Supporting BA students’ disciplinary writing in two languages

Aktivitet: Tale eller præsentation - typerForedrag og mundtlige bidrag

Katja Årosin Laursen - Oplægsholder

Sanne Larsen - Oplægsholder

Abstract: Supporting BA students’ disciplinary writing in two languages
This presentation reports on the development and implementation of a pilot
project at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) seeking to support students’
disciplinary writing in Danish and English through workshops that were embedded within an existing bachelor-level course in biochemistry at the Faculty of Science. Recognizing the need to support students’ development of disciplinary literacy skills at an early stage of the education, the program in Biochemistry recently introduced this course as an obligatory element of the BA-curriculum, with learning objectives and activities focusing on how to read research literature in the field and communicate disciplinary knowledge in oral and written form. Like the majority of bachelor-level courses at UCPH, the language of instruction on the course is Danish, but English also plays a role - as the language of most of the research literature discussed and as an optional language for the written exam project. In the first year of teaching the course, the content teachers experienced challenges in managing a number of aspects of the parallel literacy required on the course, including how to guide students in the choice of language for the written exam project and how to support their writing process and product in two languages. In the presentation, we first describe the content of two workshops that tried to address these issues and
the nature of the cooperation between content teachers and academic language
consultants. We then discuss the general need for, and value of, embedding a
parallel focus on disciplinary writing in Danish and English in content courses at the university based on data from the five-year development project, The Language Strategy.
6 okt. 2017

Begivenhed (Konference)

TitelICLHE 2017
Forkortet titelICLHE 2017
Dato04/10/201707/10/2017
Hjemmeside
AfholdelsesstedUniversity of Copenhagen
ByCopenhagen
Land/OmrådeDanmark
Grad af anerkendelseInternational begivenhed

ID: 185476784