Developing disciplinary discourse in a first-year engineering course: The DELNA initiative

First-year students in higher education settings tend to face ongoing challenges with variations in discursive practices and genres within their discipline. Within this context, a Diagnostic English Language Needs Assessment (DELNA) was administered to first-year engineering students to assess the strengths and needs of their ability to navigate academic language. The purpose of this paper is to report on our initiative to support student’s development of academic literacy, specifically their disciplinary language proficiency through the implementation of pedagogical support activities.

Frequency and distribution of the units of general scientific (academic) lexicon as the markers of disciplinary affiliation of a discourse

This article is dedicated to a corpus-based research of functionality of the units of general scientific (academic) lexicon in various types of disciplinary discourse, the purpose of which lies in verification of a hypothesis on a special function of the academic lexicon to indicate disciplinary affiliation of the scientific text. In the era of increasing mathematization and digitalization of scientific knowledge, corpus linguistics becomes a paramount instrument of empirical research aimed at acquisition of knowledge on the language through quantitative and qualitative analysis of compilations of texts, the scope and subject of which can be set in accordance with the specific objectives of the scholar. Special role in corpus-based research is assigned to the methods of statistical analysis for effective processing of the obtained quantitative data on linguistic realias, thereby considering linguistic research equivalent to the research of exact and natural sciences by degree of verification. The article describes the fragment of comprehensive research on functionality of the general scientific lexicon, which using the statistical method of correlation analysis on the example of more than 100 general scientific words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs) established correlation between frequency and distribution of the units of general scientific lexicon and the type of disciplinary discourse. The scientific novelty lies in the holistic approach towards analyzing the characteristic features of distribution of the frequency of general scientific lexical units in 8 types of disciplinary discourse, as well as in in application of the methods of descriptive and mathematical statistics that demonstrate that academic lexicon same as terminological lexicon may serve as marker of disciplinary affiliation of the discourse.

Metalanguage within disciplinary discourse for scientific research programs: Invitation to a debate

Modern economic science is experiencing difficulties in solving theoretical and practical problems, including its inability to predict future economic crises, and, after their onset, the effective ways to overcome them. This is largely due to the fact that representatives of different theories have different assessments of the ongoing processes in the economy and offer essentially different and often mutually exclusive ways to solve economic problems. The search for a common language and ways to unite the efforts of economists in achieving social progress is on the agenda. The paper addresses the possibilities of productive interaction between scientific programs in economics via mutual enrichment of ideas, and shows what role metalanguage plays in this process. It claims that metalanguage will allow representatives of various research programs to form a realistic view of each other’s concepts, and not to criticize the caricatures of their opponents’ theories.

Pomp and Circumstances: From Research, in Practice, for Students

Circumstances are powerful grammatical tools for representing precision and specificity in the clause, and they add contextual factors necessary for nuanced disciplinary discourse. This type of detail expressed through circumstances is significant in academic discourse, yet it is often neglected in favor of attention to participants and processes. Drawing on our experiences teaching embedded, discipline-specific EAP to multilingual students at Vantage College at the University of British Columbia, we demonstrate how circumstances, and more broadly circumstantiation, generate crucial insights for both comprehension of complex academic materials and generation of student texts. We also show how circumstances are useful grammatical concepts for working across the metafunctions and ranks in multiple ways: transitivity analyses of circumstance types within disciplinary texts, for example, highlight the relationship between their deployment and genre and stage variations. Probe questions provide a pedagogical lens to see detail and context in critical reading and writing. Circumstances support organization by building Theme patterns through the strategic use of marked topical Themes, and convey interpersonal evaluation in academically appropriate ways. Finally, connecting circumstances to broader circumstantial meanings provides a powerful mechanism for paraphrasing with grammatical metaphor. All through our analyses and materials, we illustrate how explicit instruction in circumstances adds to students’ linguistic and analytical repertoires and facilitates powerful insight for how circumstantial information contributes to academic discourse and knowledge-building.

Writing About the Self as a Vital Component of Preparing Doctoral Students to Write for Research and Publication

Although many faculty express concern about the writing ability of doctoral students, research on writing instruction at the graduate level in the social sciences has not been given sustained attention and, consequently, tends to be disjointed in scope and focus. Thus, this chapter synthesizes research over writing instruction with doctoral students to identify trends in approaches and methods that help students become “insiders” as researcher—writers in a disciplinary discourse community. Framing scholarly writing through an introspection-exposition continuum, the chapter explores ways to support doctoral students' development of a writing identity as scholars. Three techniques of narrative, montage, and vignette writing are described as ways to cultivate students' authorial voice, dispositions, and habits of mind as scholarly writers.

“A 15% Reduction in Physical Inactivity Will Be Achieved in Australasia by 2030”—Audience Votes Negative in Online Debate

The Australasian Society for Physical Activity aims to advance the science and practice of physical activity in Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. Fun, enjoyment, and cross-disciplinary discourse are important to ensure the network of physical activity professionals and our collective voice continues to grow. In May 2021, Australasian Society for Physical Activity’s Early Career Network curated an engaging online Physical Activity Debate attended by 206 professionals. This commentary provides a synopsis of the debate and the central arguments presented by the affirmative and negatives teams. The authors describe the debate format and interactive design of the online Physical Activity Debate to provide insights for future online events that aim to boost interaction among physical activity professionals from various disciplines.

Adapting to a Disciplinary Discourse: A Redesigned Course for MA History Students

For most MA programs, it is common to enroll students with different BA degrees. The MA students who have changed their discipline are required to adopt a new disciplinary discourse and learn to write academic texts in line with appropriate genres and conventions. This study exemplifies an attempt to redesign the academic writing course for MA History programs at the Ural Federal University in order to ease the difficulties faced by students with non-history backgrounds. The essence of the redesign was to enhance the traditional teaching by demonstrating fundamental dissimilarities between history and other disciplines in terms of writing conventions. Teaching academic writing in that manner was supposed to facilitate students with both a history and non-history backgrounds to master the effective conventional writing of history texts. The efficiency of the redesigned course was estimated on the basis of students’ performance and feedback. This teaching practice can be of use for academic writing instructors who seek to help students from different backgrounds develop skills and competences that are necessary for a specific professional community.