The idea of a stage – as space of performance, period of development or both – opens up rich ways of thinking about academic writing and academic speech. When we talk about stages, we might mean the stages of a text, the stages of a writing process, the stages of a writing career. We might mean writing as performance, or the stages of the seminar room or lecture theatre, where discoursal norms demand that speaking entails a kind of performing. How might EAP teachers and thinkers reckon with the stages – process and performance – of writing, teaching, speaking, research, academic work as a whole? Join us for an exciting two-day online conference!
Plenary speakers
- Pat Thomson, University of Nottingham, UK
- Raffaella Negretti, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden and Lisa McGrath, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
Abstracts
Go here for abstracts and biographies and see below for program, recordings of the plenaries, and power point slides of the presentations.
Participant guidelines
For participant guidelines, please click on this link.
Conference time zone: Central European Summer Time
Note that small changes in the program are possible. Session Zoom links will be added later.
Program at a Glance
Thursday, June 3rd
| 11.00-11.30: Conference Lounge/Social Time Join us in the Zoom Lobby Join us for an informal pre-conference session. Meet other conference participants |
| 11.30-12.00 | Welcome/Opening. Remarks by OsloMet Library Director Lars Egeland and members of the Conference Organizing Committee |
| 12.00-12.15 Break |
| 12.15-13.15 | Plenary Session 1: Pat Thomson Title: “Staging revision: some musings on academic writing advice” Abstract: Academic writing advice often suggests that it is good/normal/desirable to produce a messy first draft that then needs to be revised. In this presentation, I examine the “staged” notion of revision that is implicit in this advice. While there are clear benefits of encouraging researchers to get words down on paper, I ask whether there may be unintended consequences which arise from glossing over inter-connected revising practices. My (informed) suspicion is that supervisors and reviewers often see the results of rituals of revision which are more a performance than the artisanal crafting required in authoritative and persuasive text work-identity work. I propose a heuristic for somewhat better advice. And, oh yes, this is a first outing of some of a new book on revision! | To watch a recording of the plenary select this link. |
| 13.15-13.30 Break |
| Time | Concurrent Session 1 | Zoom Room Links |
| 13.30-14.00 | Room 1: “The academic writing rehearsal: learning from the performance” Andrew Northern and Hilary Glasman-Deal | To attend this session, enter Room 1 by clicking on this link |
| Room 2: “An ethnographic investigation into authorial voice development of an exiled academic: an academic literacies approach” Baraa Khuder and Bojana Petrić | To attend this session, enter Room 2 by clicking on this link |
| Time | Concurrent Session 2 | Zoom Room Links |
| 14.05-14.35 | Room 1: “Opening dialogic spaces: Meaning-making in teacher educators’ conversations with colleagues about academic writing instruction practices” Ingunn Ofte | To attend this session, enter Room 1 by clicking on this link |
| Room 2: “Risk Assessment: Setting the Stage for More Daring Performances in Academic Essays” Jonathan W. Leader | To attend this session, enter Room 2 by clicking on this link |
| 14.35-14.50 Break |
| Time | Concurrent Session 3 | Zoom Room Links |
| 14.50-15.20 | Room 2: “The PhD confirmation report and viva: ‘stages’ for performing knowledge” Marion Heron and Nadya Yakovchuk | To attend this session, enter Room 1 by clicking on this link |
| Time | Concurrent Session 4 | Zoom Room Links |
| 15.25-15.55 | ||
| Room 2: “Dealing with EAP mixed-ability groups step by step” Natalia Tager | To attend this session, enter Room 2 by clicking on this link |
| 15.55-17.00 Break |
| Time | Concurrent Session 5 | Zoom Room Links |
| 17.00-17.30 | Room 1: “Writing Retreats and Writing Groups – Significant Stages of Doctoral Writing Support” Jenny Mattsson | To attend this session, enter Room 1 by clicking on this link |
| Room 2: “Offstage: an invitation to a Circle of Trust” Michèle le Roux | To attend this session, enter Room 2 by clicking on this link |
| Time | Concurrent Session 6 | Zoom Room Links |
| 17.35-18.05 | Room 1: “Using Mixed Methods in EAP Writing Research” Weijia Li | To attend this session, enter Room 1 by clicking on this link |
| Room 2: “Collaborative Pedagogical Drama Game Play as Part of Writing Process” Lin Zhou | To attend this session, enter Room 2 by clicking on this link |
| 18.05-18.30 Break |
| 18.30-19.30 Virtual Social Event (Details in the welcome email you received before the conference) |
Friday, June 4th
| 10.00-10.30: Conference Lounge/Social Time Join us in the Zoom Lobby |
| Time | Concurrent Session 7 | Zoom Room Links |
| 10.30-11.00 | Room 1: “Interactive annotation in higher education. Staging student teachers’ collaborative reading and writing through the Lacuna Platform” Anita Normann and Hildegunn Otnes | To attend this session, enter Room 1 by clicking on this link |
| Room 2: “Staging Speaking Provision along the Doctoral Journey” Sharon Smith | To attend this session, enter Room 2 by clicking on this link |
| Time | Concurrent Session 8 | Zoom Room Links |
| 11.05-11.35 | Room 1: “Performing solidarity: Helping students to negotiate the explicit encoding of writer-reader alignment in their writing” Ramona Tang | To attend this session, enter Room 1 by clicking on this link |
| Room 2: “Setting the stage for lecture listening: how representative are EAP coursebooks?” Katrien Deroey | To attend this session, enter Room 2 by clicking on this link |
| 11.35-12.00 Break |
| 12.00-13.00 | Plenary Session 2: Raffaella Negretti and Lisa McGrath Title: Setting the stage(s) for research writing: actors, audiences and learning the craft Before you hear the plenary, we invite you to complete a small activity. Abstract: The stage is an apt metaphor for how the EAP community has come to understand research-based writing: scholarly writers are actors, performing genres to disciplinary audiences who have expectations based on familiarity with those genres and the recurrent rhetorical contexts in which they operate. Research writing is of course a textual practice, but it is also inherently social, with both cognitive and affective dimensions. As such, another intriguing facet of stage and its relationship to genre is the series of stages of writer development – how the writer acquires the ability to perform and have agency across rhetorically recurrent situations. The aim of our talk today is to bring new insights to our understanding of these “stages” by presenting a data set derived from a metacognitive scaffolding task completed by a group of doctoral students in the sciences. The task was designed to foreground primarily social facets of writing: writing as genre performance on a specific stage, for a specific audience and as a form of situated, purposeful communication against the backdrop of the current knowledge within a field. Further, the task foregrounded writing as a form of development towards a self-directed, agentive and possibly creative adaptation of one’s authorial choices. On the basis of this new data and our previous research, we present three main arguments: first, we show that a straightforward disciplinary framing of research-based writing is not reflective of the hybridised, fluid and multidisciplinary audiences that our students write for; second, given their complex writing contexts, we argue that students need support in recognising this complexity and in developing rhetorical adroitness in order to write effectively; and third, we call for deeper engagement with well-established theories of learning such as self-regulation and metacognition so that EAP teachers and researchers can design tasks that investigate and promote student learning, and that encompass the social, cognitive and affective dimensions of genre performance. | To watch a recording of the plenary, select this link. |
| 13.00-14.00 Lunch |
| Time | Concurrent Session 9 | Zoom Room Links |
| 14.00-14.30 | Room 1: “Operating in the margins: the benefits of EAP occupying the Third Space” Malgorzata Drewniok | To attend this session, enter Room 1 by clicking on this link |
| Room 2: ““Stages” of academic writing: a diachronic corpus analysis of history writing in English and Romanian” Loredana Bercuci, Claudia Doroholschi, and Andrei Stavilă | To attend this session, enter Room 2 by clicking on this link |
| Time | Concurrent Session 10 | Zoom Room Links |
| 14.35-15.05 | Room 1: “Setting the stage for student collaboration” Averil Bolster and Peter Levrai | To attend this session, enter Room 1 by clicking on this link |
| 15.05-15.20 Break |
| Time | Concurrent Session 11 | Zoom Room Links |
| 15.20-15.50 | Room 1: “The uncanny little text doctor: creativity and aesthetic digital experience in the teaching of academic writing” Iben Brinch Jørgensen and Merete Morken Andersen | To attend this session, enter Room 1 by clicking on this link |
| Room 2: “Revising in Parallel Stages” Jennifer Lewin | To attend this session, enter Room 2 by clicking on this link |
| Time | Concurrent Session 12 | Zoom Room Links |
| 15.55-16.25 | Room 1: “Academic Writing Centres as Stages of Performance: Experiences from two Norwegian Institutions” Cathinka Dahl Hambro | To attend this session, enter Room 1 by clicking on this link |
| Room 2: “Text is Material” Josh Thorpe | To attend this session, enter Room 2 by clicking on this link |
| 16.25-16.40 Break |
| Time | Concurrent Session 13 | Zoom Room Links |
| 16.40-17.10 | Room 1: “Micro-credentials and Digital Badges for EAP Programs” Darren Downing | To attend this session, enter Room 1 by clicking on this link |
| Room 2: “The Use of L1 in the Transitional Stages of Academic English Writing Development” Lyudmila Belomoina | To attend this session, enter Room 2 by clicking on this link |
| 17.15-18.15 Conference Wrap Up Event Click on the Link to Join |