ABSTRACT
This chapter reports on a sociology of sport course which seeks to develop undergraduate students’ critical reflection capabilities through evidence-based academic writing. Students tend to start with everyday experience and opinions about sport and lack an academic interpretation. The course enacts semantic gravity from Legitimation Code Theory’s (LCT) Semantics for knowledge-building of the five ‘grand’ sociological stances in the field, Conflict; Critical; Feminist; Functionalist; and Interactionist theories. Semantic gravity is enacted to teach abstract concepts, how these theories might be applied to different empirical contexts, and to raise students’ awareness about how to effectively write a theoretical framework section for an Introduction-Method-Research-Discussion paper. The chapter shares classroom activities devised as five stages: (1) entry points and upshifts (2) entry points and downshifts (3) disconnected high flatlines versus semantic gravity waves (4) semantic gravity wave ranges to demonstrate how SG- and SG+ meanings are employed to produce an effective theoretical framework in a model academic text; and (5) student production of a sound theoretical framework section accompanied with a semantic gravity profile representing it.
