‘I've never done a dissertation before please help me’: accommodating L2 students through course design

Salter-Dvorak, H (2014) '‘I've never done a dissertation before please help me’: accommodating L2 students through course design.' Teaching in Higher Education, 19 (8). pp. 847-859.

Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2014.934344

Abstract

This article considers how course design accommodates the adaptation of L2 students into the early stages of the master's dissertation (Social Sciences and Humanities) at a UK university. I present a contrastive process-oriented analysis of two students' experiences on different courses, extracted from a 13-month ethnographic study in which students' self-reports (journals; interviews) were triangulated with their assignments, interviews with lecturers and classroom observation. I identify two ‘literacy events’ in the early stages: discussing the topic and preparing the proposal. In order to make visible these events, I deploy Lave and Wenger's Community of Practice model, while taking a post-structuralist view of learning as a dynamic between language, identities, power relations, affordances and agency. Findings show unequal support for these events on the two courses; I argue that this exemplifies significantly different ideologies relating to the accommodation of L2 students, and discuss implications for course design.

Item Type: Article
Keywords: L2 students, accommodation, course design, identities, apprenticeship, literacy events
Divisions: School of Education
Date Deposited: 12 Jul 2022 16:45
Last Modified: 13 Jul 2022 08:35
ISSN: 1356-2517
URI / Page ID: https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/14876
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