Disciplinary Discourses Research Articles

Marginality, Canonicity, Passion. Edited by Marco Formisano and Christina Shuttleworth Kraus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. vi+364.

Marginality, Canonicity, Passion. Edited by Marco Formisano and Christina Shuttleworth Kraus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. vi+364.

Translanguaging and Multilingual Academic Literacies: How Do We Translate That into French? Should We? Pour en faire quoi ? (et pourquoi s'en faire?)

Translanguaging has become an inescapable notion in the anglophone literature on multilingual education. Questions thus arise as to whether and how it should be imported into francophone educational discourse, which has developed parallel vocabularies and orientations. The stakes are not only terminological — how to import a notion with ill-defined contours from one discursive universe to another — but pedagogical and political: what value could be added by the notion of translanguaging, either translated or borrowed as is, not only in addressing the needs of plurilingual writers who, like francophone educators, must reconceptualize English disciplinary discourses in another language, but also in creating more equitable conditions for the circulation of ideas across linguistic and national lines? To tackle these questions, this paper draws on two sources of insight: strategies for cross-lingual mediation developed in translationand terminology studies, and lessons from the import of literacy into francophone discourse in the 1990s and 2000s. Existing uses and translations of translanguaging are then reviewed, and new translation equivalents proposed to render and clarify the multiple meanings of translanguaging and operationalize the notion in French. In keeping with a translanguaging approach, the paper translanguages about translanguaging, deepening our understanding of it through more than one linguistic lens.
 Keywords: Translanguaging, translation and writing pedagogy, multilingual terminology, multilingual academic literacies, crosslingual reading and composing, international circulation of ideas
 

Globalization, Cosmopolitanism and 21st Century Populism

The contemporary debate on 21st century populism centres on a term (“populism”) that can be flled with multiple meanings. It provides the social sciences with a “meta-concept” that offers coherence to disciplinary discourses. In the 21st century, globalization and cosmopolitanism are often viewed as an irresistible force by intellectuals, with advocacy of cosmopolitanism becoming commonplace. For the most part, the academic community has only belatedly and reluctantly decided to address the electoral success of political parties that reject the political consensus of the post-1989 “New World Order”. In sharp contrast to the intellectuals’ stance, the empirical evidence suggests that it is localism (and not cosmopolitanism) that has been on the rise in recent decades. Glocalization is connected to the formation of varied collective responses and representations, thereby giving rise to the mutually defined pair of cosmopolitanism and localism. The cosmopolitanism–localism binary relationship is a result (or outcome) of glocalization. However, the majority of social-scientifc perspectives do not give proper consideration to the notion of “local”. The notions of localization and de-globalization as part of post-Great Recession trends are discussed. The extent to which these can rectify shortcomings in current theorizing is explored.

On ‘Crisis’ and the pessimism of disciplinary discourse in foreign languages: An Australian perspective


 This article investigates how the disciplinary discourse on the contemporary state of foreign languages in universities hastily refers to these disciplines as being in ‘crisis’. This practice is nearly as old as the Humanities itself, and has been employed periodically since at least the 1940s. Despite a period of increasing foreign language enrolment in the first decade of the twenty-first century in Australia, calls of ‘crisis’ came from across the languages sector. In tracing the use of the term ‘crisis’, we show how the sector has long been characterised by such alarmist terminology, even when reality suggests otherwise. The article traces this usage in the recent disciplinary discourse in foreign languages. A topical report of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, which shows increased language enrolment over the period 2002-11, leads one to believe that things at universities may not be as bad as first thought. This finding has implications for language enrolments not just in Australia, but around the world.

Learning progressions: framing and designing coherent sequences for STEM education

The coupled influences of scholarship in the fields of Psychology, Philosophy, and Pedagogy beginning in the 1950s, set in motion the emergence of new images, methodological perspectives, theories, and design principles about learners and learning. Advances in cognitive and sociocultural psychology, shifting images of the nature of science, recognition of the importance of disciplinary discourse practices in learning, the scaffolding of learning by tools and technologies, along with the adoption of ‘assessment for learning’ instructional strategies are among the factors that have led researchers and practitioners to advance positions that learning ought to be coordinated and sequenced along conceptual trajectories, developmental corridors, and learning progressions (LP). Following opening Introduction and LP Research Framework sections that provide an overview of the runup to LP research and development, I then turn to future research discussions and implications targeting five LP domains: Using Knowledge with Scientific Practices; Instructional Pathways – Early Childhood Learning; Teaching Experiments – Science and Mathematics; Upper/Lower Anchors for Measuring Progress; and Concepts & Practices. The Conclusion section points to overarching challenges for researchers, planners, and teachers in STEM education. There is much to learn for all!

Disciplinary Literacy: From Infusion to Hybridity

This article argues that for disciplinary literacy to be addressed successfully by subject-area teachers and students, it needs to choose a different path than the one it has been on. It explains how the road disciplinary literacy has traveled to date has been marked by justifiable subject-area teacher resistance to requirements to infuse literacy teaching and learning strategies into their teaching without regard for disciplinary epistemologies or local perspectives. It argues for an alternative approach that immerses literacy experts in the hybridity of classroom disciplinary learning spaces with respect for literacy and disciplinary discourses as well as school and community subcultural beliefs, practices, and resources. It examines the ways such hybridity has been addressed by disciplinary literacy researchers in the Journal of Literacy Research to date, and it offers recommendations for advancing research, practice, and policy.

“Reading Is Important,” but “I Don't Read”: Undergraduates’ Experiences With Academic Reading

AbstractQualitative data analysis from open‐ended comments written by 206 undergraduates illustrates student attitudes, beliefs, and practices that reveal an academic reading paradox. Consistently, undergraduates report that reading is valuable, yet their noncompliance with reading assignments suggests otherwise. Undergraduates report that they achieve their academic goals with little reading and that they perceive reading as too voluminous and irrelevant to class outcomes. The data highlight a misalignment between conventional academic expectations that undergraduates will read in scholarly ways and their actual academic reading practice. Qualitative analysis illustrates that students do not experience academic reading as a venue for scholarly engagement in disciplinary discourse. Whereas the academic reading literature proposes that students develop along a continuum from novice to expert reader, findings suggest that the undergraduate experience of academic reading is not representative of that continuum.

Change of style, change of mind: lawyers’ writing manners

AbstractThis paper explores the relationship between style and epistemology as regards the discipline of law – especially in the Romanistic tradition – and, more specifically, its resistance to interdisciplinarity. Drawing on literary theory and discourse analysis literature, the first part of this paper examines the notion of ‘style’ in relation to academic disciplines. It argues that the variety of writing styles reflects the various epistemologies underlying the different disciplinary discourses and makes interdisciplinarity difficult to implement in general. The second part of this study borrows Roland Barthes's distinction between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts in order to show that lawyers’ writing manners hinder the ability of law to connect with other disciplines. Against the background of the two sections, this contribution will finally include a discussion on what could be done to enhance law(yers)’s capability for interdisciplinary thinking, concluding that style might be not so insignificant a place to start with.

Fashion’s Measure: Preaching, Chronicle-Writing, and the New Look of the 1340s

The clothes sported by young Italian men in the 1340s—tunics cropped at the pelvis, slouchy hoods, large bags hanging from metallic belts—were as daring as their emergence was sudden and mysterious. Scholars have generally associated their appearance with Italy’s rampant mercantilism and even regarded them as the first occurrence of fashion; yet, as this essay notices, their descriptions mostly draw from the language of size, thus encouraging the exploration of fashion as a metric construct. Reading chronicles of late medieval tailoring through measuring practices help us identify the “new look” of the 1340s as a product of the communes, the governments of the Italian city-states, which carefully controlled both the production of clothes and the application of standards. By inserting tailoring within the cities' disciplinary procedures and discourses, this essay reveals the overlooked activism of the preaching orders who, in their roles as chroniclers, moral arbiters, advisors to law-makers and, especially, measurement checkers, established size as the perceptual filter for determining the respectability of clothing.

Multidisciplinary Discourses in an engineering design-based science curricular unit

To promote rich discourse around scientific and engineering practices, teachers may turn to engineering design-based science curricula; however, this has discursive demands which have yet to be examined in a unit focused on integration of engineering and science. To investigate these discursive demands, we expand on the definition of discourse to include the ways of knowing, doing, talking, reading, writing, and context within science and engineering—and refer to these as disciplinary Discourses. The following major research question guided this study: how are multiple Discourses enacted by both the teacher during whole class discussions and students in small groups in an engineering design-based curricular unit? In this descriptive case study, we investigated these disciplinary Discourses in a design-based unit that focused on integration of engineering into a sixth-grade genetics unit through whole-class videos and audio recordings of a target student group. Our findings suggest that while the Discourses present in whole class discussions often reflected the focus of the daily lesson, this unit creates a space for multidisciplinary Discourse to emerge between science and engineering. Also, this teacher merged everyday and more technical disciplinary Discourses to scaffold the students’ understanding. Finally, we observed multidisciplinary Discourses between science and engineering emerge in our student group, suggesting that students can successfully integrate the two disciplines. This study therefore begins to investigate the disciplinary Discourses present in a design-based curricular unit and specifically multidisciplinary Discourses that may enhance students’ understanding of both science and engineering.

An investigation of the relationship between academic numeracy of university students in South Africa and their mathematical and language ability

In South Africa many school-leavers are underprepared for higher education, especially in academic literacies, including numeracy. It is important for higher education to identify the students most vulnerable to failure in coping with the numeracy demands of the curriculum, so that resources available for interventions can be most fairly used. To this end, we seek to answer the question: ‘What is the relationship between students’ academic numeracy and their mathematical and language competence.’ We investigate the relationship between students’ academic numeracy scores (on a test reflecting the expectations of higher education) and their writing of four school-leaving examinations that reflect most directly mathematical competence and language ability. In a sample of 7464 students, only 13% had numeracy test scores that were classified as proficient, almost all of whom had studied Mathematics and English Home Language. Almost 90% of those who took Mathematical Literacy and English First Additional Language achieved scores in the lowest category. Comparing the test score distributions of groups of students defined in terms of the mathematics and language school subject combinations, reveals that mathematics competence and language ability are equally related to students’ academic numeracy. The results indicate the need for curriculum reforms in schools and in higher education. Ideally, development of students’ academic numeracy should be infused in the teaching of the disciplinary discourses. The effectiveness of interventions intended to improve academic numeracy will be enhanced if they focus not only on quantitative competence but also on language development.

Academic Success: a student’s guide to studying at university

Aimed at students with limited experience of the culture and conventions of English-speaking universities, this book introduces readers to a wide range of academic communicative practices. It assumes no prior knowledge or experience of the (mostly) unwritten behaviours, attitudes and values required for academic success and provides a comprehensive breakdown of these, clarified throughout with examples, explanations and practical guidance.The book’s scope is broad, rather than deep, and therefore represents a useful and pragmatic introductory text for any student preparing for a transition or return to higher education. The text is underpinned throughout by two recurring themes that are directly transferable into LD practice. The idea that academic knowledge is developed and communicated via debate and argument is directly linked to the notion of ‘academic apprenticeship’ in which students are encouraged to begin participation in active and current disciplinary discourse.

Co-redefining and co-creating Academic literacies in PhD education

Our presentation discusses the practices and findings from a PhD workshop series at the Academic Resource Centre, Umeå University Library, Sweden. The partnership between librarians, writing tutors/researchers in supporting PhD research has recently become a new reality with Information Literacy courses offered as tools for resources and searching (Hassani, 2015; Paasio & Hintikka, 2015; Garson,2016). The insights from our course contribute to this literature by re-conceptualizing “academic literacy”, including Information Literacy, in doctoral education.
 Adopting Academic Literacies (Lea & Street, 1998, 2006) as our workshops’ underlying framework, we propose literacy beyond individual, transferable cognitive skills of writing and reading. Rather, it is an interrelated, dynamic, and situated set of knowledge, skills, and personal attributes that help PhD students acculturate into disciplinary discourses, the academic community, and wider social contexts.
 Our course approaches literacy holistically as comprising Research competence, Information literacy, and Academic English, with consideration to social processes (power, identity, and authority). The workshops cover critical reading, the literature review, writing abstract, communicating research and writing papers, but the PhD students are also encouraged to make sense of their writing by having critical, inquiry-based reflections about themselves, academia, and social discourses.
 The results from the first three workshop seasons emphasize knowledge co-creation – between academic librarians and researchers, and between workshop instructors and PhD students, as one key principle in developing academic literacies. The findings indicate that Information Literacy can be seen beyond tools and resources but rather a springboard that stimulates PhD students’ critical thinking in their becoming researchers. The positive feedback from the participants also gives the rationale for the expanding roles of the library (Delaney and Bates, 2018). These workshops have strengthened our belief that collaboration is one important strategy for librarians and writing tutors/researchers to acquire the skills of the future.
 Authors
 Mai Trang Vu, PhD, works at the Academic Resource Centre, Umeå University Library, and Department of Language Studies, Umeå University, Sweden, trang.vu@umu.se.
 Magnus Olsson, Academic Librarian, Academic Resource Centre, Umeå University Library, Sweden, magnus.olsson@umu.se.
 
 References
 Delaney, Geraldine, & Bates, Jessica. (2018). How Can the University Library Better Meet the Information Needs of Research Students? Experiences from Ulster University. New Review of Academic Librarianship, 24(1), 63-89.
 Garson, D. S. (2016). Doctoral students becoming researchers: An innovative curriculum. Nordic Journal of Information Literacy in Higher Education, 8(1).
 Hassani, A. E. (2015). The role of Information Literacy in higher education: An initiative at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco. Nordic Journal of Information Literacy in Higher Education, 7(1).
 Lea, M. & Street, B. (1998). Student writing in higher education: An academic literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education, 23(2), 157–72.
 Lea, M. & Street, B. (2006). The ‘Academic literacies’ model: Theory and applications. Theory into Practice, 45(4), 368–77.
 Paasio, A-L, Hintikka, K. (2015). An Information Literacy course for doctoral students: Information resources and tools for research. Nordic Journal of Information Literacy in Higher Education, 7(1).

Context and text in scientific disciplines of English

Abstract As major world languages – Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese, for instance – become the medium of university networks, it may be the right time to take stock of the influence that English has had over the way the disciplines of humanities and sciences have been shaped, directed and evaluated, in particular in the second half of the 20th century. This paper is an attempt to understand some of the textual, linguistic and historical determinants of Disciplinary English (DE) specifically in the spectrum of technical subjects. DE is now a way of meaning which has become associated with objective authority. From this association, DE has shaped our disciplinary knowledge and spread across to registers of bureaucratic and political subject matter. The discussion also considers innovative potential in disciplinary discourses, in particular what Halliday regarded as the “knight’s move” in text: this is the related, analogical effect of Hasan’s “symbolic articulation” in verbal art and grammatical metaphor in the language of technical disciplines.

The language of educational linguistics in Hispanic Latin America

AbstractThis study aims to identify patterns of the system ofthemein Spanish in 28 educational linguistics’ articles, an emerging field in Latin America. Results show a high number of textual and elaborated interpersonal Themes (especially in Conclusions), alongside a frequent choice of marked Themes (especially in Introductions) which adjust thematic strings, while the Subject is usually explicit and previous to the verb. Educationally-oriented articles tend to use more interpersonal Themes and preposed explicit Subjects, in what seems to be a disciplinary validation struggle. This research can help understand the construction of a new disciplinary discourse, connecting semantic and lexicogrammatical patterns to epistemological frameworks, while providing evidence to the realization of Theme and Subject across stages, disciplines and languages.

Views on education for sustainable development (ESD) among lecturers in UK MSc taught courses

PurposeIn the new Sustainability 2.0 era of education for sustainable development (ESD) transforming, curriculum remains a high interest topic, including in the UK. Among influential factors for progress, lecturer views on sustainable development and ESD in curriculum are important. In particular, the relationship between espoused views on sustainability and development and these views institutionalized into the curriculum require further investigation. Existing qualitative interview studies of lecturers identify a range of views about sustainable development and ESD but rarely focus on postgraduate environments nor use thematic discourse analysis.Design/methodology/approachThis active interview study enrolled a cohort of academics (n= 21) teaching into ten postgraduate UK taught masters degrees. Using active interviews and thematic discourse analysis, this study focused lecturer accounts of translating sustainable development into ESD, student attitudes and characteristics and course nature and content in relation to institutional, disciplinary, personal and other drivers and discourses. Thematic discourse analysis and NVivo 12 the study identified themes and discourses arising from the interview accounts.FindingsIn addition to identifying echoes of previously identified themes, this study focuses on the influence of interviewer–interviewee interaction and the interrelated nature of themes developed from 972 substantive codes. These themes identify the key influences as institutional, personal and disciplinary perspectives, institutional contrasts and tensions; pragmatic and passionate student characteristics; flexible sustainability principles and definitions; and social and personal ethics, ideology and equity, as key factors. Despite varying in length and depth, interviewees all show a deep appreciation for the challenges of defining and teaching sustainable development in complex institutional circumstances.Practical implicationsFaculty accounts of sustainable development and ESD practice depend on personal ethics and experiences, disciplinary discourses and institutional drivers and arrangements. Rather than focusing on simple categorizations of views in abstract, progress toward transformational ESD should acknowledge the need for dialogue about the importance of a plurality of views and discourses.Originality/valueThematic discourse analysis of a multi-institutional cohort affords closer analysis of contextual institutional and identity factors influencing approaches to HESD. Academic views cannot be easily subcategorized into broad conservative or radical positions. Final discussion of the relevance of institutional theory to sustainability change is also new.

Teacher Targets: A model for CLIL and ELF teacher education in polytechnic settings

Author/s
 Carmen Sancho GuindaUniversidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
 
 ABSTRACT
 The objective of this paper is to present an alternative model for CLIL/ELF teacher education, called the Teacher Target Model, which may help hard-science teachers undertake English-medium instruction more efficiently. Conceived as a visual educational trope for changing mentalities and practices, it derives from the needs analysis of a group of polytechnic teachers who have participated in the cycles of in-service training seminars given at the Polytechnic University of Madrid since 2009. Their notions, impressions, and video-recorded performances reveal that in general they hold a monolithic conception of classroom interactions and teaching procedures, with an ensuing impoverishment of genre and language repertoires. To bridge this gap, the model proposed here cross-weaves five discursive strands converging in university lectures, namely disciplinary discourse, (meta)discourse of the medium, embedded genres, lecture phase, and teaching style, thus fostering natural communication beyond the delivery of technical content and bringing ELF instruction closer to the CLIL dynamics.

Linguistic and Epistemology Challenges in Research Writing: An Exploratory Study of Chinese Graduate Students’ Academic Writing Experiences

The purpose of this grounded theory study was to examine the difficulties faced and strategies used by Chinese graduate students with English academic writing at an American university. Eight graduate students majoring in humanities and social sciences at different stages of their graduate studies were interviewed. The interview data illustrated the types of difficulties that these students encountered and the types of coping strategies they used in the process of adapting to the requirement of specific disciplinary written discourses. Difficulties and problems varied across the curriculum and the individuals. Some common problems included insufficient linguistic knowledge, being unfamiliar with academic writing conventions and gaps in the epistemological assumptions between U.S. and China’s academia. One of the biggest gaps is lack of critical thinking skills among Chinese students and different attitudes towards verification in writing. These difficulties and problems reflect the complexity of writing as a socially constructed activity that requires necessary linguistic knowledge as well as familiarization with cultural models, i.e., ways of thinking, believing and valuing that are associated with the disciplinary discourses. The results of the study suggest that this group of Chinese graduate students had received limited training in English academic writing before they came to U.S and they brought with them to the U.S. classrooms writing experiences that at times differ from the writing conventions of the American academia and, therefore, need assistance in order to successfully adjust to the new academic environment. This study also showed that there is not enough social help for those international graduate students. For most of them, adjusting to the U.S. academic written discourse is mainly a trial-and-error process. Therefore efficient social help from the peers, professors and curriculum is needed.

The Research Potential of Cultural Policy in the Structure of Disciplinary Discourses

The Research Potential of Cultural Policy in the Structure of Disciplinary Discourses

Constructing knowledge and identity in a professionally-oriented discipline

AbstractCentral to rhetorical genre theory is the notion of ‘rhetorical situation’ (Bitzer, 1968), which emphasizes context as sociohistorically situated. In the analysis of academic genres, this notion helps us to think of the contexts that genres respond to as dynamic, varying across time and space, rather than as stable and unified disciplinary discourse communities. From this social perspective, academic disciplines are theorized as including a great number and range of rhetorical situations (Paré, 2014), and the idea of genre variation becomes of increasing scholarly interest. In this study, rhetorical genre theory and the concept of ‘rhetorical situation’ provide a framing for the analysis of a recurrent discursive event. The event is the design studio ‘crit’, a weekly presentation and review of students’ in-progress design ideas and artifacts, through which the teaching and learning of architectural design is enacted in the academy. In a professionally-oriented discipline such as architecture, curriculum genres often need to negotiate tensions between the academy and the profession. Applied to such settings, a rhetorical genre approach invites us to think about whose values and knowledge dominate, and who has the authority to adapt the genre to suit its changing needs. This paper reports on interviews with five design teachers (one senior academic and four professional practitioners). The interviews reveal how the teachers take up the crit genre in diverse ways, including what counts as knowledge and competence in the design studio and how this knowledge is best taught, learnt and assessed. The paper concludes that students would benefit from a genre pedagogy that focuses on genre variation, its sources and its consequences, as well as genre conventionality.