This paper reports results from a research project which uses Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) to explore how English and other semiotic resources are used in knowledge-building practices in university level English medium education (EME). It starts from the premise that understanding the uses of participants' semiotic resources in EME needs to be linked more clearly to the nature of the disciplinary knowledge which is the target of instruction, both across and within academic disciplines. LCT is an approach from the sociology of education which can be used to explore and enhance all kinds of knowledge-building practices (Maton, 2014). It is a response to what Maton (2014: 3-4) claims is the "knowledge blindness" of much educational research, that is, that the nature and structure of knowledge and knowledge practices is often not considered, and instead there is a focus on ways of knowing and knowers (e.g., from a psychological perspective, as in constructivist accounts of learning). Current LCT-informed research mainly uses the three "dimensions" of Specialization, Semantics and Autonomy to reveal the underlying organising principles of knowledge practices. Specialization sees practices as knowledge-knower structures which can be explored in terms of epistemic relations to objects of study, and social relations to ways of knowing and knowers. Semantics explores practices in terms of their context-embeddedness (semantic gravity) and how densely packed meanings are (semantic density). Autonomy examines how knowledge practices are positioned as more or less inside or outside fields of activity, and the purposes to which such "inside" or "outside" knowledge is put. The project uses these three dimensions of LCT to explore how English and other semiotic resources are put to use in knowledge-building in university English-medium education. Specialization shows how epistemic relations involving relative focus on the "what" and "how" of learning can account for differences in the use of semiotic resources even within the same discipline. Semantics shows how lecturers handle complex, highly dense material by "unpacking" and "repacking" it in "semantic waves", and Autonomy shows how knowledge from "inside" or "outside" the current topic (e.g., when giving examples) can be used more or less effectively for disciplinary knowledge-building purposes. The data are drawn from a corpus of video-recordings of face-to-face and online teaching and interviews with lecturers, from a range of disciplines, in two EME settings (Spain and Turkey). The analysis combines LCT with a conversation analytic and corpus linguistics (CA/CL) approach, in which fine-grained qualitative analyses of specific extracts of interaction are combined with corpus analyses which reveal wider patterns across datasets. The paper ends with suggestions as to how the findings of LCT-based studies which use detailed analyses of classroom data can be used as a knowledge base and resource for the professional development of lecturers in university English medium education.
Reference
Maton, K. (2014). Knowledge and knowers: Towards a realist sociology of education. Routledge.
