About Us

Rational

Academic Writing: a language-based approach is an interactive CD-ROM to teach students about writing at university. Primarily designed as support material for international students enrolled in English for Academic Purposes courses, the CD-ROM is also suitable for local students wishing to learn about language aspects of tertiary writing. A significant feature of the CD-ROM is the incorporation of many annotated student texts from a range of disciplines and genres. Systemic functional grammar has informed the section on writing paragraphs, and academic language. All sections of the CD-ROM include tasks.

Structure

Academic writing: a language based approach has three sections. Each is attached to the main menu and contains an overview of its Topics in a Section Menu. Each Topic accessed by a Section Menu may be read in sequence, or you jump to or from particular segments.

Funding

The development of Academic Writing: a language-based approach was made possible by funding from the following sources:

• Vice-Chancellor's Challenge Grant funding in 1997-1998 from the University of Wollongong to Dr. Bill Winser, Faculty of Education and Elizabeth Thomson,Faculty of Arts, University of Wollongong
  
• An Apple University Development Fund grant in 1998 to Elizabeth Thomson and Robyn Woodward-Kron, Modern Languages Program, University of Wollongong
  
• Vice-Chancellor's Challenge Grant funding in 1999 from the University of Wollongong to Elizabeth Thomson and Robyn Woodward-Kron in the Modern Languages Program, University of Wollongong.
  
• Funding from the Faculty of Arts, The University of Wollongong.

Developers

This CD-ROM project was completed at the University of Wollongong by a team of three: Robyn Woodward-Kron and Elizabeth Thomson (both of the University's Modern Languages Program) and James Meek (of the Centre for Educational Development and Interactive Resources).

Robyn Woodward-Kron: Selecting, analysing and annotating student texts. Writing, editing and proofing the package content for computer presentation.

Elizabeth Thomson: Supervising original research, collecting student essays, seeking funding support, coordinating the project and editing content.

James Meek: Adapting original paper-based material to computer. Providing authorware programming and instructional design.

Support

No formal support is offered with this product, however if there are technical problems we'll do our best to be helpful.

Send an email to: imp@uow.edu.au.

Include details of the product and version as well as information about the specific problem you are having.

Acknowledgements

The developers would like to express their sincere thanks to the students who made their work available for this project. We would also like to acknowledge the assistance of lecturers who made students aware of this project and facilitated our text collection.

We would also like to thank two colleagues in the Centre for Educational Development and Interactive Resources, University of Wollongong for their help: Ray Stace, who acted as an Educational Consultant to the project, and Dhammika Ruberu, who provided some vital Technical Assistance.

Finally, the developers would like to acknowledge Professor Christine Ewan, Pro-Vice Chancellor (Academic), for funding the original development of the English Language Studies major at the University of Wollongong, and Professor Anne Pauwels, Dean of Arts for her funding support.