Disciplinary registers in a first-year program
A view from the context of curriculum
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.
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.
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