A scientist in interdisciplinary team-teaching in an English for Research Publication Purposes classroom: beyond a “cameo role”

Date

2019

Authors

Li, Y.
Cargill, M.
Gao, X.
Wang, X.
O'Connor, P.

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Journal article

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Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2019; 40:129-140

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Yongyan Li, Margaret Cargill, Xin Gao, Xiaoqing Wang, Patrick O'Connor

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Abstract

Interdisciplinary collaboration, i.e., collaboration between language professionals and content specialists, has long been called for as a valuable mechanism for supporting students' academic literacy development. Nevertheless, such partnership, in particular in the form of classroom team-teaching, has been rarely found; and the role of content specialists in a team-taught classroom setting is little known. In this paper, we report an observational case study of how an English-speaking scientist (ecologist) engaged in team-teaching with a language instructor, his long-term collaborator, in an English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) course for research students in agronomy at a Chinese university on a teaching visit. Our dataset consisted of 16h of video-recorded classroom team-teaching sessions, observational fieldnotes, and interview data. The data analysis revealed three key dimensions of the scientist's instruction: putting “a scientific spin” on the lecture, advising the novices to do what a scientist does, and illuminating the identity of a scientist. Our study offers a valuable reference for practitioners and administrators who may want to foster interdisciplinary collaboration in their institutional contexts and in particular discipline specialists' active participation in teaching ERPP.

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© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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