Accessing the Schema of your Students and the Subject Specialists (Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences)

Allison, N. (2017) Accessing the Schema of your Students and the Subject Specialists (Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences). Addressing the State of the Union: Working Together = Learning Together, Bristol, UK, 7-9 Apr 2017.

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Abstract

Thomas Nagel: “What’s it like to be a bat?” The Philosophical Review 1974 considers consciousness and argues that although there may be objective facts, there is a need for sufficient similarity between experiencers of facts, i.e. the subjective consciousness of facts, for us to understand, assuming we, the experiencers, first have the basic nature to become sufficiently similar to each other. A human’s language adjustment or learning to understand another human might satisfy this nature element, but we must recognise that learning the words to communicate is not enough without the ascribing of those words to mutually agreed reality i.e. a shared or united meaning. I illustrate in this presentation the idea that our role in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) is not only to provide academic language learning opportunities/to teach academic language, but it is to enable students to communicate effectively with their particular ‘group’ (their part of the academy) and that this cannot be done without negotiating the subjective reality of disciplinary specific language. What does the student need to understand to move to the academy and vice versa? I provide findings of preliminary work on how students perceive meaning of disciplinary specific vocabulary, how the receiving department perceives this vocabulary, and raises the question how teachers can (or whether they should) make this a part of effective language learning in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pre-sessional courses. I also present automated means of analysing texts to improve our understanding of someone else’s reality.

Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item
Keywords:Schemata, ESAP, subject specificity, cognitive linguistics.
Status:Published
Refereed:No
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Allison, Mr Neil
Authors: Allison, N.
Subjects:L Education > L Education (General)
College/School:College of Arts & Humanities > School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Copyright Holders:Copyright © 2017 The Author
Publisher Policy:Reproduced with the permission of the author
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