ROGER

More information about the NFEAP 2018 conference

Abstract:

The changes that have occurred in Romania in recent years have resulted in a dynamic and diverse landscape of academic genres in higher education, in which several traditions coexist: the French and German traditions which helped shape the Romanian educational system since the 19th century, the Soviet-inspired system that largely replaced them after World War II, and more recently the increasing influence of English, widely perceived as a vehicle for integration, internationalization, innovation and modernisation.

The ROGER project, conducted over a period of five years (2017-2022) at the West University of Timisoara, is an attempt to understand this complex landscape by creating an inventory of academic genres used at Romanian universities. An initial data collection process was undertaken via semi-structured interviews with faculty and a student questionnaire, as part of a mixed data collection methodology which will ultimately lead to the evaluation of academic genres both qualitatively and quantitatively: interviews (e.g. Jackson et al 2006), survey (e.g. Chitez, Kruse & Castelló, 2015) and corpus (cf. Gardner & Nesi, 2013).

The present paper draws on faculty interviews and student questionnaires to investigate the genre of the scholarly research paper, which has emerged as the main genre university students are required to write besides BA or MA theses. The genre shares a number of similar features across disciplines, despite bearing different names reflecting different academic and disciplinary traditions (‘lucrare stiintifica’, ‘research paper’, ‘eseu academic/academic essay’, ‘referat,’ etc.). We will look at the terminology and use of this genre in several disciplines, in degrees taught in English and in Romanian, in an attempt to understand how these relate to the different academic and disciplinary traditions at work in the Romanian academic environment, to what extent the different genre names reflect variations in the genre itself, what is the relation between the genres used in Romanian-language and English-language degrees, and what the implications are for teaching.

References:
Chitez, M., Kruse, O. and M. Castelló. (2015) The European Writing Survey (EUWRIT): background, structure, implementation and some results. Working Papers in Applied Linguistics 9, Hochschul-online-Publikationen ZHAW.

Gardner, S., & Nesi, H. (2013). A Classification of Genre Families in University Student Writing. Applied Linguistics, 34(1), 25–52. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ams024

Impressions:

• Insightful keynotes from some of the most important scholars in the field – Carmen Pérez-Llantada, John Swales, Christine Tardy
• High standard of thought-provoking contributions approaching genre from a multitude of angles
• A very effective conference concept – with short presentation sessions followed by plenty of discussion opportunities