3.5 Discourse and critique

Stein’s work described in section 4 draws on Street’s conception of literacy as a social practice and inherently ideological, as discussed in section 2.2. Street (1995) argues that the way people learn literacy is always imbued with power relations and is part of an ideology, that is a system of values, beliefs and social practices connected with a particular dominant social group. An important strand within language studies has been the development of a group of approaches to analysing ideological aspects of language, and teaching students how to do this, variously referred to as critical literacy, critical language study or critical discourse analysis. These approaches all address the following questions:

1. In what ways do texts (spoken or written) convey particular ideological messages?
2. How do texts position people in certain ways and what resources do people have to resist such positionings?
3. How do wider social processes shape the language we use and the meanings we take from it?

Academic writing itself often entails particular risks, sacrifices and investments in relation to the kind of person students feel they are, and the kind of person they want to become. As discussed in section 2, there is a growing body of research in academic literacy/ies, which documents the particular practices and discourses required for students working at this level, and the models of knowledge and learning that underpin these. In research with eight mature students doing undergraduate degrees at a British university, Ivanič (1998) analysed in detail the traces of different discourses within their essays and explored, in interviews with her students, the reasons behind their particular choices of language. She found that students felt they ‘owned’ parts of the essays more than others. Some choices, to include a formal academic phrase, refer to a writer, use a quotation or adopt a particular evaluative stance (for instance giving evidence of familiarity with existing theory rather than critically examining it), were taken from a sense of ‘playing the game’, or producing what they felt the tutor who marked the essay would value. At other times students felt they were able to express their own ideas and beliefs more directly – often at the end of an essay, by which time they had worked out a position for themselves through the writing.

While Kamberelis and Scott’s (1992) research showed how younger students drew on the voices of people around them in their writing, Ivanič’s shows how her students were able to explain where they had picked up particular words, syntactic structures, argumentation strategies or structuring devices, from their reading, lectures, tutorials, discussion with other students and sources outside the university altogether. Some pieces of language were appropriated because the student had been interested and excited by an idea or a writer, and some because the student felt they were appropriate for the discourse within their discipline and would be positively valued by staff evaluating the essay. It was sometimes difficult to knit language from these heterogeneous sources together, and to negotiate the tricky boundaries between quotation, paraphrase and plagiarism. As Ivanič puts it: ‘Complex negotiations of identity lie beneath the surface of what may appear at first glance to be ‘‘inadequate’’ academic writing’ (1998, p. 343). Students were not always comfortable with the academic ‘selves’ they were required to produce through academic writing. Applied courses often involved the further complexity of having to juggle between two different discourses and ‘selves’ within the one piece of writing which would be assessed both by an academic and a professional tutor. Ivanič gives the example of an essay by a student doing a social work degree where she switches between the vocabulary and grammatical structures of a social work report and that of an academic essay, and between the identities of trainee social worker and applied social science student.

Ivanič believes that teachers need to give more attention to the ways in which students are struggling with different discourses and different kinds of selves within their writing. Using the term ‘subject position’ to mean ‘assigned identity as a certain type of person’, she summarises the ways in which writing constitutes a ‘representation of the self’ as follows: