Developing academic literacy skills involves building knowledge and skill in three main areas: technical aspects (e.g. summarizing, paraphrasing, sentence and paragraph level word choices, frequently used language patterns); disciplinary components (e.g. how texts are constructed in your particular subject area); and critical components (e.g. 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 and knowledge you will need to comprehend and produce texts in your graduate studies. The course analyses examples of evaluative texts (e.g. academic essays and reviews) and research reports (e.g. library research reports in essays, and empirical reports in theses and dissertations), and provides guided and independent opportunities for text construction. 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 are explored. We also look at what corpus-based analyses reveal about language use in particular disciplinary areas.
Each class session includes discussion of a course reading that relates to the topic of the session, some explicit instruction about the genre, analysis of sample texts and the type of language typically used, as well as opportunities to receive feedback on practice tasks. The course has three assignments.