Lawrie HunterKochi University of Technology

Writing Research Across Borders III

-a composite tool for EAP writers and mentors

Concept mapping and text analysis

Problem: argument blockEngineering EAP PhD students have

trouble articulating their arguments.

Factors1.The structure of an engineering RP is not the structure of an argument.2. Continuous text does not reveal

rhetorical structure.3. Teaching argument leads poorly to

abstraction skill.

(The link relations are onlycommunication moves verbs from argument discourse.)

Intervention 2: Use Cmap Tools-force articulation of relations between core content elements

Write asummary from map

Mapsource

text

Study 1: interventions 1 and 2

Critiquethe map

Make aconsensus

map

ResultsLack of rhetorical awareness led to the inclusion of background information in summaries.Absence of visual metaphors led to narrative order confusion.

Intervention 3: identify core text

Intervention 4: Institute visual metaphors

overarching

subordinateabstract

concrete

passage through time

more importantless important

more salient

less salient

rhetoricalflow

argumen

tdirection

cause-effect

ResultsCore content dominant in summaries;sentence order much better.Some learners extended the process to a second text analysis for further abstraction.

Study 2: interventions 3 and 4

Instructionin text analysis

Mapsource

text

Write asummary from map

ReflectionTeachers of writing:

-built-in bias againstlow-text work?

Outreach: just ask me!Whatever you need.I love to help.

Lawrie HunterKochi University of Technology

http://www.core.kochi-tech.ac.jp/hunterhttp://lawriehunter.com

Concept mapping and text analysis: A composite tool for EAP writers and mentors

This presentation demonstrates how a low text representation of the content of text can reveal rhetorical structure or orchestration (or their absence). It also argues that Cmap representation can have a valuable place in the writing center toolkit. Cmap representation has gained a wide usership, particularly in science education, thanks to the popularity of the freeware Cmap Tools. Cmap Tools forces the user to label each link between two nodes with a phrase specifying the relation between those nodes. As well, applying several visual metaphors (e.g., up is abstract, down is concrete; up is overarching, down is subordinate) can make the representation even more compressed. This presents an altogether more powerful representation than mind maps. This presentation reports several cases of fruitful application of Cmap Tools, wherein EAP learners of academic writing discovered intellectual leverage in mapping. In each case the learners drew constrained maps of the content of a text (academic or popular genre), critiqued their maps, arrived at consensus on an accurate mapping, and then set out to write a new version of the text based only on the content of the map. In each case the subsequent work was rich regarding writing strategy and proactive use of tools. The learners developed their own approaches, cycling between moves analysis and concept mapping as they worked to unpack text that they had initially identified as 'good models'. In each case too the end product was significantly closer to the target form. The observations made here point to numerous applications in EAP writing, and suggest that the Cmap deserves a place amongst the essential tools for EAP instruction and writing center work, being of particular use in the analysis of source texts where the identification of rhetorical orchestration is difficult; where argument is often masked by other rhetorical devices; and in situations where one's thinking about an approach to a problem is complex and difficult to encode directly in extended text.