Entering a disciplinary community: Conceptual activities required to write for one introductory university course

Abstract

Although previous research in both first and second language composition has called for the examination of the various intellectual or conceptual activities required for university content courses, this call has gone largely unanswered. This article presents the results of a study of one introductory university course in Organizational Behaviour, a subcommunity or “forum” within the academic community of business studies. It analyzes the conceptual activities the students were required to carry out in order to write their weekly assignments and shows how these activities determined the nature of the expected discourse. The article argues that learning how to carry out such activities can be profitably transferred from the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classroom to university content classes. It suggests that nonnative-speaking (NNS) students can use these activities to explore their own disciplinary communities and thus facilitate their initiation into those communities. The results of this study also offer important implications for first and second language writing pedagogy as well as for course design and teaching assistant (TA) preparation in academic content classes.