Abstract

Abstract This study draws on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), particularly semantic gravity waving, as a strategy for academic literacies practitioners to conceptualise how knowledge in their field might be organised and presented. Students can be guided to notice meanings related to context-dependency at the discourse and lexico-grammatical levels through the presentation of semantic gravity waving profiles. For this study, semantic gravity waving profiles have been found useful for explaining the rationale of a genre pedagogy approach, the structure of an Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion (IMRD) genre, and teaching both lexical coherence for a theoretical framework section, and accurate use of determiners with non-count abstract nouns such as “research”. Therefore, semantic gravity profiling seems to provide explanatory power as a pedagogical tool in the classroom. Findings from a mixed method survey with sixty students as well as extracts from student texts before and after semantic gravity waving profile pedagogical interventions are provided.

Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call