Project Investigator(s): Won Kim, Lecturer, Academic English Program, Vantage College
Project Description
In this classroom-based research project, I aim to explore whether and how identities of international students using English as an additional language in a first year coordinated program in science might be empowered as critical, competent, and confident writers in two related required academic literacy courses over two winter terms guided by pedagogies centered around genre-based approaches and systemic functional linguistics (SFL) viewing language as resources of meaning-making. This qualitative inquiry will be will thus involve pre/post-course survey questionnaires, semi-interviews, weekly student journals, and the analysis of written work of focal students.
Research Questions
How does a linguistically responsive SFL-informed pedagogy contribute to the negotiation and construction of identities of first year undergraduate international students as empowered writers and thinkers in science?
Impact on teaching and learning at UBC
With a significant increase in the number of international students in higher education witnessed over the past decades, classroom pedagogy needs to respond to a call for generating desired learning outcomes in content knowledge while developing academic literacies of international students. This project can contribute to expanding our understanding of how linguistically-responsive functional approaches to language can foster academic literacies of students as apprentice scholars with dispositions, knowledge, and competence to appropriately engage with disciplinary interactions and practices. The outcome of the project can also offer insights into how an SFL-informed pedagogy can be adopted to other learning contexts with international
students across disciplines as well as domestic students, given that academic English is a second language for every student.