The construction of academic literacy : process case-studies from a TESOL context in Oman

• Main Author: Green, Simon John
• Published: University of Leeds 2011
• Subjects: 428.24
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.551247

This thesis reports research into the construction of academic literacies by three Omani undergraduates in their first year on a British university BA (Educational Studies) TESOL programme, taught in Oman. The study constructed academic literacy as communicative social practice situated within disciplinary and institutional communities, requiring the acquisition of knowledge within a number of domains: subject-matter, community, genre, process, rhetoric, ultimately resting on a foundation of communicative competence. The study used multiple data-sources: audio-logs (spoken and recorded journals), interviews, and tutorial notes to investigate the processes through which the three participants completed the first three written assignments of their undergraduate course, over the period of a calendar year. The study addressed two specific questions: (1) What patterns of interaction occurred over the course of the participants' completion of their assignments? (2) Which interactions facilitated the completion of their assignments? The study found complex patterns of textual and interpersonal interaction and concluded that the construction of academic literacies involves the interplay of textual, and interpersonal interactions, affected by individual learner differences, thus lending support to a socio-cognitive perspective on learning. Preliminary studies carried out in preparation for the study, and included within the thesis, analysed the undergraduate TESOL assignment set within the university of Leeds, School of Education, in terms of four core cognitive-rhetorical problems culminating in the construction of a genre text characterisable as a proto-typical research article. There are implications for instructional design at the interfaces of EAP and disciplinary studies.