This presentation will be dedicated to an underexplored form of disciplinary literacy practice: classroom work with literature in adult second-language instruction. I will show how the teachers and the intermediate language learners use linguistic resources while negotiating content knowledge about metaphors, narrative structure and linguistic style.
Within research into second language instruction, there has been a major focus on how to scaffold learners' acquisition of different disciplinary literacies. A central question, reflected to a varying degree in approaches such as genre pedagogy, content-based instruction and CLIL, is how the linguistic dimensions of dealing with instructional content can be made explicit to the learner. However, limited attention has been given to second language learners' negotiating content belonging to the language they are studying. My presentation will be dedicated to this less explored form of disciplinary literacy. Drawing upon a classroom study of adult intermediate second-language instruction, I will employ SFL (systemic-functional linguistics) and LCT (legitimation code theory) to explore how two teachers involved their students in classroom work with literature. Based on observations, voice recordings and collected teaching materials, I will show how the teachers and the students negotiated subject content such as metaphors, narrative structure and linguistic style. In particular, I will highlight discursive shifts in classroom interaction between concrete/everyday and more abstract/metaphorical ways of using language as the teachers and the students discussed formulaic language encountered in the novels. In addition, I will show how these discussions related to the comprehension and interpretation of the literary texts.
