Eliciting professional discourse in assignments

• Main Author: J. Pinder
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: 01.01.2007
• Subjects: Academic education; Assignments; Postsecondary education; Professional discourse; Professional education; Scenarios; Teaching methods; Technical writing; Theory practice relationship; Universities; University students; Writing skills
• ISBN: 9780980361643; 0980361648
• DOI: 10.2104/ld070003

In university courses which have a vocational orientation, students are often given assignments that require them to relate the theory they are learning to real-life-like situations, in ways that are intended to mirror tasks they may eventually encounter in the workplace. Whatever the limitations imposed by the institutional context on the ability of this kind of exercise to initiate students into professional discourse, it continues to be a highly-regarded teaching tool. In this chapter the author considers, in the light of the work by Freedman and others on the differences between academic and professional learning and the ways professional discourse is learned, how this kind of assignment can function. The discussion draws on the analysis of a sample of eleven 2nd and 3rd year assignment tasks (from Business and Economics subjects) that present a scenario and require the student to adopt a professional role. The tasks examined differed quite widely in degree of explicitness about the role the student writer was to adopt, and how this translated into expectations of genre and audience. There were also varying levels of detail in the contextualisation of the task. The author looks at the way these assignments create a rhetorical context to elicit professional discourse, and how they deal with issues identified in the literature as potential barriers to learning. [Author abstract]