The full day comprised one opening plenary followed by two parallel sessions, each offering four invited papers. At the end of the day there were four parallel sessions, each providing four contributed papers. I cannot cover in detail all the papers but the following is a brief overview. He suggested that a cross-disciplinary uniform approach did not seem as effective as we may have previously thought. Ann Hewings extended Dudley-Evans criticisms by looking more closely at genre differences.
Novices have to learn the disciplinary differences.
She presented results of a study into the differences in grammatical subject categories across a range of disciplines. This would be what one wishes, but it is uncertain how people do acquire this and equally how one can provide appropriate training for non-native speakers at specific moments in their academic careers. It would seem unlikely that a detailed training in the characteristics of the discipline s writing in the initial year would yield the desired results, because the students have not yet acquired a large enough body of knowledge of the discipline. Similarly the textbooks that are often the required reading in the early years do not provide a suitable example of the kind of writing students entering the genre are expected to be able to produce. These were some of the issues arising from the opening plenary, as well as some of my own conclusions from it.