Engaging dentistry students with disciplinary literacy: A stakeholder’s perspectives

Abstract

Each discipline at the tertiary education embraces its epistemological framework that underlies distinct academic conventions and varying discourse practices. In addition to their subject-matter needs, learners also face challenges for professional communication in their future context. To prepare students to communicate in a disciplinarily recognized way, language practitioners need to induct discipline-specific literacy instruction into their teaching practices. Whilst an inventory of literature has touched upon interdisciplinary learning and teaching, discussions from the stakeholder’s perspectives are not yet as prevalent. This study, grounded in Hong Kong, aims to explore how a stakeholder designs, implements and revamps an academic literacy course for dentistry students. Qualitative data consist of classroom observations and two interviews with a stakeholder, who concurrently serves the role as both a program coordinator and a language practitioner. Group and individual interviews with her students were conducted and adopted as supportive data. The initial results find the stakeholder’s emphasis in incorporating corpora into pedagogical practices that help substantiate students’ understanding of discipline-specific contents. The emerged challenges also include: bridging students’ needs with institutional resources and sustaining a joint collaboration with the subject-matter specialists. Subject-specific implications will be also proposed in this presentation.