Accessing Academic Discourse


Book Description

Academic discourse is the gateway not only to educational success but to worlds of imagination, discovery and accumulated wisdom. Understanding the nature of academic discourse and developing ways of helping everyone access, shape and change this knowledge is critical to supporting social justice. Yet education research often ignores the forms taken by knowledge and the language through which they are expressed. This volume comprises cutting-edge work that is bringing together sociological and linguistic approaches to access academic discourse. Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is a long-established and widely known approach to understanding language. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) is a younger and rapidly growing approach to exploring and shaping knowledge practices. Now evermore research and practice are using these approaches together. This volume presents new advances from this inter-disciplinary dialogue, focusing on state-of-the-art work in SFL provoked by its productive dialogue with LCT. It showcases work by the leading lights of both approaches, including the foremost scholar of SFL and the creator of LCT. Chapters introduce key ideas from LCT, new conceptual developments in SFL, studies using both approaches, and guidelines for shaping curriculum and pedagogy to support access to academic discourse in classrooms. The book is essential reading for all appliable and educational linguists, as well as scholars and practitioners of education and sociology.




Academic Conversations


Book Description

Conversing with others has given insights to different perspectives, helped build ideas, and solve problems. Academic conversations push students to think and learn in lasting ways. Academic conversations are back-and-forth dialogues in which students focus on a topic and explore it by building, challenging, and negotiating relevant ideas. In Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings authors Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford address the challenges teachers face when trying to bring thoughtful, respectful, and focused conversations into the classroom. They identify five core communications skills needed to help students hold productive academic conversation across content areas: Elaborating and Clarifying Supporting Ideas with Evidence Building On and/or Challenging Ideas Paraphrasing Synthesizing This book shows teachers how to weave the cultivation of academic conversation skills and conversations into current teaching approaches. More specifically, it describes how to use conversations to build the following: Academic vocabulary and grammar Critical thinking skills such as persuasion, interpretation, consideration of multiple perspectives, evaluation, and application Literacy skills such as questioning, predicting, connecting to prior knowledge, and summarizing An academic classroom environment brimming with respect for others' ideas, equity of voice, engagement, and mutual support The ideas in this book stem from many hours of classroom practice, research, and video analysis across grade levels and content areas. Readers will find numerous practical activities for working on each conversation skill, crafting conversation-worthy tasks, and using conversations to teach and assess. Academic Conversations offers an in-depth approach to helping students develop into the future parents, teachers, and leaders who will collaborate to build a better world.




Systemic Functional Linguistics


Book Description

Systemic Functional Linguistics is a functional model of language inspired by the work of Saussure, Hjelmslev, Whorf, and Firth. SFL was developed by Michael Halliday and his colleagues in the 1960s and has grown into a widely studied and research field, with growing interest in China, Latin America, and North America. This new five-volume collection from Routledge focuses on the foundational papers underlying SFL theory and practice and illustrative papers that have inspired succeeding work.







Investigating Aspects of Academic Discourse


Book Description

Monografie se věnuje anglickému odbornému diskursu a zaměřuje se na několik jeho zásadních rysů. Ačkoli probírá celou řadu dílčích témat, kniha se zabývá především třemi standardy textuality, a sice intertextualitou, koherencí a informativitou. V publikaci se všechny tyto standardy protínají v globálním tématu, které je zde jedinečně uchopeno jako soubor relevantních rysů – je ztvárněno v titulech, v klíčových slovech a jejich výskytu v samotném textu a rozvíjí se v jednotlivých odborných subžánrech, tématech odstavců a dále se prohlubuje zahrnutím relevantních citací. Tato monografie se věnuje výhradně psanému odbornému diskursu. Soustavně vychází z analýzy autentických dat diskursu humanitních věd. Publikaci profilují především stylistické, textově-lingvistické a diskursní analýzy, které čerpají z celé škály relevantních teorií včetně aktuálního členění větného, čímž nepřímo ověřují jejich nosnost. Všechny kapitoly předkládají kvantitativní i kvalitativní analýzu dat, mezi těmito pohledy usilují o rovnováhu a pokoušejí se vždy o funkční interpretaci zjištění. Z epistemologického hlediska jsou všechny studie zahrnuté do této publikace pevně spjaty s funkčně strukturalistickou tradicí Pražské školy, která je přirozeně obohacena o moderní přístupy ze světové lingvistiky. This monograph deals with English academic discourse and focuses on some of its constitutive features. Although a variety of particular topics are addressed, the volume is largely centred on three standards of textuality, namely intertextuality, coherence, and informativity. In this book, all these standards meet in the Global Theme, which is grasped here uniquely as a cluster of relevant features – embodied by the titles, lists of keywords and their in-text use, and further developed through diverse academic subgenres, through paragraph themes and enhanced by integrating relevant citations. This monograph explores written academic discourse exclusively. It is firmly established on the systematic investigation of authentic data drawn from the discourse of the humanities. The book profiles stylistic, text linguistic and discourse analyses, employing a range of relevant theories, including the Functional Sentence Perspective, and thus indirectly verifying their viability. All the chapters provide quantitative as well as qualitative analyses of data, striving to achieve an appropriate balance and to interpret the findings functionally. From the epistemological viewpoint, all of the studies involved in the monograph are rooted in the Prague functionalist tradition, naturally enriched by modern approaches from world linguistics.




The Good Study Guide


Book Description

Developing your learning skills is one of the best investments you can make. We all need to be lifelong learners now. Whether you are an experienced student or just starting out this book will stimulate, guide and support you. It will make you think about yourself and how your mind learns. And it will change forever the way that you study.Topics include:- motivating yourself and managing your time- taking full advantage of your computer- reading with concentration and understanding- developing flexible note-taking strategies- getting the most from seminars and workshops- making presentations- researching online- handling numbers and charts with confidence- writing clear, well argued assignments- doing yourself justice in exams.For more information, go to www.goodstudyguide.co.uk




Knowledge and Knowers


Book Description

We live in ‘knowledge societies’ and work in ‘knowledge economies’, but accounts of social change treat knowledge as homogeneous and neutral. While knowledge should be central to educational research, it focuses on processes of knowing and condemns studies of knowledge as essentialist. This book unfolds a sophisticated theoretical framework for analysing knowledge practices: Legitimation Code Theory or ‘LCT’. By extending and integrating the influential approaches of Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein, LCT offers a practical means for overcoming knowledge-blindness without succumbing to essentialism or relativism. Through detailed studies of pressing issues in education, the book sets out the multi-dimensional conceptual toolkit of LCT and shows how it can be used in research. Chapters introduce concepts by exploring topics across the disciplinary and institutional maps of education: -how to enable cumulative learning at school and university -the unfounded popularity of ‘student-centred learning’ and constructivism -the rise and demise of British cultural studies in higher education -the positive role of canons -proclaimed ‘revolutions’ in social science -the ‘two cultures’ debate between science and humanities -how to build cumulative knowledge in research -the unpopularity of school Music -how current debates in economics and physics are creating major schisms in those fields. LCT is a rapidly growing approach to the study of education, knowledge and practice, and this landmark book is the first to systematically set out key aspects of this theory. It offers an explanatory framework for empirical research, applicable to a wide range of practices and social fields, and will be essential reading for all serious students and scholars of education and sociology.




Teacher Development for Content-Based Language Education


Book Description

This book fills a large gap in our understanding of how to prepare teachers for the challenging but increasingly popular task of integrating content and language instruction. It brings together findings on content-based teacher education from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North America in order to inform researchers and teacher educators and enable them to play a critical role in the continued success of such programs. It offers a solid grounding in theories and applications of content-based approaches with empirical studies investigating teacher identity, materials design, use of cognitive discourse functions and best practices for teacher education. Responding to the growing popularity of content-based programs and the shortage of qualified teachers for these contexts, this book promotes teacher-researcher collaboration and provides support for trainee teachers, in-service teachers and course leaders.




Assessing Academic English for Higher Education Admissions


Book Description

Assessing Academic English for Higher Education Admissions is a state-of-the-art overview of advances in theories and practices relevant to the assessment of academic English skills for higher education admissions purposes. The volume includes a brief introduction followed by four main chapters focusing on critical developments in theories and practices for assessing reading, listening, writing, and speaking, of which the latter two also address the assessment of integrated skills such as reading-writing, listening-speaking, and reading-listening-speaking. Each chapter reviews new task types, scoring approaches, and scoring technologies and their implications in light of the increasing use of technology in academic communication and the growing use of English as a lingua franca worldwide. The volume concludes with recommendations about critical areas of research and development that will help move the field forward. Assessing Academic English for Higher Education Admissions is an ideal resource for researchers and graduate students in language testing and assessment worldwide.




The Knowledge Gap


Book Description

The untold story of the root cause of America's education crisis--and the seemingly endless cycle of multigenerational poverty. It was only after years within the education reform movement that Natalie Wexler stumbled across a hidden explanation for our country's frustrating lack of progress when it comes to providing every child with a quality education. The problem wasn't one of the usual scapegoats: lazy teachers, shoddy facilities, lack of accountability. It was something no one was talking about: the elementary school curriculum's intense focus on decontextualized reading comprehension "skills" at the expense of actual knowledge. In the tradition of Dale Russakoff's The Prize and Dana Goldstein's The Teacher Wars, Wexler brings together history, research, and compelling characters to pull back the curtain on this fundamental flaw in our education system--one that fellow reformers, journalists, and policymakers have long overlooked, and of which the general public, including many parents, remains unaware. But The Knowledge Gap isn't just a story of what schools have gotten so wrong--it also follows innovative educators who are in the process of shedding their deeply ingrained habits, and describes the rewards that have come along: students who are not only excited to learn but are also acquiring the knowledge and vocabulary that will enable them to succeed. If we truly want to fix our education system and unlock the potential of our neediest children, we have no choice but to pay attention.