Abstract:

When teaching students to write, a teacher keeps in mind the values that are specific of academe. Teachers empower students to consider their written work as a part of institutionalized discourse. Therefore, teachers’ main concern is to reveal for the students the imperative (in E. Kant’s sense) to respect the scientists they are citing, to use discourse-specific evaluative means when analyzing the scientists’ contribution to the field under study and to attract students’ attention to the language they use – in terms of register and style.

To reveal the academic values that are embedded into students pursuing bachelor’s and master’s degree in translation studies, 1700 oral and written teachers’ commentaries on students’ scientific papers, conference reports, thesis and course papers and dissertations have been analysed. The corpus of texts was formed years 2016 through 2019. Therefore, it was possible to compare the nature of commentaries on the papers by the same student. When reviewing students’ papers, especially those ones relating to academic research, teachers make written comments on stylistic, grammatical and discourse aspects. The analysis of the comments has revealed that the latter mostly concern the values of the academic discourse society. Thus, for example, when a student does not cite the reference source properly (such situations occur mostly among first-year students), or even avoids citing it, 100% of teachers’ emphasize in their commentaries the necessity to cite properly. The commentaries involve indicators of deontic modality, evaluative words of negative / positive connotation.

When first-year students use evaluative means to characterize a well-known linguist’s contribution, they often tend to express their attitude in a straight-forward manner:
NN has offered a very good classification
NN suggests too simple approach.

The first statement, in the framework of academic discourse is on the verge of being too informal, while the second one sounds rude because the student evaluates the approach s / he has not the grasp of. So, the nature of the second evaluation is both of linguistics-related character and at the same time of academic discourse etiquette. The teacher’s commentaries “one should learn lots of approaches to be capable of evaluating this one” and “in academic discourse, we never judge other linguists’ contribution in such terms” are revealing the following basic values for the students: the value of life-long learning, the value of respecting other linguists’ contribution to the field. Moreover, a teacher’s feedback gives the students the impetus to question their own research skills and to develop them further.

The research has revealed that 98% students realize the values of academic discourse by the time they graduate from the university. Importantly, overall quality of the written paper improves significantly, which becomes especially explicit when comparing the thesis of the students pursuing the Bachelor’s degree and the dissertations of the students pursuing the Master’s degree. Moreover, every thesis and every dissertation undergoes a reviewing process (by the scientific advisor and by another professor), so it is possible to analyse the extent to which the same student’s writing skills have improved.

It is relevant that the values students acquire in the process of writing outreach the framework of academic discourse and help them throughout their life.

Keywords:

Academic values, writing skills, teacher’s feedback.