Teaching Academic Literacy in Disciplinary Contexts: Insights and Implications from a Discourse Study

Academic literacy contributes to increasing students’ performance in universities. Most current literacy models applied in universities are not without limitations. The aim of this study is to identify the linguistic differences that exist in the genre of laboratory reports. Hence a sample of laboratory reports were collected across sub disciplines and different year levels. A discourse analysis was conducted to examine different move structures in the variety of students’ laboratory reports. The results show that there are subtle differences in the move structures in the same genre. These differences exist because of specific learning outcomes and pedagogical intentions for the laboratory programs. Therefore, this paper highlights the strengths of teaching literacy practices in collaboration with disciplinary teachers and language teachers to allow an opportunity for them to discuss pedagogical intentions and designs that impact language use and structure of written genres.