Scholars globally are under increasing pressure to publish in international, highly-ranked, and usually English-language journals. This has created a need for insights into the evolving discourses, genres, and publication practices of disciplinary discourse communities. This thesis reports an exploration of textual and contextual facets of writing for publication in the academy. More specifically, the overarching aim was to investigate the relationship between discipline, and the rhetorical features, genres, languages and dissemination outlets used by scholars. The thesis comprises four qualitative studies, and employs a variety of methods to explore this relationship across four disciplines: anthropology, history, linguistics and pure mathematics. The results reveal some connections between epistemological characteristics of the disciplines investigated and scholars’ rhetorical choices. The structure of the research article in pure mathematics is shown to reflect the process of knowledge construction in the discipline, and patterns of self-mentions in anthropology and history articles are attributed to disciplinary methodology. Furthermore, insights into the relationship between discipline, and genre use, language selection, and access to publication outlets are obtained. The results reveal disciplinary differences in terms of scholars’ opportunities to publish in the local language and in English. Based on my findings, I argue that while discipline is a significant factor in understanding how scholars construct and disseminate their research-based writing, these practices are also subject to local, international and digital developments. As such, the relationship between discipline, genre, language and publication should be understood as dynamic. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: In press. Paper 3: Submitted. Paper 4: Submitted.</p>

Among scholars of applied linguistics and composition studies, the notion of academic literacy has generated discussions regarding L2 students' intellectual growth and academic performance in the college context. Several studies provide a detailed account of how students adapt their literacy practices in response to their perceived needs for task completion; however, as the notion of academic literacy has gradually been linked to concerns of disciplinary enculturation, a situated process of becoming involved in disciplinary discourse, there has been a call for attention to the disciplinary discourse communities into which students are initiated through literacy tasks. Although some previous studies have forged early linkages and integrated disciplinary discourse into the notion of academic literacy, the empirical data comes from graduate students (Casanave, 2002; Prior, 1998) or L1 students (Hass, 1994; Herrington, 1985; Sternglass, 1997). The study reported in this dissertation, however, investigates the situated and enculturating literacy practices of L2 students in undergraduate settings. Also, as compared to previous studies that describe the literacy strategies in or students' views of disciplinary discourse, the present study attempts to schematize the connection between literacy practice and disciplinary enculturation, drawing on the notion of genre and its framework. This study has a clear focus of analysis by discussing the literacy practice of two L2 students as they engage in genres, mostly written work, in class, herein referred to as genre practice or genre-mediated literacy practice. This study follows the L2 students' learning throughout their undergraduate college experience, providing an analysis of their genre practice across disciplines from their first year to graduation, and at the same time tracing the factors that contextualize their genre practice, such as previous genre encounters, class work, writing assignment guidelines, cultural norms, individualized perceptions of disciplinary expectations, etc. Through careful textual analysis and interviews, this study focuses on the L2 students' developing academic literacy as mediated by discipline-specific genre practice in three different learning contexts: writing in general education courses, writing in business writing courses, and writing in courses in their majors. The results of the study show that both students' genre practices varied, depending on how genre was cued, interpreted, and performed, by social affordances such as lectures, class readings, class discussions, and interactions with peers and instructors. The study shows the students' genre practice taking shape in the way they were situated in disciplinary discourse, while at the same time their understanding of disciplinary discourse was mediated by their engagement in genre. In addition, by looking at the students' genre practice in four different knowledge dimensions—formal, rhetorical, procedural, and subject matter (see Tardy, 2009)—this study documents a detailed process of constructing discipline-specific literacy. Despite its context-dependent, individualized positioning in disciplinary discourse, this study captures a series of patterns of literacy practice cutting across the two L2 students' approach to genre and highlights the issues inherent in classroom-based instructional settings. The theoretical and pedagogical implications of this study suggest the need to reexamine the role of writing for discipline-specific literacy, both to enhance college writing instruction and to advocate for writing across the curriculum.

This thesis presents an investigation of undergraduate student learning with respect to physics lectures attended in English and Swedish. The work studies three connected areas: student learning patterns, bilingual scientific literacy and disciplinary discourse. Twenty-two physics students at two Swedish universities attended lectures in both English and Swedish as part of their regular undergraduate programme. These lectures were video-taped and used to contextualize in-depth, semi-structured interviews with students. When taught in English the students asked and answered fewer questions and reported be-ing less able to simultaneously follow the lecture and take notes. Students adapted to being taught in English by; asking questions after the lecture, no longer taking notes in class, read-ing sections of work before class or—in the worst case—by using the lecture for mechanical note taking. Analysis of student oral descriptions of the lecture content in both languages identified a small number of students who found it almost impossible to speak about disciplinary concepts in English. These students were first-years who had not been taught in English before. How-ever, the findings suggest that, above a certain threshold level of disciplinary language com-petence, it does not appear to matter which language students are taught in. Finally, the thesis makes a theoretical contribution to educational research. The initial lan-guage perspective is broadened to include a wide range of semiotic resources that are used in the teaching of undergraduate physics. Student learning is then characterized in terms of becoming fluent in a disciplinary discourse. It is posited that in order to achieve an appropri-ate, holistic experience of any given disciplinary concept, students will need to become fluent in a critical constellation of disciplinary semiotic resources.

This exploratory case study was undertaken to obtain a greater understanding of the difficulties that physics students face when solving image-object projections in optics problems. This was carried out by studying the students’ reasoning when facing new kinds of problem settings using the refraction of light and the position of the virtual image and the real object as the frame for the research. The results show that there is more than one reasoning possibility that is feasible for students to use when dealing with the same problem. The results also illustrate how several different ways of reasoning may be simultaneously needed to solve a refraction problem. The different kinds of reasoning have been referred to as reasoning categories in this study. The analysis illustrates how the categories complement each other, and the use of many reasoning categories is shown to be fruitful. However, the vast majority of the participants made contradicting answer selections when solving similar problems by using contradicting reasoning approaches. This lack of consistency in the participants’ reasoning could indicate that they have a fragmentary understanding of optics in general. Both the capability to link reasoning approaches together, as well as the affordances that different modes of representations offer, are needed for the construction of a better conceptual understanding. Only mastering a few ways of reasoning and a few modes of representation could lead to fragmented knowledge, which, in turn leads to making problem solving really challenging. One purpose of this study was to find out if reasoning categories and modes of representations are essentially linked. If so, then the reasoning categories would be determined by the representation of the problem. The analysis shows that there is a connection, but that there are also other factors at play.