Teaching and Learning Academic Discourse

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Teaching and Learning Academic Discourse

• Sangrawee Chaopricha

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Philosophy

• L. Vygotskys Learning Theory
• M. Bahktins Discourse Community
• M. Nystrands Construction of Knowledge

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L. Vygotskys Learning Theory

• Social and cultural aspects
• Zone of proximal Development
• Situated Learning and Scaffolding
• Language and dialogues
• Spontaneous and Scientific Concepts

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M. Bahktins Discourse Community

• Discourse community
• Academic Discourse
• Stratification with multivoicedness
• Interactions are intertextual

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Academic Discourse

• Socio-dialectological principle.
• Socially and culturally contingent, dynamic
• Specific conceptualization and intentional
  dimensions.
• Linguistic components and situation.

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Genre Knowledge

• Everyday genre
• Secondary genre

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Generic Stratification

• Everyday Genre
• Genre is a horizon of expectations brought to
  bear on a certain class of text types. It
  includes features of language (linguistic and
  rhetorical conventions) that knit together with
  specific points of view, approaches, forms of
  thinking, nuances and accents characteristic of
  the given genre, e.g.,oratorical, publicistic,
  jounalistic genres.

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Professional Stratification

• Secondary genre
• The language of the lawyer, the doctor, the
  public education teacher, etc.
• These sometimes coincide with and sometimes
  depart from the stratification into genres.
• They involve different terms, specific forms for
  manifesting intentions, forms for making
  conceptualization and evaluation concrete.

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Dialogue

• It is a verbal process between two different
  people or between an earlier and a later self.
• Intertextuality
• The word is half someone elses.

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Nystrands the Construction of Knowledge

• The Theory of Reciprocity
• The Contruction of knowledge is cognitive,
  contructive and communicative processes.
• Readers read on the premise of writers and
  writers write on the premise of readers.
• Semantic potentialities

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The Theory of Reciprocity

• The theory of reciprocity governs how people
  share and exchange knowledge when they
  communicate, and how they choose to present it in
  discourse.
• The fundamental motive for discourse production
  is assuring reciprocity between writer and
  reader/ speaker and listener.

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Reciprocity

• Elaboration (abbreviation and deletion) is(are) a
  communicative option(s) and strategy(ies) to
  maintain the terms of reciprocity.
• When elaboration, abbreviation or deletion at the
  levels of genre, topic, and comment is
  sufficient, writers leave readers with no
  uncertainty about the meaning of the
  communication.

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Pedagogy

• Academic discourse should be taught through
  apprenticeship format, dialogue and a socially
  situated problem solving process
• Teachers need to first analyze, identify, and
  explicitly teach students the academic
  conventions and ways of thinking process required
  in different discourse communities.

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Pedagogical Strategies

• Initiation-modeling, exploring, negotiating,
  meaning making, reading-to-write
• Enculturation- creating social milieu/tasks
  Dialogicality-collaborating, interacting, problem
  solving
• Expert-novice- scaffolding, coaching,

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Pedagogical Strategies

• Tasks-require students construction of meaning
  and knowledge.
• Empowerment- constructing a new representation of
  ideas and issues that makes new sense,
  positioning their work with authority within it,
  fading

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Research Methods

• Conference Protocols
• Stimulated Recall Interviews
• Discourse Analysis

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Further Studies

• Demystification of certain concepts
• Practices of certain pedagogical strategies in a
  classroom setting.

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Teaching and Learning Academic Discourse

• Teaching and learning academic discourse is a
  process of active cognitive reorganization and a
  process of enculturation into an academic
  community.