On film studies courses, students are asked to treat as objects of study the same films which they may more commonly experience as entertainment. To explore the role of academic writing in this, an action research project was carried out on a university film studies course using a systemic functional linguistics approach. This paper presents a key assessment essay genre, referred to as a taxonomic film analysis. This genre was analysed drawing on the work of Halliday and Mathiessen, 2004 and Martin, 1992 and Lemke, 1985 and Lemke, 1990), focussing on three aspects: the genre acts performed in the process of analysing film; the conceptual frameworks of film studies knowledge, or ‘thematic formations’ (Lemke, 1993) drawn on and re-constituted in the assignment; the particular ways that language is used to perform these acts and build these thematic formations. For EAP to be relevant to film students, it is proposed that EAP specialists need to engage with these three aspects of film study. This application of SFL in film studies EAP is intended as an illustration of how SFL tools can be used for relevant EAP provision across the HE curriculum.
Highlights
► The key genre identified was taxonomic film analysis. ► Deploying film studies language and genre converts film into an object of study. ► EAP lecturers need to engage with both the language and the meaning making of film student
Wingate deals with development of induction program for all students at Kings, something not well addressed previously in UK.
Recommends discipline-specific genre-based approach using exemplar materials drawn from student work.
Outlines application of deconstruction/joint construction/individual construction (Martin & Rose, Rothery) procedure through small group work with prepared guidance and commentaries. Suggestive of dialogic teaching, though this not directly explored.
Notes student preference for authentic essays; and subject tutors reluctance to engage.
Small scale and early reported - tentative.
Since early 2007, the Library of Congress has been developing Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms for Library and Archival Materials (LCGFT), whose terms describe what something is rather than what it is about, as subject headings do. In March 2015 the Policy and Standards Division (PSD) will approve approximately 390 genre/form terms for literary works.
The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) is perhaps the most widely adopted subject indexing language in the world, has been translated into many languages, and is used around the world by libraries large and small. LCSH has been actively maintained since 1898 to catalog materials held at the Library of Congress. Proposals for additions and changes are reviewed regularly at staff meetings in the Policy and Standards Division (PSD) and an approved list is published.
Second Life is a online 3D virtual world. Users assume an online identity - an "avatar" - to represent themselves within the Second Life community. The avatar can walk, run and fly in the virtual world, and can also communicate with other avatars using chat and instant messaging. The recent addition of high-quality audio offers clear benefits for the language learner. What differentiates Second Life from earlier virtual worlds is the lifelike rendering, which makes for a more richly immersive experience. The high-quality graphics, endlessly customizable avatars, together with real-life background noise (birds, wind, crashing waves) accentuate one's sense of telepresence.
D. Nguyen, D. Trieschnigg, and M. Theune. Proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, page 321--330. ACM, (2014)
B. Pang, L. Lee, and S. Vaithyanathan. Proceedings of the ACL-02 conference on Empirical methods in natural language processing-Volume 10, page 79--86. Association for Computational Linguistics, (2002)