans in terms of the teaching of academic writing, and there are many, and rather than talking about my experiences in California, I decided to pose general questions raised in the first conference volume that are of concern to writing teachers throughout the world. I am repeating the questions here, and some of my suggested answers, for the readers’ consideration and critique. Certainly these questions have been raised in different ways in North American conferences for a number of years, though often not in the same order---or with the same emphases.

Question 1: What are the distinctive differences among texts in academic contexts? How can we characterize, explain, and juxtapose these differences in our work with students and university faculty—and in our research in teaching?
This question was prompted by the comments by Reinecker and Stray Jörgenson who, as I mentioned earlier, had juxtaposed the American” and “Continental” approaches to writing and texts in the first conference volume .

Far be it from me to describe, or defend, the “Continental” model to a European audience, but with the help of considerable English for Academic Purposes research, I was able to problematize any notion of an “Anglo-American” model. First, I noted that there is great variation among texts in the disciplines, even among those that appear to have “Anglo-American” features. Here are a few of the differences among the so-called “Anglo-American” papers in the sciences:
• At the “ways of being” disciplinary or sub-disciplinary level, there are distinct differences in how research is framed. How are hypotheses or research questions posed? What kinds of data are appropriate for analysis? How are these data reported? What does the visual information in the report look like? Basically, there are remarkable variations in what constitutes knowledge and how experts in a discipline make and transform that knowledge within the sciences.
• Methodologies employed by researchers vary considerably depending upon the discipline, the classroom, the data, the laboratory—and the expertise and interests of those completing the research. These differences are realized in a variety of research texts.
• At the discourse level, many research papers are headed or sectioned—but some are not. Some headings are functional, as in the IMRD paper (Introduction, Methodology, Results, Discussion) and some are more analytically, or topically, based.
• Even within single research papers, sections show considerable variation. For example, some disciplines require extensive literature reviews; others do not. What is included in a review can also vary considerably.
What about within a discipline then? Individual papers for specific journals can vary internally. Within one research paper, for example, there may be
• Knowledge telling (summary or narrative) and knowledge transformation (analysis, synthesis, critique). (See Bereiter and Scardmalia, 1987)
• Argumentation advanced in several ways, supported by visual as well as verbal evidence (see, e.g., Fahenstock, 2003).
• Variation in citation and its use, depending upon the section of the paper.
• Variety in register, with the discussion section becoming more familiar, for example.
In addition to these synchronic differences, there are many diachronic variations as genres evolve, grow, and die over time. Here are some of the historical changes in scientific research papers, as noted by genre researchers:
• Some text macro-structures have become more varied over time. At one point, many scientific texts were governed by a simpler narrative structure, for example. (Bazerman, 1988)
• Titles in some research papers have become longer and more revealing (Huckin, 1987) to accommodate the busy researcher. Often the title will specify not only the research topic but the methodology employed—and sometimes even the results.
• Some portions of texts are becoming more “voiced” and interpersonal (See, e.g., Hyland, 1998; Ivaniç & Camps, 2001).
• And, of course, as more L2 speakers write in a foreign language (usually English), they bring with them their own discourse values and practices. Anna Mauranen (1993), a Finnish researcher, for example, found that professionals from her country used less metadiscourse in their texts than do Anglo-Americans. After studying the metadiscourse in texts written by speakers of English and Finnish, she made this comment:

The poetic, implicit Finnish rhetoric could be construed as
being polite by its treatment of readers as intelligent human
beings to whom nothing much needs to be explained. Saying
too obvious things is, as we know, patronizing. (p. 17)

The answer to the first question posed, then, is that we need to view texts highly varied and situated. We need to use terms like “text types,” and especially “genre” as guides to analyzing textual variation, but not as absolutes. Not surprisingly, something as broadly defined as the “Anglo-American” model is very difficult to identify, particularly as text.

Question 2: Where should we begin with a pedagogy for academic writing? With this question, I was responding to an chapter in the EATAW volume (2003) in which Björk argues that we should teach what he calls “text types” (comparison/contrast, cause/effect) as general, interdisciplinary typologies before “introducing students to the genres of their disciplines” (p. 30). In my plenary, I argued, as I am sure most readers of this journal would, that students who are overly introduced to “the modes,” as we used to call them, come to believe that good writing is only about structure ---that form is all. And the five paragraph essay form, still prevalent in North America, is not assisting us to eradicate this belief. Unfortunately, however, we cannot live with this narrow view any more. Compositionists have done too much reading about the social construction of texts—and about writers’ processes---to accept form as an end in itself. Form is important, certainly, certainly, but so are many other factors that need to be taught, and learned, simultaneously. Prior (1998) makes the point about text complexity very well:

[Texts] are …dynamic-multi-voiced, multi-goaled phenomena, generated by the complexly orchestrated interaction of centripetal and
centrifugal forces in the unfolding of micro-and macro-histories of the world.
Genres in this view emerge as considerably more complex than the typical
Notions of genre, but this specification also offers a principled way to explore
How genres are employed, reconfigured, and reaccentuated as situations vary.
(p. 58).

Question 3: What is an academic writing process? Because the “writing process” idea is a much newer to Europeans than it is to Americans, I reviewed some of the great contributions of “The Process Movement.” (See, e.g., Johns, 1997 or Silva, 1990 for a review of these elements.). However, the academic writers with whom our European colleagues are working are already completing long papers, graded by disciplinary faculty whose prompts may be unrevealing, to say the least. In Europe, then, the tasks are discipline-based and require considerable sophisticated planning on the part of the student . Assisted by a very useful volume (Bawarshi, 2003), Swales and Feak (1994), and my own experience, I proposed that academic writing teachers begin with a process in which instructors:

1. Introduce two or more student paper models for comparison, which, if possible, respond to the same task.
2. Help students to analyze the models using a situated invention rubric, bringing contextual, textual, and, if possible, writer factors into play. (Students will refer to this rubric throughout the process.)
3. Facilitate student discoveries about how the assignment will be assessed, i.e., what is most important to the faculty audience.
4. Assist them in breaking down their writing process into manageable parts. (e.g., documentation and the literature review, results section…)
5. Through modeling, assist students to transform knowledge by approaching each paper section or sub-task individually,
6. Require students to write drafts of the paper segments identified.
7. Peer review in class, using the assessment criteria from #3, above.
8. Collect papers and recommend revision.
9. Ask students to revise their first segment, reflect, and begin to write another part of the paper
… and the process continues until the entire paper is compiled

I argued that the most important element of this process is invention which then becomes central to student peer and self-review, revision, and class discussion.
Accused in the literature of being an “accommodationist,” for endorsing “traditional academic teaching and the current power relations in academic and in society,” (Benesch, 1993, p.711), I showed my true colors in this relatively non-hostile environment of EAP teachers as I suggested an invention grid for student discussion and use, a template for beginning the discussion of an assigned writing task in an identified academic environment.
In the academic writing invention grid below, the first column, “Attribute,” includes some questions that students can ask of the task and text assigned. In the “K/NK” column, the student checks (British English: “ticks) what s/he already knows or doesn’t know. The third column is used to record what the student knows or thinks s/he knows about the task or the means through which the student will discover what s/he doesn’t know. Accompanying this exercise can be one in which the student records his/her responses towards the assignment and plans for manipulating the assignment in a way that will benefit, and even satisfy, the writer.

Invention Grid
Attribute K/NK Comments or Discovery Methods
a. Objectives for students: Why is the paper being assigned?
b. Relevance to course concepts or content
c. Genre: Are there model texts?
d. Research questions, hypotheses, or topics
e. Text macro-structure & metadiscourse
f. Micro-structural issues: e.g. cause/effect, functions of sections
j. Uses of non-linear text: visuals, fonts, etc.
k. Citation and referencing style
l. Register: lexicon, interpersonal features.

This grid then gives students methods for revising their work from the top down, considering issues raised during invention, as well as their own aims, the textual values of the discipline, citation practices, and other text-based issues such as editing.
Finally, I suggested in the plenary that students always be given opportunities for reflection upon past and future writing situations, genres, and tasks. These reflections should aid in the development of metacognition, sensitivity to disciplines, genre analysis, motivation, and flexibility.
Much of what I argued in this plenary, and elsewhere (e.g., Johns, 2003), is for a richer and more complex approach to the writing process, one that takes the genre, the writer’s role and interests, the audience, the situation, and other factors into consideration at the beginning—and throughout---the process.

Conclusion

The next conference of the European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing will be held in 2005, in another pleasant European location. Information about the participants, the 2003 EATAW conference, and future conferences, and other matters of interest to European teachers of writing can be obtained on the organization web page (http://www.eataw.org). Or, you can become part of the discussion by joining the EATAW Conference listserv. Just send an e-mail request to
Eataw-conf@listserv.hum.ku.dk.
We in North America have much to learn about Europe (and elsewhere) and about the teaching of academic writing from this organization—and much to contribute, as well. Perhaps some of the readers of this report will join me at the 2005 EATAW Conference.

References
Bawarshi, A. (2003). Genre and the invention of the writer. Logan, UT: University of Utah Press.
Bazerman, C. (1988). Shaping written knowledge. University of Wisconsin Press.
Benesch, S. (1993). ESL, ideology, and the politics of pragmatism. TESOL Quarterly, 27, 705-716.
Bereiter, C. & Scardamalia, M. (1987). The psychology of written composition. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Björk, L. G. Bräuer, L. Rinenecker & Peter Stray Jörgensen [Eds.] (2003). Teaching academic writing in European education. The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. [A collection of papers from the first EATAW Conference held in Groningen, The Netherlands, 2001.]
Coe, R.M. (1987). An apology for form; or, who took the form out of process? College. English, 49, 13-28.
Fahnestock, Jeanne (2003). Verbal and Visual Parallelism (supporting argumentation). Written Communication, 20, 123-52.
Geertz, C. (1983) Local knowledge: Further essays in interpretive anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
Huckin, T. (1987, March) Surprise value in scientific discourse. Paper presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Atlanta, GA.
Hunston, S. & G. Thompson [Eds.] Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse. Oxford University Press.
Hyland, K. (1998). Hedging in scientific research articles. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Ivaniç, R. & D. Camps (2001). I am how I sound: Voice as self-representation in L2 writing. Journal of second language writing, 10, 3-33.
Johns, A.M. (2003). Genre and ESL/EFL writing instruction. In B. Kroll [Ed.]. Exploring the dynamics of second language writing (pp. 195-217). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Johns, A.M. (1997). Text, role, and context: Developing academic literacies. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Matsuda, P. (2003). Second language writing in the twentieth century: A situated historical perspective. In B. Kroll [Ed.] Exploring the dynamics of second language writing. (pp. 15-34). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Mauranen, A. (1993) Contrastive ESP rhetoric: Metatext in Finnish-English economics texts. English for Specific Purposes, 12, 3-22.
Prior, P. (1998). Writing/disciplinary: A socio-historic account of literate activity in the academy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Samraj, B. (2003). The influence of discipline upon genre. Paper presented at the AAAL Conference, Arlington, VA, March.
Swales, J.M. & C. B. Feak (1997) Academic writing for graduate students: Essential tasks and skills. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.