Investigating the learning transfer of genre features and conceptual knowledge from an academic literacy course to business studies: Exploring the potential of dynamic assessment

Academic literacy courses aim to enable higher education students to participate in their chosen academic fields as fully as possible. However, the extent to which these students transfer the academic skills taught in these courses to their chosen disciplines is still under-researched. This article reports on a study that investigated the potential of dynamic assessment (an assessment approach that blends instruction into assessment) in the transfer of genre features and conceptual knowledge among undergraduate business studies students in a UK public university. The data includes three students’ written assignments (N = nine), interviews (N = three) and business studies tutor (N = three) feedback. Drawing on Vygotskian sociocultural theory of learning and a genre theory based on Systemic Functional Linguistics, the data were analysed. The findings suggest that dynamic assessment may contribute to the transfer of genre features and conceptual knowledge to a new assessment context. Implications of this for academic literacy instruction and assessment design are presented

On the user's side: definitions in Italian and British patient information leaflets

This article examines patient information leaflets (PILs), as texts addressed by experts to laypersons. The PIL (foglio illustrativo in Italian) is a mandatory document packed with medicines that provide the patient with information about the medicine and instructions on how and when to take it. The paper comparatively analyses the definitions of medical terms in Italian and British PILs. It is based on a qualitative analysis of data extracted from two small comparable corpora consisting of 50 Italian and 50 British texts, respectively. Results have revealed some similarities that seem to be cross-cultural features of the genre, and significant differences

Multiliteracies for academic purposes : a metafunctional exploration of intersemiosis and multimodality in university textbook and computer-based learning resources in science

This thesis is situated in the research field of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) in education and within a professional context of multiliteracies for academic purposes. The overall aim of the research is to provide a metafunctional account of multimodal and multisemiotic meaning-making in print and electronic learning materials in first year science at university. The educational motivation for the study is to provide insights for teachers and educational designers to assist them in the development of students’ multiliteracies, particularly in the context of online learning environments. The corpus comprises online and CD-ROM learning resources in biology, physics and chemistry and textbooks in physics and biology, which are typical of those used in undergraduate science courses in Australia. Two underlying themes of the research are to compare the different affordances of textbook and screen formats and the disciplinary variation found in these formats. The two stage research design consisted of a multimodal content analysis, followed by a SF-based multimodal discourse analysis of a selection of the texts. In the page and screen formats of these pedagogical texts, the analyses show that through the mechanisms of intersemiosis, ideationally, language and image are reconstrued as disciplinary knowledge. This knowledge is characterised by a high level of technicality in image and verbiage, by taxonomic relations across semiotic resources and by interdependence among elements in the image, caption, label and main text. Interpersonally, pedagogical roles of reader/learner/viewer/ and writer/teacher/designer are enacted differently to some extent across formats through the different types of activities on the page and screen but the source of authority and truth remains with the teacher/designer, regardless of format. Roles are thus minimally negotiable, despite the claims of interactivity in the screen texts. Textually, the organisation of meaning across text and image in both formats is reflected in the layout, which is determined by the underlying design grid and in the use of graphic design resources of colour, font, salience and juxtaposition. Finally, through the resources of grammatical metaphor and the reconstrual of images as abstract, both forms of semiosis work together to shift meanings from congruence to abstraction, into the specialised realm of science

Content Individuation and Evolutionary Content Emergence

This short paper addresses two connected issues which were brought to some focused light by Searle’s comments on my contributed article to the anthology Searle’s philosophy and Chinese Philosophy: Constructive Engagement. The first issue concerns the claim that animals cannot have observer-independent intentional content of the same type as that of human beings. The second is my denial that mental content can be merely caused in specific brain states, given its holistic and normative character. I defend my position on the second issue by distinguishing content individuation from content realization while I elaborate my relatively more sophisticated argument for the first claim by clarifying two related senses or levels of ‘content’ and ‘self’, respectively associated with certain quasi-rational capacities from a third-person perspective and the subjective holistic consciousness from a first-person perspective with the explicit social-discursive dimension. Searle’s Connection Principle is briefly drawn on in this context, with an eye to showing its potential significance when it is extended into the evolutionary settings. In short, it is the full-blown rationality of human holistic discursive practice that ultimately grounds the content talk, which then becomes meaningfully ascribable to certain natural forms of animal existence

Teaching The Language Of A Lab Report: A Guide For Science Teachers

Academic language in the register of science is often challenging for students to compose, and their science teachers may struggle to support their language development. This project explores the question, what are the language structures science teachers must teach for secondary students to be able to write successful science lab reports? In this paper I report the strong link between language and knowledge in science. Students must develop strong language skills in science not only to communicate scientific ideas but also to gain understanding of scientific concepts. Supporting the development of language in the register of science is a challenging obstacle for science teachers. The literature will show that science teachers report being under-prepared to teach the language of science, and much of the writing they lead in science classrooms does not involve analysis and interpretation. The review of literature indicates at least four significant aspects of language in the register science. 1) Writing in science tends to use an authoritative tone that is both objective and assertive. 2) Packed with meaningful technical terms, extended noun phrases and embedded clauses, scientific writing is informationally dense. 3) Scientists make broad use of Greek and Latin roots and modify them with prefixes and suffixes, developing extensive technical vocabulary within the register of science. 4) Finally, nominalization, transforming verbs and adjectives for use as nouns, enables scientific argumentation and description of scientific processes. (231 words

Legal Education and Public Policy: Professional Training in the Public Interest

A recurrent problem for all who are interested in implementing policy, the reform of legal education must become ever more urgent in a revolutionary world of cumulative crises and increasing violence. Despite the fact that for six or seven decades responsibility for training new members of the public profession of the law has in this country been an almost exclusive monopoly of a new subsidized intellectual elite, professional teachers of law, and despite much recent ferment and agitation among such teachers, little has actually been achieved in refashioning ancient educational practices to serve insistent contemporary needs. No critics have been more articulate in lamenting this failure than the professional law teachers themselves. What they think they have done to legal instruction may be recapitulated as a transition from lectures, to the analysis of appellate opinions, to confusion. Not atypical of the common indictment are the words of one eminent self-critic: blind, inept, factory-ridden, wasteful, defective, and empty

A “More Political” Commission? Reassessing EC Politicization through Language

This article contributes to the study of the European Commission's (EC) politicization by examining this phenomenon from the angle of communication. We elaborate a novel approach based on two linguistic indicators – charisma and technicality – which we then apply through a content analysis of 8,947 speeches delivered by Commission members between 1999 and 2019. Contrary to the narrative of an ever more political Commission, we find that the linguistic politicization of the EC decreased over the period under exam, reaching its nadir during Jean-Claude Juncker's presidential term (2014–19). Our findings raise the question of whether language is yet another ordinary dimension of politicization, or rather it is used strategically by the Commission to underplay its underlying politicization as measured in more traditional institutional, policy, and individual terms. Either way, our study highlights the multi-faceted nature of the politicization concept, and the need for deeper and more nuanced analyses of it

Capacity Building Needs of Business Education Lecturers for Efficient Lecturing in Federal Colleges of Education in North Western States, Nigeria

The study empirically investigates how professional business education lecturers in Federal Colleges of Education in Nigeria’s North-western needed to be strengthened. The study was guided by two research questions and two null hypotheses were formulated at 0.05 level of significance.  The study used a descriptive survey design. The population of this study was 126 professional business educators from six Federal Colleges of Education in North-western State, Nigeria. Research experts validated the instrument. The researchers used Cronbach Alpha method to determine the instrument’s reliability and a reliability coefficient of 0.93 was then obtained. The questionnaire has 20 items in the instrument. The study used inferential statistics of mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions, while the t-test was used to test the null hypotheses formulated for the study. According to the study’s findings, entrepreneurial skills, managerial skills, information and communication technology (ICT), and capacity building for professionalism are the priorities for all professional lecturers in the field of business education in federal colleges of education in North-western Nigeria. Based on the findings the researchers concluded that professional business education lecturers should be gingered because professionalism in Federal College Education necessitates ICT, managerial, and entrepreneurial competencies. Keywords: Capacity building, Business education lecturers, Efficient lecturin