Selected papers by Tim Moore
Australian Universities' Review, 2020
What's being lost in the new regimes of learning. It is not just governments - and their ideologi... more What's being lost in the new regimes of learning. It is not just governments - and their ideological agendas - that have steered our universities down flawed paths
International Journal of Lifelong Education, 2020
A critical review of three recent publications that consider the current state of our universitie... more A critical review of three recent publications that consider the current state of our universities, and their increasingly uncertain futures.
Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 2019
There is a consensus nowadays that the best way to develop students’ academic literacy abilities ... more There is a consensus nowadays that the best way to develop students’ academic literacy abilities is within the context of their studies in the disciplines, an approach known as ‘curriculum embedding’. But despite the demonstrable value of this approach, surveys of the field in Australia suggest there has been only limited success over the years in integrating embedding pedagogies into university courses. In the light of this halting progress, there is a need to constantly document initiatives in this area, both to affirm the principles upon which embedding is founded, as well as to show how these principles can be given practical effect on programs. This paper provides an account of one such initiative – a collaborative project between Sociology academics and an academic literacy specialist. The key motif on the project was how the notions of ‘theory’ and ‘critique’ could be made comprehensible to students in the particular disciplinary context they were working in. We also show that an essential element of such programs is developing a common metalanguage by which pertinent issues can be explored, both among academics and with students.
Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 2019
Most of the articles in this special issue of ARAL draw on sources and antecedents in the academi... more Most of the articles in this special issue of ARAL draw on sources and antecedents in the academic literacy field that will be well-known to many readers. These include the work of linguists working in systemic functional linguistics; the genre research and analyses of the ESP school (Swales, Hyland) and also the contribution of the North American schools of composition theory and rhetorical genre theory (Bazerman, Miller, Freedman). A source however, that may be less familiar to readers is the work of what is known as the first generation of academic literacy specialists working in Australian universities (Gordon Taylor, John Clanchy, Hannah Bock and others). This group came into being as a consequence of changing education policies in Australia in the 1970s when students from non-traditional backgrounds first gained access to university study on a significant scale. The resultant need to support these new cohorts in their learning saw the creation of study skills units in a number of universities, and in this development, the establishment of a new academic field in the country. The pioneering work of these early practitioners was to find expression in an edited collection published in the late 1980s, Literacy by Degrees, a volume that documented the understandings they had developed in their close work with students over the preceding decade – Gordon Taylor at Monash, Hannah Bock at Latrobe, Brigid Ballard and John Clanchy at the Australian National University, Peggy Nightingale at University of New South Wales, and Vic Beasley at Flinders University. This publication, although not necessarily widely known in applied linguistic circles, has nevertheless, had a major influence on the outlooks and practices of those working in the field of language and learning support. In this retrospective review, I outline some of the main ideas contributed by the authors at this time, and also what can be said about the volume's legacy 30 years on. In the final part of the review, I reflect a little on how the situation of literacy in the academy has developed and changed since that time. As with all academic movements, the ideas advanced in Literacy by Degrees were formed in part in opposition to a number of prevailing trends and orthodoxies at the time. One of these was the 'study skills' approach to academic literacy, where it was imagined that the teaching of all-purpose, general skills, like reading skills (e.g. the skimming and scanning of texts) could adequately equip students for the diverse demands of study in the disciplines. Another was a belief that problems of students' language use should be understood mainly in universalist terms – as the limited acquisition of general morpho-syntactic competence. Absent in both these strands, the authors argued, was what lies at the heart of all academic study – the seeking to 'understand' things and to make meaning of them:
Cambridge papers in ELT, 2019
For the EAP practitioner seeking to develop students’ critical thinking abilities, a number of k... more For the EAP practitioner seeking to develop students’ critical thinking abilities, a number of key curriculum challenges present themselves. This extended paper discusses such challenges in some detail, including: the variety of definitions, practices, and pedagogical approaches to critical thinking; the relationship between critical thinking and content knowledge; the genre and cultural contexts of critical thinking. Practical suggestions and examples for EAP course design are provided.
Studies in Higher Education, 2017
Recent developments in higher education have seen a strong emphasis placed on making graduates ‘j... more Recent developments in higher education have seen a strong emphasis placed on making graduates ‘job ready’ for their work in the professions. A driver of this agenda has been the many mass-scale surveys conducted with business and industry about the abilities and general employability of graduates. This Australian-based study is focused on perceptions and attitudes around one such ability – professional writing skills. ‘Discourse-based interviews’ (Odell, et al. 1983) were conducted with managers and supervisors from a range of professional areas. Their responses were most interesting, and served, among other things, to challenge some of the emerging ideas about ‘job-readiness’ in current debates about the directions of higher education.
Studies in Higher Education 38, 4: pp 506-522, 2013
The article reports a study that investigated ideas about critical thinking as held by academics ... more The article reports a study that investigated ideas about critical thinking as held by academics working in three disciplines: history, philosophy and cultural studies. At least seven definitional strands were identified in the informants’ commentaries, namely critical thinking: (i) as judgement; (ii) as skepticism; (iii) as a simple originality; (iv) as sensitive readings; (v) as rationality; (vi) as an activist engagement with knowledge; and (vii) as self-reflexivity. This multiplicity of meanings is thought to have important implications for university teaching and learning. The design of the study and the conclusions drawn from it draw heavily on Wittgenstein’s idea of meaning as use.
Higher Education Research and Development, 30, 3: pp. 261-274
I report a study that investigated ideas about critical thinking across three disciplines areas: ... more I report a study that investigated ideas about critical thinking across three disciplines areas: Philosophy, History, and Literary Studies. The findings point to a diversity of understandings and practices, ones that suggest the limitations of a more generic approach. I argue that a more useful conception of critical thinking is as a form of 'metacritique'where the essential quality to be encouraged in students is a flexibility of thought, and the ability to negotiate a range of different critical modes.
Journal of Academic Language and Learning (2014)
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education
On the use of Halliday's transitivity in academic skills advising t i m m o o r e Monash Universi... more On the use of Halliday's transitivity in academic skills advising t i m m o o r e Monash University,Australia ab s t rac t
Higher Education Research and Development. 23, 1: pp. 3-18
English for Specific Purposes
This paper investigates variation in knowledge construction in three disciplines-sociology, econo... more This paper investigates variation in knowledge construction in three disciplines-sociology, economics and physics-by drawing on Halliday's notion of ''metaphenomenon''. Specifically, the study analysed the frequency and type of agentive elements (participants and processes) in textbooks to find out the extent to which knowledge in these disciplines is attributed to individual scholars, schools of thought, conventional wisdoms and the like, as opposed to being realised in a non-attributed canonical form. The findings suggest that with respect to the feature of metaphenomenon, economics textbook discourse is arguably more akin to that of physics than its social science counterpart, sociology. The implications of the findings-both pedagogical and ideological-are discussed. #
The teaching of critical thinking is seen as a key component of many EAP programmes. There is a d... more The teaching of critical thinking is seen as a key component of many EAP programmes. There is a degree of uncertainty and confusion however, about how critical thinking is best understood, and then how our conceptualisations of it might translate into coherent programmes for students. The chapter identifies three distinct strands of thinking about critical thinking in the literature: a skills approach, an ethics approach; a 'language of evaluation' approach. A critical discussion of these approaches is provided, alongside some recent empirical research into critical practices across a range of discipline areas. It is suggested that the framing of critical thinking curricula needs to be guided by a number of broad principles, arising from this research, namely: that critical thinking typically takes in a variety of discursive practices; that the types of critical judgements students need to make are subject to a good deal of variation; that the quality of these critical judgements are strongly related to the degree of knowledge students have of the entities they need to consider. The chapter concludes with some practical advice about how these principles might be given effect in the design of EAP programmes, both in pre-sessional and concurrent contexts.
A challenge for many EAP teachers working on pre-sessional programs is to find ways to reconcile ... more A challenge for many EAP teachers working on pre-sessional programs is to find ways to reconcile the dual aims of preparing students for university study and for the IELTS test. The study described here seeks to provide some guidance on this issue through an analysis of the type of writing required in the two domains. We compared the standard IELTS Task 2 rubric with a corpus of 155 assignment tasks collected at two Australian universities and found that whilst IELTS writing bears some resemblance to the predominant genre of university study-the essay, there are also some very important difference. Our findings suggest that the type of writing the test elicits may have more in common with certain public nonacademic genres, and thus should not be thought of as an appropriate model for university writing. We conclude that it is probably best to deal with test preparation and the broader EAP writing curriculum within separate programs. With apologies to Marx—a spectre haunts the world of EAP, this is the spectre of the academic English test. To speak of such tests as 'spectres' is perhaps over-dramatising matters, but the image nevertheless seems to us an appropriate one. This is because, for those involved in the preparing of students for university study on pre-sessional EAP programs, the IELTS and TOEFL tests (and equivalents) often cast a long shadow over one's deliberations and efforts.
The study investigated the literacy practices required of graduates in professional work across a... more The study investigated the literacy practices required of graduates in professional work across a range of occupational areas. It considered how these corresponded to the types of reading and writing required of candidates on the IELTS test – both in the Academic and General Training modules.
In H. Marriott, T. Moore & R. Spence-Brown (eds) Learning discourses and the discourse of learning. Melbourne: Monash ePress. pp. 02.1-02.12
The notion of graduate attributes -a surprisingly enduring idea in Australian higher education ov... more The notion of graduate attributes -a surprisingly enduring idea in Australian higher education over the last decade or so -has been useful as a way of requiring academics and administrators to reflect seriously on the nexus between university learning and the demands that graduates will face in their subsequent professional lives. A potential danger of this movement however, is that increasingly these attributes will be thought of as discrete skills to be developed on courses, with a concomitant downgrading of the role of disciplinary content. Manifestations of such a trend are the emergence in recent years of a variety of extra-disciplinary courses such as 'professional writing' and 'critical thinking', as well as a lingering interest in the idea of generic skills testing prior to graduation (e.g., Graduate Skills Assessment test). The main argument of this paper is that if the graduate attributes idea is to continue to be a useful one in the framing of university curricula, it is important that effective ways are found to integrate the development of these attributes within the context of the disciplines. We outline one such method -a possible framework for the analysis and creation of assessment tasks -which, we think, has general applicability to learning in any disciplinary setting. The key element of this framework is the notion of 'role' -which can be used to explore with students (and also confer on them) a range of academic and professional identities.
Books by Tim Moore
This book clarifies the idea of critical thinking by investigating the 'critical' practices of ... more This book clarifies the idea of critical thinking by investigating the 'critical' practices of academics across a range of disciplines. Drawing on key theorists - Wittgenstein, Geertz, Williams, Halliday - and using a 'textographic' approach, the book explores how the concept of critical thinking is understood by academics and also how it is constructed discursively in the texts and practices they employ in their teaching.
Selected essays and Commentary by Tim Moore
Crikey , 2024
Hard news headlines are often constructed around three key features. Sky News frequently trashes ... more Hard news headlines are often constructed around three key features. Sky News frequently trashes these conventions
The Saturday Paper, 2023
The power of vice chancellors and their empires of managers and administrators are hurting univer... more The power of vice chancellors and their empires of managers and administrators are hurting universities' abilities to provide their core service - education.
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Selected papers by Tim Moore
Books by Tim Moore
Selected essays and Commentary by Tim Moore