Data selection

The purpose and research questions above shaped the selection of data in terms of the level, nature and quality of writing targeted, the ‘disciplines’ or degree programmes selected for comparison, and the need to investigate parallel programmes across two institutions. Coursework writing of relatively highly- achieving undergraduate students in their third year in the departments of History and Politics and International Relations (PIR) at two institutions was selected as focus for the study.

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The writing of third-year undergraduate students was chosen as opposed to that of first or second-year students following the rationale that by a student’s third year they would have ventured as far as is possible at undergraduate level into the discourse community of their department and programme and that therefore at this stage their writing would be an accurate reflection of the influence of any disciplinary and/or institutional socialisation or apprenticeship. The work of relatively highly-achieving third-year students, those achieving largely 2:1s and firsts for their essays, was chosen because this successful performance can be seen as validation in the eyes of the department of their success in terms of the disciplinary expectations of undergraduate students.

Undergraduate as opposed to postgraduate writing was focused on because many students on taught postgraduate degree programmes have studied within a different disciplinary area or in a different national context at undergraduate level; for this reason, their adaption to the discourse community, discipline and institution is likely to follow a steep trajectory within the one year of their master’s course, rendering the writing produced by some students at this level possibly less reliably or consistently shaped by practices of their department. Also, there is a considerably smaller cohort at this level meaning it is a much more challenging task to collect an adequate range and quantity of ‘good’ texts.

Coursework writing as opposed to exam writing was selected as focus for the reason that coursework writing is by nature more in-depth and carefully- constructed than writing completed under timed conditions, and is thus potentially a better reflection a student’s knowledge, ability and practices. From a logistical perspective it was also easier to collect than exam writing. The final third-year dissertation was excluded for reasons in line with Alsop and Nesi’s rationale for the exclusion of dissertation work from BAWE (2009, p. 74), that this much longer, more polished, multiply drafted piece of work completed under greater guidance from a supervisor, was less characteristic of student writing as a whole.

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Writing from degree programmes within the departments of History and PIR was chosen as focus for two connected reasons. Firstly, as discussed in the literature review, relatively few studies of academic writing, either at professional or at student level, have compared writing that sits reasonably closely at the ‘soft’ end of the disciplinary spectrum and there are compelling arguments (e.g. Nishina, 2010) for the usefulness of such research. History and PIR sit within the soft epistemological field. At Institution X, the researcher’s place of work, they fall under the umbrella of ‘Arts and Social Sciences’ and students have the option of undertaking a joint honours degree across both departments, either in ‘Modern History and Politics’ or ‘Modern History and International Relations’. History and PIR are thus distinct but connected fields and as such a potentially useful focus for identifying finely delineated disciplinary differences. A further reason supporting their choice is the fact that in both areas of study the majority of coursework writing assignments fall under the category of ‘the Essay genre family’ (Nesi and Gardner, 2012). Only texts from this genre are included in the study and thus distinctions identified between writing in the two areas can more confidently be attributed to discipline and/or institution with the variable of genre as far as possible discounted.

Finally, the study’s overall purpose of investigating the extent to which ‘discipline’ and/or local institutional context exerts an influence on undergraduate writing necessitates collecting data from more than one institution. Without a cross- institutional analysis, differences identified between writing done by students in the two programmes within Institution X could only confidently be argued to be differences between the discourses of those particular localised departments. However, if the same patterns of difference found between Institution X programmes are also found between equivalent departments at another UK HE institution, the attribution of these differences to ‘disciplinary’ factors becomes much more compelling.

To create a cross-institutional dimension to the study, data from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus (a resource discussed in more detail

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below) was usefully employed. Although the BAWE corpus texts were collected from four institutions, holdings for each discipline generally consist of student writing from a single institution (Alsop and Nesi, 2009, p. 74); an examination of preliminary records, held at CAL, of the compilation of the BAWE corpus confirmed that this is indeed the case for Politics and History. ‘Politics’ essays in BAWE were collected from a department named ‘Politics and International Studies’. As can be seen in Table 1 below, a cross-programme, cross-institutional comparison was designed with Institution X being the institution I work within and Institution Y being the institution from which BAWE texts were collected.

History Politics/IR

Institution X HIST-X POL/IR-X

Institution Y HIST-Y POL/IR-Y

Table 1: Corpus design