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Article published In:
Australian Review of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 43:3 (2020) ► pp.228–246

Applying semantic gravity wave profiles to develop undergraduate students’ academic literacy

ORCID logo | National University of Singapore

This study draws on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), particularly semantic gravity waving, as a strategy for academic literacies practitioners to conceptualise how knowledge in their field might be organised and presented. Students can be guided to notice meanings related to context-dependency at the discourse and lexico-grammatical levels through the presentation of semantic gravity waving profiles. For this study, semantic gravity waving profiles have been found useful for explaining the rationale of a genre pedagogy approach, the structure of an Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion (IMRD) genre, and teaching both lexical coherence for a theoretical framework section, and accurate use of determiners with non-count abstract nouns such as “research”. Therefore, semantic gravity profiling seems to provide explanatory power as a pedagogical tool in the classroom. Findings from a mixed method survey with sixty students as well as extracts from student texts before and after semantic gravity waving profile pedagogical interventions are provided.

Keywords: Legitimation Code Theory, semantic gravity, knowledge, Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1LCT and CLIL
    • 2.2Semantic gravity
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Context
    • 3.2Design
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Application of semantic gravity waving profiles to explain the logics of practice
      • 4.1.1The genre-based pedagogical cycle
      • 4.1.2Structure of the IMRD genre
    • 4.2Micro level application of semantic gravity waving profiles
      • 4.2.1Individual sections in the IMRD
      • 4.2.2Individual language items
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 20 March 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.19012.bro
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