Integrating genre theory and digital literacy in ESP pedagogy: A case study for early career researchers

Résumé fourni par la source

Genre theory has long served as a helpful heuristic for aligning ESP instruction with the specific language and communicative demands of learners’ target discourse communities (Feak, 2011; Swales, 1990). This presentation reports on a blended learning course designed according to the core tenets of genre theory, specifically the constructs of ‘genre awareness’, ‘inter-genre-ality’, and ‘genre repertoires’ (Devitt, 2004; Swales, 1990). We explain how language, communication and digital skills (digital literacy) can be integrated into an ESP course in order to teach PhD students how to manage their professional genre repertoire effectively in digital media. While the course focuses on Open Science and digital genres, it uses traditional academic genres that the students are familiar with (articles and abstracts) as a starting point to help them learn how to recontextualize and refocus the specialized content of these texts to successfully reach diverse audiences. The genres taught include professional science communication genres (e.g., impact statements, lay summaries and personal homepages), as well as genres for public engagement (e.g., personal blogs, microblogs, infographics and explainer videos). These genres are dedicated to outreach communication and dissemination in research projects, emphasizing the use of strategies for promoting scientific research in digital media for culturally diverse, multilingual publics. We describe the learning tasks the students undertook, evaluate the outcomes of their learning and discuss their reflections on using genre repertories and digital (multimodal) resources and tools to create their digital fingerprints, increasing their visibility and impact on the Internet and engaging with diverse audiences by making content more accessible. Ultimately, we advocate for further empirical investigation into the efficacy of ESP training that integrates language, communication and digital literacies. Such training is crucial in order to validate the innovative ESP pedagogical practices that have evolved to meet the demands of the digital transformation in scientific communication. References Devitt, A. J. (2009). Re-fusing form in genre study. In J. Giltrow & D. Stein (Eds.), Genres in the Internet: Issues in the Theory of Genre (pp. 27–47). John Benjamins Publishing Company. Feak, C. B. (2011). Putting strategy into ESP materials development. In C. Pérez-Llantada & M. Watson (Eds.), Specialized Languages in the Global Village (pp. 239–260). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge University Press.

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