Ophelia Garcia coins the term ‘Translanguaging’ to describe how multilingual speakers draw flexibly on languages in mixed and blended forms, in multiple cultural and linguistic communities.
On film studies courses, students are asked to treat as objects of study the same films which they may more commonly experience as entertainment. To explore the role of academic writing in this, an action research project was carried out on a university film studies course using a systemic functional linguistics approach. This paper presents a key assessment essay genre, referred to as a taxonomic film analysis. This genre was analysed drawing on the work of Halliday and Mathiessen, 2004 and Martin, 1992 and Lemke, 1985 and Lemke, 1990), focussing on three aspects: the genre acts performed in the process of analysing film; the conceptual frameworks of film studies knowledge, or ‘thematic formations’ (Lemke, 1993) drawn on and re-constituted in the assignment; the particular ways that language is used to perform these acts and build these thematic formations. For EAP to be relevant to film students, it is proposed that EAP specialists need to engage with these three aspects of film study. This application of SFL in film studies EAP is intended as an illustration of how SFL tools can be used for relevant EAP provision across the HE curriculum.
Highlights
► The key genre identified was taxonomic film analysis. ► Deploying film studies language and genre converts film into an object of study. ► EAP lecturers need to engage with both the language and the meaning making of film student
This paper reports on the second phase of a joint teacher/researcher project that explored teachers’ understandings of the potential of the interactive whiteboard (IWB) as a tool for primary school children’s collaborative group work. By examining teachers’ written analyses and discussions of work carried out in their own classrooms, the paper seeks to contribute to the debate about the ways in which the use of IWBs can contribute to changes in pedagogy. It highlights the interrelationships between collaborative learning and factors identified as important in the research carried out by teachers, amongst them the children’s technical skills and confidence, the mediating role of the teacher, the IWB affordances for knowledge‐building and the teachers’ own knowledge, attitudes and professional development. The paper also provides an account of how participation by the teachers in a course with Faculty staff, focused on the collaborative co‐construction of knowledge related to learning and to classroom research grounded in the values and principles of socio‐cultural theory, supported changes in pedagogic practice.