Abstract
Subject specialists’ knowledge of academic and disciplinary literacy is often tacit. We tackle the issue of how to elicit subject specialists’ tacit knowledge in order to develop their pedagogical practices and enable them to communicate this knowledge to students. Drawing on theories of genre and metacognition, a professional development activity was designed and delivered. Our aims were to (1) build participants’ genre knowledge and (2) scaffold metacognitive awareness of how genre knowledge can enhance their pedagogical practices. The findings reveal that participants built a genre-based understanding of academic literacy and that the tasks provided them with an accessible framework to articulate and reflect upon their knowledge of disciplinary literacy. Participants gained metacognitive awareness of misalignments between what they teach and what they expect from students, their assumptions about students’ prior learning and genre-based strategies to adapt their practice to students’ needs. Our approach provides a theoretically grounded professional development tool for the HE sector.
Highlights
This is something that my colleagues and I often talk about - why don’t students write well (...) but other than sending them to our Writing Centre we rarely do anything about this. (P10)Higher Education (2019) 78:835–853This quote from our data encapsulates the pressing issue that we tackle in this paper: the role of subject specialists in students’ academic literacy development. literacy is integral to academic success (Sala-Bubaré and Castelló 2017), the expectation that students arrive at university equipped with the necessary skills, or that these skills will develop implicitly, still persists (Dysthe 2002)
The situatedness of academic discourse (Hyland 2004) means that academic literacy development must be tied to disciplinary literacy (Paxton and Frith 2014)—the ‘knowledge and abilities possessed by those who create, communicate, and use knowledge within disciplines’ (Shanahan and Shanahan 2012, p. 8)—and foregrounds the role of subject specialists in facilitating or expediting literacy development
The findings show that genre theory can help subject specialists build an understanding of academic literacy, while metacognitive training provides an opportunity to articulate and reflect upon their tacit disciplinary knowledge and practice, enabling them to apply their insights to courses
Summary
This is something that my colleagues and I often talk about - why don’t students write well (...) but other than sending them to our Writing Centre we rarely do anything about this. (P10)Higher Education (2019) 78:835–853This quote from our data encapsulates the pressing issue that we tackle in this paper: the role of subject specialists in students’ academic literacy development. literacy is integral to academic success (Sala-Bubaré and Castelló 2017), the expectation that students arrive at university equipped with the necessary skills, or that these skills will develop implicitly, still persists (Dysthe 2002). 8)—and foregrounds the role of subject specialists in facilitating or expediting literacy development. This development—in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), and in writing and skills centres working with other academic languages—has historically been somewhat detached from disciplines. Johns (1997) highlighted this decontextualisation, arguing that academic literacy development should not be the sole purview of EAP specialists, encouraging ‘all faculty to take responsibility for student literacy growth’ A shift is required in subject specialists’ perceptions about what academic literacy is and who is responsible for its development
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