This paper reports on research into the process and product of student essay writing at undergraduate level. The research was carried out from two different theoretical perspectives: phenomenonographic research on student learning in higher education, and systemic functional linguistic research on student writing in higher education. The research highlights both the qualitatively different ways that students conceive of essays and therefore approach the process of writing them, and the qualitatively different types of essays that emerge. The paper discusses the relationship between the two sets of findings, and raises some pedagogical issues for the teaching of essay writing in higher education.
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Prosser et al. (1994) studied this question.
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