Academic discourse socialisation into the target disciplines : a multiple-case study of undergraduates from double-degree English teacher training programmes in Hong Kong

Abstract

Since written assignments have been a major mode of assessing learning in tertiary education, it is important to study how undergraduates display and negotiate knowledge in written academic discourse. The process of learning to construct knowledge through written discourse in the target discipline(s) is defined as written academic discourse socialisation (Duff, 2010). While previous studies (e.g., Leki, 2007) have reported the difficulties encountered by English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) undergraduates when they socialise into one discipline, their concurrent socialisation into two or more disciplines, which may be more complex, is still under-explored. As double-degree programmes are expanding in the field of English teacher training in Hong Kong, it is valuable to examine how these pre-service teachers (PSTs) socialise simultaneously into the target disciplines of Education, Linguistics and Literature.

With a longitudinal frame of three semesters, the current study explored the academic discourse socialisation journeys of four PSTs of English who were in their freshman and sophomore years. This initial stage of socialisation is potentially more perplexing (Evans & Morrison, 2016), and therefore, it is insightful to study how the beginning PSTs sought to write in a disciplinary approved way. The investigation featured a triangulation of research methods and theoretical frameworks. Narrative inquiry, textual analyses of written assignments through Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), and discourse-based interviews (DBIs) were employed to corroborate the PSTs’ narrated experiences, linguistic choices, as well as explanation for their disciplinary writing. The methodological triangulation bridged the divide between the two camps of self-reported and textual data in the literature. Addressing the multiple data sources, three theoretical frameworks—the theory of Language Socialisation (LS), constructivism and social constructivism complemented one another to explore the multifaceted nature of academic discourse socialisation, which tends to span the cognitive, social, linguistic and psychological dimensions.

The analyses reported different socialisation trajectories, which were found to rest upon the PSTs’ agency, learning experiences, interactions with socialising agents and a multitude of contextual factors. The narrative inquiry revealed the affordance of various modes of interactions with peers, senior peers, teachers and other in-service practitioners. Meanwhile, influential contextual factors ranged from course arrangements, disciplinary contexts, institutional policies to social ideologies. Complementing the narrative inquiry, the SFL analyses indicated how the PSTs’ performance often hinged on their selections of lexico-grammatical and rhetorical resources, which manifested disciplinary specificity. Corroborated with the SFL findings, the DBIs further unveiled the PSTs’ epistemological understanding of the disciplines and their distinctive means of acquiring linguistic and disciplinary knowledge.

Based on the empirical data, the current study has developed a framework which integrates the possible factors underlying academic discourse socialisation. The framework is anticipated to guide future research to yield more comprehensive analyses of academic discourse socialisation in other settings. The findings have also provided pedagogical implications for supporting the concurrent academic discourse socialisation of PSTs of English, who are socially expected to demonstrate high English writing proficiency, a good command of disciplinary knowledge and well-developed linguistic repertoire.