Ann Hewings & Sarah North

The Open University, UK

Emergent disciplinarity in undergraduate essays: the use of theme as a textual organiser

The social and epistemological context of individual disciplines is key to writing at both professional and student level in tertiary institutions. If writing is seen as developing within specific contexts of practice then we would expect to see evidence not only of disciplinary differences in professional academic writing, but also of emergent disciplinarity in student writing.

This paper uses evidence from two studies of undergraduate writing to highlight the role of previous academic experience in developing an understanding of what is expected and valued in the context of disciplinary writing. Our research has focused on Theme as the point of departure of the message, looking at the way it helps to structure assignment essays in the disciplines of geography and history of science. Analysis of seventy six essays shows that the way texts are structured varies in line with disciplinary background and experience.

These findings add weight to earlier observations of discipline-specific ways of knowing and writing and raise fundamental questions about general academic literacy and discipline-specific literacy.