ABSTRACT
Much discussion surrounds how to determine and define what academic discourse is (see, for example, Bartholomae, 1986; Bizzell, 1988; Coles and Wall, 1987; Elbow, 1991; Harris, 1989; Rose, 1985). At the most general level academic discourse is understood to be a specialized form of reading, writing, and thinking done in the “academy” or other schooling situations. It has been referred to as the “peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding and arguing that define the discourse of our community” (Bartholomae, 1986, p. 4). Because it appears to require a kind of language with its own vocabulary, norms, sets of conventions, and modes of inquiry, academic discourse has come to characterize a separate culture, one within which each discipline may represent a separate cultural community. It is from this notion of a separate culture that we get the terms discourse or interpretive “community.” Bartholomae (1986) has captured this notion of acquiring the language of the new community in his oft-quoted article, “Inventing the University.” As he puts it,
The students have to appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, and they have to do this as though they were members of the academy, or historians or anthropologists or economists; they have to invent the university by assembling and mimicking its language…. They must learn to speak our language, (pp. 4–5)
