Pixel International Conferences

In Romania, writing is the primary means of assessing student knowledge ever since the adoption of the Bologna Process. As such, law No. 288/ 2004 stipulates that each of the three university cycles should end with a thesis. In spite of this, L1 academic writing courses in Romania are not guided by national educational policy and writing support is provided according to each university’s internal policies. Often, students are expected to have learned academic, as well as professional writing, in high school, or to learn it intuitively at university. Chitez and Kruse [1] have shown that, in Romania (pp. 172-174), the genres learned in high school only slightly overlap with the genres students are asked to produce at university. In the present paper, we use corpus linguistics methods to analyze and compare the Romanian students’ entrance-level writing, reflecting the high school norms, with their first year examination writing. As our aim is also to capture the diversity of linguistic and cultural challenges the students are confronted with when building their written argumentation competence in their mother tongue, we contrast writing processes in Romanian (L1) in the frame of a course in literary theory. The research methodology involves the compilation of two corpora: (a) a corpus of novice writing, NoviceRO (30 essays), and (b) a corpus of first year writing as part of a compulsory Introduction to Literary Theory class, LitTRO (30 essays). We look at rhetorical and linguistic patterns related to argumentation in terms of frequency and effective logical and textual integration. We also reflect on the influence of the Anglo-American writing culture [2] for the students minoring in English. Our findings provide insight into the pedagogical complexities of accompanying the Romanian students in their border-crossing from pre-university towards university writing.

Keywords: Romanian university curriculum, written argumentation, corpus linguistics, Romanian freshmen, L1 writing pedagogy.

References

1. Chitez, M., Kruse, O. “Writing cultures and genres in European Higher Education”. Castelló, M.; Donahue, C. (eds.), University Writing: Selves and Texts in Academic Societies. Studies in Writing Series, vol. 24, Brill, Leiden, 2012. pp. 151-175.
2. Chitez, M., Learner corpus profiles: the case of Romanian learner English, Linguistic Insights Series (Series Editor: Maurizio Gotti). Peter Lang, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2014.