This study reports on a four-year project to embed academic literacy within one core course of a Bachelor of Education program. It involves an interdisciplinary collaboration between learning advisors, as literacy specialists, and lecturers, as subject specialists. It examines their roles and responsibilities and lecturers' perspectives when handing over the teaching of academic literacy to them. Data encompasses interviews with lecturers, meeting notes, and cohort statistics about assessment grades. Discourse analysis with theory from Systemic Functional Linguistics identifies the shifting contributions of the collaborators and how lecturers evaluate their experiences. Findings suggest that handover is smooth when it is done gradually and involves intensive prior collaboration. However, the contrasting views of the lecturers raise questions about what is optimal for students. Although limited, data indicates that reductions in resubmission rates and students achieving in the minimal passing range cooccur with the addition of mini videos about reading and writing critically.
What does it mean to know a word? When asked this question, students often appear flummoxed, lacking either the metalanguage or linguistic knowledge to articulate an insightful response. This paper argues that lexical awareness, coupled with an extensive vocabulary, are essential components of the multiple academic literacies required of students. In order to support students' vocabulary acquisition and understanding, workshops, designed to introduce participants to the workings of English language and to promote autonomy in tertiary students. Each two-hour EASI workshop is divided into five discrete sessions: grammar, vocabulary, punctuation, pronunciation, and conversation skills. Using Nation's (2001) framework, we take as our point of departure the tripartite structure of form, meaning and usage. Under the heading of form, the main focus is on parts of speech and morphology (derivational roots and affixes).Under the heading of meaning, the programme first considers denotative and connotative meanings, touching on notions of concept development, and then moves on to explore sense relations. Under the heading of usage, our approach is informed by recent developments in corpus linguistics that yield frequency information, leading to resources such as Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List. From a discipline perspective, it is clear that a strong sensitivity to vocabulary within a given academic discourse is fundamental to academic literacies development at tertiary level. Also included under the heading of usage are syntactic and lexico-grammatical considerations such as collocation and colligation. This paper will outline the theoretical approach taken in developing the vocabulary component of the EASI programme and report on two iterations of delivery: the original teaching session and subsequent revisions based on feedback from both students and the teaching team.
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