SFL and academic apprenticeship

Australia hosts thousands of international students but, many are unprepared for postgraduate study, struggling particularly with critical and reflective writing. The subject ‘Postgraduate Critical Scholarship’ was subsequently developed as a discipline-specific support in the School of Education at an Australian University to apprentice students into postgraduate academic culture. It extends beyond the provision of English for Academic Purposes to offer students additional ways of being and acting within the Academy, thereby increasing their agency.This paper demonstrates how two concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics, individuation and stratification, are recontextualised in the curriculum design and pedagogy. With individuation, the subject addresses expectations for a variety of academic activities, including assumed knowledge, interacting with academics, researching, referencing, reading, writing and presenting. It aims to add to students’ repertoire of culturally specific texts and practices, providing access and the opportunity to affiliate with an additional academic sub-culture: Australian. It also empowers students to embrace their home countries, supporting them to recontextualise the practices they are learning across the two contexts. Regarding stratification, the subject addresses language use at all levels. While weekly topics sometimes focus on only one language level, stratification is constantly ‘visible’ though making links to strata above and below; Text, discourse and clause structure are consistently linked to meaning making. This approach, which teaches language use as choices of meanings - not rules, is critical. It serves to enable students to have greater control over how and to what extent they choose to affiliate with different academic communities.