Over the past decade historians and educational researchers in the UK, Australia, the USA and Canada have been devoting ever increasing energy to the systematic exploration of the learning of history at the college level. Now members of the discipline have come together to nurture and to disseminate this new scholarship of teaching and learning history. They have created an international society, a website, and an electronic newsletter that should be of interest to those in other disciplines who are concerned (...) with bringing some of the rigor they honor in traditional research to the problems they face in the classroom. (shrink)

In order to write successfully, students need to understand what it is they are expected to write, why it is written in a particular way and the form that the final text should take. Linguistics research indicates that the ubiquitous essay and report conceal significant disciplinary variation. Educational research reveals variation with regard to assessment and marking of written work within disciplines, between lecturers, across departments, nationally and internationally. We present an interdisciplinary, genre-based model that we have piloted and tested (...) in History at the University of Portsmouth. Our aim is to bring disciplinary, applied linguistic and academic skills expertise to the point where students are taught to write particular assignments. We offer the model for testing in other genres, disciplines and institutions. (shrink)