ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 explores the nature of academic literacy in EMI. Academic literacy refers to the core competencies students need to develop to learn academic content through EMI. Academic literacy involves understanding assumptions, concepts, ideas, and theories, together with the processes and modes of thinking and inquiry used in a discipline. It involves participating in the communicative practices and academic tasks of the discipline, as well as using the genres and text types used in academic discourse in the discipline. Academic literacy involves mastery of both declarative knowledge (knowing about something) and procedural knowledge (knowing how to do something). The chapter clarifies the role of academic tasks, genres, and texts in different disciplines and also draws on the distinction between BICS (basic interpersonal communicative skills) and CALP (cognitive academic language proficiency) to clarify the nature of acquiring disciplinary literacy in EMI. The nature of common genres and text types of academic disciplines in both secondary and tertiary education is discussed.
