120225 SE MA Seminar - Focus: Applied Linguistics / Linguistics Seminar (2022S)

Aims:
1) gain knowledge in academic genre analysis, literacy studies and ELFA research
2) gain familiarity with and experience in in working with applied linguistic methods
3) gain detailed empirical insights regarding a (student) academic written genre OR a student’s genre-specific literacy

Contents & Method:
The internationalisation of higher education has gone hand-in-hand with an unprecedented push for English for its main institutional purposes, i.e. education and research, resulting in English (as a lingua franca) functioning as main language of academic writing world-wide, be it by expert users or by students. Although nobody is a native speaker of academic English – after all, it requires a lot of time and effort to learn to participate in academic practices – the ins and outs of academic writing are certainly more demanding to make one’s own in a second language. The challenges students and academics face when wanting to produce academic texts in English have motivated various applied linguistic and educational research areas, such as English for Academic Purposes (EAP) or literacy studies. This rich literature offers approaches to and insights into crucial questions, such as: What do different academic genres look like? What differences are there within and across different disciplines? What knowledge and abilities do (student) writers draw on when producing appropriate texts? In what ways do such literacy skills develop over time?
It is questions like these that we will deal with in the seminar course, which will focus on academic writing and literacy in the context of English as a lingua franca in academia (ELFA). Based on readings, discussions and textual examples, participants will learn about relevant research areas and approaches (e.g. qualitative corpus-based discourse studies, genre analysis, EAP). By undertaking small-scale empirical studies of self-collected data-sets, they will gain informed insights into (developing) literacy practices, textual sequences and discursive patterns of academic texts in ELFA and what implications these findings might have for the writers’ academic learning and identities.