Beginning University

Thinking, researching and writing for success

Andrew Wallace, Tony Schirato

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000256338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Vita studentesca

Get good marks for your essays and assignments!Learn to think and write clearly!Find the information you need easily!Do you want to make the most of your time at university? Beginning University shows you how to develop the skills you need in order to succeed at university and later on.Step by step, the authors explain how to think critically, create an argument and present your ideas well both in writing and in oral presentations. They show you how to read effectively and take good notes, and how to plan your work. They also look at how to get the most out of your lectures and tutorials, and give you handy research tips. Questions and activities at the end of each chapter help you practise what you have learnt. Beginning University provides a head start to studying at university and can be used by students in any subject. Don't wait till it's too late!

part I BACKGROUND

chapter 1 Communication in context

Imagine that you are a 25-year-old just arrived in a foreign country where you will live and work for the next few years. You have been left in a small, run-down hotel where nothing works, you don't know anybody, you cannot work out the money, it's raining, and you know next to nothing about where you are going to be spending the next three years of your life. You're not used to the weather, the insects, noises, smells, shops, food. Nothing is quite what you expected. Things will get better—eventually—but meantime you will have to learn to adjust if you are to make a success of your time here.

When students first enter a university, it doesn't really matter whether they are 17-year-olds fresh out of school or 40-year-olds with plenty of work experience—they are moving into a field of activity they do not know much about. Universities are different from schools and most workplaces: they have their own rules, regulations, cultures, activities, expectations and values.

First-year university students know that going to university is a challenging experience, but their ideas about the challenges they will face are not always accurate. They are likely to worry too much about some kinds of potential problems, and not enough about others. This book aims to help. (Naturally, we cannot help with ail the problems a first-year student might experience. We don't, for instance, offer any advice about which course or subjects to enrol in, how to find accommodation or how to live on a limited budget.)

COMMUNICATION IS THE KEY

This text deals with, university study primarily in terms of communication. Most of what you do as a student involves communication. You will .spend a lot of time reading and listening to lectures. In assignments you will have to communicate by writing or (in the case of oral presentations) speaking. Discussion with staff and other students will probably be an important part of your learning. You cannot succeed at university without effective communication skills.

By communication skills we do not mean merely being clear and precise when talking to people, dressing well, smiling, or writing neatly. It involves being able to find and understand information, to deal with ideas, make decisions, learn and adapt in unfamiliar situations, and organise work. A university graduate should be a good communicator— but not in the same way that a salesperson or television newsreader is a good communicator. A university graduate is someone who can participate effectively in an exchange of ideas, and good communication in this sense means being able to think effectively. Skill in critical thinking (or reasoning) and the procedures of exposition (explaining and analysing things) are central to academic coijimunication of all kinds.

You will have to develop high-level communication skills to succeed at university. These are some of the most important assets you will take with you into the workforce. The skills, you pick up—in critical thinking, researching, analysing, putting together an argument, speaking to a group, planning, time management, writing a report, editing, using communication technology—are precisely what employers want of graduates.

Graduates are worth employing not just because they possess certain facts but because they know how to deal with information and people. 1 hey have learned a specialised vocabulary (such'as that used by accountants or social scientists), and learned how to use other tools and procedures. They are thus able to make sense of facts, discover new facts, look at facts in new ways, The real benefit of university education often' lias more to do with mastering the process of dealing in knowledge than with the specific content of what is taught. It is important: to be .aware that the communication skills you use and develop at university have a relevance beyond your years of formal study. These, skills are transferable to your future job. Your university studies are much more relevant and beneficial than you may realise. Although we have been using the word 'skills', the. term literacies is another way of expressing what we mean.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURAL CONTEXT

There is another reason why it is useful to approach university education in terms of communication. Modern communication theory provides insight into the way human beings behave and interact because it takes account of the cultural contexts that influence what people think and do. While psychology contributes a lot to our understanding of learning—by helping us understand how memory works, for example— psychology tends to concentrate on the human individual in isolation. The fact that life is very different in Estonia, japan, Bolivia and Australia, and that life in the 20th century is radically different, in most countries, from that in the 19th, is due to the different cultures that exist in each place and time—not to the attributes of individuals. Knowing about a person's personality or intelligence doesn't tell us much about how they interact with the culture in which they find themselves.

To return to our example of arriving in a foreign country, many of your problems would involve communication. You might not know the local language, for instance. But language itself would be only one difficulty. All kinds of local attitudes, values, customs and conventions would be equally unfamiliar. Is it impolite to sit on a table? Will people be offended by a lot of eye contact or a lack of eye contact? Is bargaining normal when you buy something? As well as conventions relating to interpersonal communication, you would need to know something about the laws of the country—including which laws no-one took seriously ('You're not allowed to park under trees, so everybody does it') and which were taken very seriously ('Illegal drug possession means 20 years in jail'). You would need to know what sources of information there were in the country, and which ones were reliable. To communicate effectively in this foreign country, you would need to learn something about its culture.

In the first place, though, you need to realise that cultural awareness is what matters. If you are completely insensitive to the differences in the new country's culture you will not get very far. It is no good blaming the locals for laziness, stupidity or ignorance when they behave in ways that are perfectly normal and appropriate in their culture. Nor would it be useful to blame yourself: it is not that you lack certain inner qualities; what you lack is knowledge of the: 'rules of the game' that apply in this part of the world. It probably will not matter that you don't already know a lot about the new country when you arrive, as long as you are prepared to begin 'reading it'—that is, picking up its rules and conventions, learning how it works, and adapting your own actions accordingly.

communication is not the same everywhere and in all circumstances. Communication is affected by cultural context—in fact, it is inseparable from its context. To be an effective communicator, you have to be able to analyse the context in which you are operating.

UNIVERSITIES AS A CULTURAL CONTEXT

Of course there are cultural differences within countries as well as between them. We can speak of any society as having many different cultural fields. Students coming into the university field (and leaving the fields of business, government or secondary education) have to become familiar with different rules, values, expectations and conventions. Moving to a new cultural field is in many ways like moving to another country. You encounter new:

• institutions (in a university, this would include the library, student administration, the international office, the student union);
• rules (you have to enrol by a certain date; if you fail several subjects you might be excluded; fines are imposed for overdue library books); m titles (professor, doctor, vice-chancellor, student counsellor);
• conventions (you are supposed to talk in tutorials but remain quiet and pay attention m lectures; there are certain ways to go about getting an extension for your assessment);
• genres (lectures, tutorials, practical classes, workshops, reports, essays, oral presentations);
• discourses (sociology does not use the same 'language' as journalism, or electronics the same language as biology); and
• activities (going to classes, student parties).

While you will be able to rely on some of your present skills and habits, you will have to pick up many new perspectives and adapt to new practices. Some of the new requirements will be made clear, but there are unspoken assumptions and conventions you will have to pick up on your own.

In the list above we mention discourses and genres. Discourse refers to the types of language that are used in a field or subfield. Sometimes the use of language in a field is very formal. For instance, in a courtroom, judges and lawyers use legal discourse (made up of words such as plaintiff, defendant, habeas corpus) rather than ordinary, everyday language. Other discourses are less formal but still specialised (the sport of cricket has square leg, googly, wrong-un, and if a batter is caught, the fielding team will all scream 'Howzat?' rather than 'Please give him out').

The university has its own discourses, some of which are to be found across the field (terms such as monograph, hypothesis, bibliography, tutor), while others are more specific to disciplines or subject areas (e.g. in psychology, words such as cognition, introversion and regression). Discourses are characteristic ways of using language which tend to be associated with different values, attitudes and social purposes. In chapter 2 we discuss the values associated with academic discourse.

Every field is characterised by certain communication genres—kinds or types of communication. Films have a number of genres (the musical, the western, science fiction, horror), which are different from one another in terms of story, audiences and audience expectations, and discourses. Universities have their own genres—the lecture and tutorial being examples of teaching genres. There are also various assessment genres: essay writing, oral presentations, case studies, experiment write-ups, and exams (which have their own subgenres, such as multiple choice, take-home and long essay).

In order to communicate effectively in any field or activity, it is important to be familiar with, and understand the requirements of, discourses and genres. This is particularly the case at university, where so many of the genres are directly or indirectly related to your success. It will take time to master all the discourses and genres involved in your course and to feel comfortable with them. The main thing is to appreciate that you do have to adapt to different requirements. If you are reading or writing in a history subject, you have to use a discourse that is different from the discourse of a, tourism or management subject. If you are writing a report, you must conform to the conventions of that genre, not to those of the essay or exam answer.

CULTURAL LITERACY

Communication theorists use the term cultural literacy to describe the ability to operate effectively in a particular cultural field. Being 'literate' originally meant being able to read and write. Now we describe people as literate in a particular cultural context if they have the knowledge, insight, experience and skills that allow them to function well in that context. Strangers in a foreign country learn how and where to obtain information and make sense of it, how to make their needs known, how to achieve what they want. They become literate in that particular context. University students have the job of acquiring 'tertiary literacy'. This includes knowledge of relevant discourses and genres, which in turn depends on understanding the nature of the academic enterprise, knowing how to respond to requirements, and so on. The term 'literacy' is more useful than the narrower term 'communication skill'.

Not only can the general skills in dealing with ideas and communicating that you develop at university be transferred to your job after graduation, but once you understand that any field has its own rules, values, genres and discourses, and that different audiences don't have the same literacies and expectations, you can use this knowledge to guide your activities. For instance, engineering students have to absorb a lot of technical information. They also need to learn that the genres and discourses of the field of engineering are very different from the fields that most of their future clients work in—such as bureaucracies, trade unions, businesses, public utilities and local councils. Engineering courses now usually include subjects which help students appreciate that the logics and values of the field of engineering are different from those of, say, environmental groups. The students develop insight which helps them to communicate with clients, protesters, union officials or business rivals. They realise they have to become familiar with other people's fields, priorities, expectations, discourses and genres, particularly if what has to be communicated is complex and highly technical.

All graduates, not just engineers:, need to realise that contexts—and thus the kind of communication appropriate to them—vary a great deal. But you will become a graduate who is alert to context only if you practise analysing your context as an. undergraduate.. This means you must acquire the habit of thinking about the processes of learning you are involved in, and not just plod unthinkingly from one task to another.

LEARNING TO ADAPT

It 'would be useful, if you were moving 'overseas, to have a guide who showed you around,, explained things to- you, provided you with information, and could be consulted when you had to make a decision. In a sense this book has been set up to do just that—in your university lire. We cannot provide detailed advice on the particular subjects in which you are enrolled: this is a general guide. In any case, we think the best way to help you is to encourage you to learn to help yourself. Even if it were possible to provide specific advice on every problem you might encounter, that would only make you dependent on the book. So while we provide suggestions about strategies you will find useful, we do not offer simple solutions' or formulas. Instead, we want to get you into the habit of thinking.

An important thing to think about is the purpose of what you do. Because they are anxious, or in a mad panic to get an. assignment finished, or distracted by thoughts of more exciting things, students often ignore purpose. They forget that a paragraph they are writing should serve some purpose in relation to the set topic of the assignment. They lose sight of the purpose of the assignment itself. If forced to think about it, they would probably say that the assignment (together with other pieces of assessment) serves the purpose of determi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: how this book can help you
• Part I Background
• Part II The basics
• Part III Learning strategies
• Part IV Assignments
• Part V Beyond university
• Appendixes
• Endnotes
• Recommended books
• Index