Interdisciplinary Practices in Academia by Buckingham, Louisa; Dong, Jihua; Jiang, Feng (Kevin);

Short description:

This volume addresses the implications that academic interdisciplinarity in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) has for research and pedagogy with a global reach.

Long description:

This volume addresses the implications that academic interdisciplinarity in the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has for research and pedagogy with a global reach. The Editors present a coherent, research-supported analysis of the influence of interdisciplinary research and methods on the way academics collaborate on courses, develop their careers and teach students. The hitherto prevalence of disciplinary silo-like approaches to academic and scientific issues is increasingly ceding ground to an interdisciplinary synergy of different methodological and epistemological traditions. In the context of ongoing trends towards interdisciplinarity in degree programmes and the increasing popularity of such degree programmes with students (e.g., bioinformatics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, neuropolitics, evolutionary finance, global studies, and security studies), academics and programme administrators need awareness of the skills needed to operate in interdisciplinary contexts.

Studies in this edited volume examine interdisciplinary communication practices, and identify how academic writing, teaching, language proficiency assessment and degree programmes are responding to changes in the broader social, institutional and political contexts of academia. As authors in the volume demonstrate, the discursive features, literacy practices and instructional modes, and the student experience of these emerging interdisciplines deserve systematic exploration.

This insightful volume sheds light on contexts across the globe and will be used by students studying EAP and ESP pedagogy or practice; academics in the fields of applied linguistics and higher education, as well as higher education faculty and administrators interested in interdisciplinarity in degree programmes.

 "This volume offers a new conceptualization of EAP, one grounded in interdisciplinarity. It does so not only by making a case for interdisciplinary EAP research and teaching, but by offering illustrations of what that looks like across the globe."

Laura Aull, Writing Program Director & Associate Professor, University of Michigan

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Section I: An Exploration of Text Genres and Interdisciplinary Discourse Features

1. Genre as a Product of Discursive Fusion: A Theoretical Framework for Interdisciplinary Rhetoric

Amir Kalan

2. Intertextual Challenges in Interdisciplinary Texts: A Text-based Analysis of Textual Voice in Citation in Six Undergraduate Dissertations in Education

Natalie Schembri

3. Academic Values in Interdisciplinary Research Articles: A Case Study on Adjectives of Importance

Natalia Muguiro

4. The Development and Inheritance of Authorial Stance in Interdisciplinary Studies: The Case of Bioinformatics

Jihua Dong and Louisa Buckingham

Section II: Interdisciplinary Approaches to EAP, ESP and Degree Programmes

5. Understanding and Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries: Pedagogical Insights from an Interdisciplinary Graduate-Level EAP Course Sequence

Joseph Arthur Davies

6. The Practice of Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Developing Academic Literacies in an English Medium Degree Programme in Sri Lankan Higher Education

Nadee Mahawattha, Romola Rassool and Ramal V. Coorey

7. Threshold Crossing into a Disciplinary Voice in the United Arab Emirates

Michelle Bedeker and Amina Gaye

8. Bridging the Unknown: Threshold Concepts in Doctoral Research Writing

Cecile Badenhorst

9. A Psycholinguistic Approach to Speech Disfluency Production and Perception in Aviation English Exams

Ay