Disciplinary literacy and multilingual students’ writing assignments

• Disciplinary literacy is based on the premise that each school subject, such as physics, mathematics or history, has its own way of writing, reading and creating meaning (Shanahan & Shanahan 2018). In the later years of secondary school literacy differences among the school subjects increase, which also means that the texts that the students are supposed to write must be more subject-specific (Shanahan & Shanahan 2008). The importance of understanding disciplinary literacy and be able to write, read and communicate in different school subjects are crucial for every student, not least for the multilingual students. The need to teach disciplinary literacy is in the same way highly important. The present study wants to contribute to knowledge about how in particular multilingual students incorporate disciplinary literacy from two different school subjects; physics and Swedish. Even though each school subject has its own disciplinary literacy, teaching literacy is not always a part of every school subject. A cooperation between a teacher of a language subject like Swedish and a teacher of a content subject like physics, can be seen as a way to build knowledge about content as well as about language. On the other hand, the students must relate to two different contents and two different disciplinary literacies. In the present study such a collaboration in year nine in a compulsory school in a larger city in Sweden is being examined. Two teachers cooperate over five weeks on a project about nuclear power and argumentative text. As a final assignment the students write an essay where they argue for or against nuclear power. The data collection took place in a school with mostly multilingual students and consists of observations, audio recordings and collection of teaching materials and student’s assignments. Both the teaching and the student’s texts are part of the study but focus here will be the student’s assignments from the end of the class project. The primary research question is: How do the students integrate disciplinary literacy from physics and Swedish in an assignment that covers both subjects? The study is theoretically based on literacy research, in particularly disciplinary literacy (Fang & Coatoam 2013, Shanahan & Shanahan 2018). In order to answer the research question analytical tools from two different theoretical frameworks have been used; systematic functional linguistic (SFL) and Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014, Martin & Rose 2008, Maton 2014). SFL is used to analyze and describe the linguistic resources that express the evaluative meaning in the assignments (Martin & White 2005). LCT, in particularly the dimension Autonomy, is used for the analysis of the integration of the two subjects in the student’s texts (Maton & Howard 2020). The presentation will explain the research design and result, where above all the methological use of LCT as a tool to analyze student’s texts will be in focus. A preliminary conclusion is that the combination of SFL and LCT can be used to make disciplinary literacy more visible, for assessment but also as a didactic tool in the writing instruction.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Studier av enskilda språk (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Languages (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Disciplinary literacy

multilingual students

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)