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Academic literacy across the curriculum: Towards a collaborative instructional approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2016

Ursula Wingate
Ursula Wingate*
Affiliation:
King's College London, UKursula.wingate@kcl.ac.uk
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Abstract

I respond to the conference theme ‘English across the Curriculum’ by suggesting that ‘Academic literacy’ should be taught across the curriculum. I first explain the concept of academic literacy, which describes the range of abilities that students have to acquire when starting out in a new academic discipline. I then discuss the dominant instructional provision at universities. As this provision fails to address students’ real learning needs, I argue for curriculum-integrated academic literacy instruction that is based on the collaboration between English for academic purposes (EAP) specialists and subject lecturers. I provide examples of collaborative, discipline-specific approaches to supporting student learning, and present some insights from an intervention study that I have carried out to explore feasible ways of teaching and collaboration. Finally, I discuss the need for lecturer training to achieve a curriculum-integrated approach, and report on my experience of running a professional development module which aimed to enable lecturers to embed academic literacy development into their teaching practice.

Type
Plenary Speeches
Information
Language Teaching , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , July 2018 , pp. 349 - 364
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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