ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces concepts from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) that launched the productive cross-disciplinary dialogue with systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and which have become central to research using the two frameworks to explore education. The concepts are from the LCT dimension of Specialization, specifically ‘specialization codes’. The chapter illustrates these ideas through showing how the concepts allow research to explain why some students are more successful than others by exploring the dispositions students bring to education, the nature of the knowledge practices they encounter in their studies, and how these relate together to shape their experiences. The example explored draws on a major study of Chinese students who attended higher education in Australia. The chapter analyses the dispositions the students brought and the teaching practices of their educators, and show how these represented a ‘code clash’ between two different ways of measuring achievement. As a result, students struggled to successfully access academic discourse.
