2024 Kirstin Wilmot: Bridging gaps between theory & practice: What LCT brings to academic literacies

Bridging gaps between theory & practice: What LCT brings to academic literacies
Academic writing is a bugbear across university contexts with different approaches being offered on how to 'fix' students' 'writing problems'. Despite academic literacies theory offering a transformative understanding of academic writing as a social practice through which disciplinary norms and values are expressed, replicated and sustained, many academics still believe it is merely an English language problem. A complicating factor in the uptake of the academic literacies approach is that it falls short of offering pedagogical application, particularly in resource-poor contexts.
In this Roundtable, Kirstin shows how LCT can make up this shortfall. Using doctoral writing as a case study, she reveals how the ‘4-K model’ in Specialization can show the sociality of writing in practical terms. Kirstin focuses on one aspect of the dissertation: where authors establish a rationale for their study. Using insights, she analyses different ways of building a rationale about a new object of study (e.g., a topic that has never been studied before) or a new approach to studying an object (e.g., a particular theoretical lens or methodological tool). Using gazes, she analyses the ways in which authors establish a rationale based on legitimate ways of knowing or acting (e.g., how one has come to know an object) or based on knower attributes (e.g., how one’s race, gender, age etc. have afforded them legitimacy as knowers of a topic). Through the analysis, Kirstin shows how LCT provides a more conceptually sophisticated, and practically useful, understanding of the socio-cultural nature of academic writing.