Analyzing writing in academic disciplines

A few concepts

Abstract

The analytic frame presented in this contribution seeks to enable careful, systematic and complex consideration of the various factors that contribute to language use in disciplinary settings across all grade levels. Three key concepts are presented: disciplinary awareness, disciplinary configurations, and writing universes, in which genres and practices interact. Describing the elements of these three concepts leads to a foregrounding of the tensions that student writers must negotiate as they produce language acts in different disciplinary contexts. The contribution bases its exploration of an analytic frame for language activity in the disciplines on insights developed through extended study of the work of apprentice writers and speakers in various settings, studying their interactions with scholastic and disciplinary life through their interaction with and representations of the objects and modes associated with different school subjects.