Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age - Sheena Gardner
8. Moving Online to Teach Academic Writing in Science and Engineering: Theory and Practice
Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age - Sheena Gardner
Helen Drury [+]
University of Sydney
Description
Our approach to teaching academic writing in science and engineering disciplines at undergraduate level has been informed by a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory of language and genre-based literacy pedagogy. We have used this foundation to develop teaching materials and approaches to scaffold student understandings of the genre, discourse and grammar of discipline based writing tasks (Jones 2004). Over a ten year period, these materials and approaches have gradually been ‘redesigned’ (Kress 2000, 2003) into interactive, multimodal, online learning modules, replacing face-to-face pedagogy with digital pedagogy (Drury 2004; Mort and Drury 2012; Drury and Mort 2012). SFL and genre pedagogy can inform the ‘redesign’ of materials and approaches for teaching academic writing online. In addition, research in social semiotics and multimodal meaning making can contribute to the development of a digital pedagogy for academic writing. However, a key question is how students use online resources to create their own learning journey to develop successful discipline based writing, their own ‘personalised curricula’ (Kress 2007). In monitoring these journeys, designer/teachers can further develop effective online curricula for academic writing (Kress 2010).