Tracking business studies students’ linguistic and conceptual development in writing: contributions from sociocultural theory (Vygotsky) and systemic functional linguistics (Halliday)

Shrestha, Prithvi (2014). Tracking business studies students’ linguistic and conceptual development in writing: contributions from sociocultural theory (Vygotsky) and systemic functional linguistics (Halliday). In: BAAL 2014 Conference: 47th Annual Meeting: Learning, Working and Communicating in a Global Context, 4-6 Sep 2014, University of Warwick.

Abstract

A substantial number of studies have been conducted on business studies students’ writing. These studies have tended to focus on final written products such as student assignments in a business studies programme. Very few studies have examined the process of writing such assignments. Therefore, there is limited evidence in terms of their linguistic and conceptual development in the process of writing assignments and thus this warrants further research. This paper reports on a study in which four undergraduate business studies students’ linguistic and conceptual developments were tracked when they wrote assignments. In order to track these students’ emerging linguistic and conceptual development, concepts from two well-established theories were employed. One was dynamic assessment (DA) derived from Vygotsky’s (Vygotsky, 1978) sociocultural theory. DA is an assessment approach based on Vygotsky’s articulation of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), the notion that has been influential in many empirical studies in applied linguistics. DA blends assessment and teaching together to help learners perform beyond their independent abilities, thus making assessment a collaborative enterprise and enabling the tutor to track student ZPDs. The other was Hallidayan (e.g., Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) which treats language as not only a meaning making resource but also a tool for learning. In this study, throughout DA, the tutor deployed SFL as a tool to track student ZPDs, particularly emerging linguistic and conceptual developments needed for writing business case study analyses. The findings of this study have implications for tutor assessment and feedback, and disciplinary writing development.

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