F o r P e e r R e v i e w A Classification of Genre Families in University Student Writing AbstractAs demand for English-medium higher education continues to grow internationally and participation in higher education increases, the need for a better understanding of academic writing is pressing. Prior university-wide taxonomies of student writing have relied on intuition, the opinions of faculty, or data from course documentation and task prompts. In our research we classify a broad range of the writing actually produced by university students for assessment purposes. To make such a description manageable, we grouped the texts in the BAWE corpus into thirteen genre families.

This paper reports on an investigation into the dictionary-using habits of international students studying in the medium of English at a British University. Over a period of three years, six groups of students were set assignments requiring them to report on the way they had consulted dictionaries to find the meanings of unknown words in texts of their choice. Eighty-nine assignments were analysed, to reveal subjects' choices of reading material, look-up words and dictionaries. The data also showed that whilst the majority of words were looked up successfully, more than half the subjects were unsuccessful in at least one out of five dictionary consultations.Subjects were found to have particular difficulty in selecting appropriate entries and sub-entries in their dictionaries. Some consultation problems resulted in serious errors of interpretation, which subjects were largely unaware of.

This paper analyses laughter in spoken academic discourse, with the aim of discovering why lecturers provoke laughter in their lectures. A further purpose of the paper is to identify episodes in British data which may differ from those in other cultural contexts where other lecturing practices prevail, and thus to inform the design of study skills and staff development programmes for multilingual, multicultural, international university environments. Examination of the data indicates that the management of laughter in British lectures is strategic, and has a rhetorical purpose. Six main types of laughter episode are described: 'teasing', 'lecturer error', selfdeprecation', 'black humour', disparagement' and 'word play'. Laughter results from references to shared 'scripts' for student and lecturer behaviour, evaluations of outsiders who do not form part of the lecturer student in-group, and the lecturers' efforts to forge group intimacy. It serves as a means of maintaining social order, building rapport, relieving tension, and modelling academic and professional identities. Comparisons of laughter episodes across cultures, however, suggest that references to conventional British lecturer and student scripts would be out of place in many non-British contexts.

While there have been many investigations of academic genres, and of the linguistic features of academic discourse, few studies have explored how these interact across a range of university student writing situations. To counter misconceptions that have arisen regarding student writing, this article aims to provide comprehensive linguistic descriptions of a wide range of university assignment genres in relation to multiple situational variables. Our new multidimensional (MD) analysis of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus identifies clusters of linguistic features along four dimensions, onto which academic disciplines, disciplinary groups, levels of study, and genre families are mapped. The dimensions are interpreted through text extracts as: (i) Compressed Procedural Information versus Stance towards the Work of Others; (ii) Personal Stance; (iii) Possible Events versus Completed Events; and (iv) Informational Density. Clusters of linguistic features from the comprehensive set of situational perspectives found across this framework can be selected to inform the teaching of a ‘common academic core’, and to inform the design of programmes tailored to the needs of specific disciplines.

This document is the author's post-print version, incorporating any revisions agreed during the peer-review process. Some differences between the published version and this version may remain and you are advised to consult the published version if you wish to cite from it.