Fostering Interdisciplinary Skills in Doctoral Students From Across the Disciplines on an English for Special Academic Purposes (ESAP) Course

Abstract

Universities have increasingly placed interdisciplinarity at the heart of their mission statements (Bridle et al., 2013). Yet, despite its integration into postgraduate programmes, research projects, conferences and workshops, the realisation of the interdisciplinary agenda can be problematic (Murdoch, 1992). In part, this is due to the continued focus on disciplinary socialisation at the postgraduate level (Holley, 2017), meaning that doctoral students are often unaware of what other disciplines do; lack experience of working or communicating with those outside their field; and might have a reluctance or lack of confidence to do so. Additionally, while collaboration and communication across the disciplines are deemed central to interdisciplinary endeavour, there is little guidance on how this can be encouraged at the doctoral level. These issues are evident in the English for Special Academic Purposes (ESAP) classroom which often requires doctoral students from diverse disciplines to work together. To address these problems, this paper will describe a tool designed for use in the doctoral ESAP classroom at a European university. The tool adapted elements of Karl Maton’s (2013) Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) to help raise awareness of how to communicate with those outside the student’s own (narrow) field. The paper evaluates this tool through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of post-course evaluations. In doing so, it highlights how the tool helps students see how they can adapt their contextualised knowledge and specific disciplinary language to their audience. One key advantage of the tool is that it enables students to retain discipline identity whilst giving them a means to appreciate non-disciplinary perspectives (Lattuca et al., 2013) or find common ground (Repko, 2008) or discipline interdependencies (Ashby & Exter, 2019), competencies recognised as key for interdisciplinary success.