LANGTCHG 715
Developing Academic Literacy
Please note: this is archived course information from 2017 for LANGTCHG 715.
Description
Developing academic literacy skills involves building knowledge and skill in three main areas: technical aspects (eg, summarising, paraphrasing, sentence and paragraph level word choices, frequently used language patterns); disciplinary components (eg, how texts are constructed in your particular subject area); and critical components (eg, issues of access, power, identity and social practices). While all three will feature in LANGTCHG 715, the main focus of the course will be to further develop the language and genre-based skills that you will need to comprehend, organise and produce particular types of texts in your graduate studies.
The course is organised around these important academic genres: evaluative texts (eg, academic essays and reviews) and research reports (eg, library research reports in essays, and empirical reports in theses and dissertations). There is a particular focus on the various kinds of metadiscourse strategies that writers use to organise information coherently and convincingly in the text, and to convey the writer’s own perspective through the use of strategies such as hedges, boosters and attitude markers. We also look at what corpus-based analyses reveal about language use in particular disciplinary areas.
Class sessions will include discussion of course readings, explicit instruction about the genre, analysis of sample texts and the type of language typically used, and a number of practice tasks for individual and group work. There will be three assignments. All course materials can be found in a text produced specifically for the course (that many students over the years have reported using as a handy reference tool when preparing course assignments or theses). Course readings are available through Talis.
Availability 2017
Semester 2
Lecturer(s)
Coordinator(s) Dr Rosemary Wette
Points
LANGTCHG 715: 15 points
