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Language, Context and Text
Vol. 1:1 (2019) ► pp.148–193

Disciplinary registers in a first-year program

A view from the context of curriculum

ORCID logo | University of British Columbia
ORCID logo | University of British Columbia

With notable exceptions, few studies of teaching and learning of scholarly registers and genres to users of English as an additional language focus on curriculum. For a contextualized understanding of register-curriculum relations, this study investigates disciplinary registers in the Academic English Program at Vantage College, a new alternative-entry, first-year program at the University of British Columbia, Canada. In integrating content and language instruction, the curriculum adopts systemic functional linguistics as the informing theory of language. Program registers and their relations are investigated using Matthiessen’s (2015) context-based register typology. This novel case study highlights register-curriculum relations in key aspects, including discipline-specific variation in register instruction, planned learning trajectories, faculty collaborations, and relations between English for general and specific academic purposes.

Keywords: English for academic purposes, register, academic literacy, undergraduate studies, international students, curriculum, content and language integrated learning, systemic functional linguistics, second-language writing
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Register: definition and rationale
  • 3.The setting: a program for first-year international students at a Canadian university
  • 4.Registers of the VC Academic English Program
  • 5.Registers in focus: descriptive report, chemistry lab report, and podcast
    • 5.1Description in the foundational writing course in Science and Applied Science streams
    • 5.2Lab report writing in the chemistry VANT140 course in applied sciences
    • 5.3Analysis of a podcast episode using sociological concepts in VANT 140 Management
  • 6.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 4 February 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/langct.00007.fer
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