Forging a Discipline-specific Voice

This book argues that the overarching goal of writing instruction and evaluation across the curriculum should be conceived of as the gradual development of students' discipline-specific discourse competence that will enable them to acquire an authorial voice in their future discipline of specialization. In order to achieve this aim, all the shareholders of the teaching/ learning enterprise across the curriculum should operate with only one unified paradigm to teaching and evaluating writing: the genre-based approach based on a a theory of language-SFL by M.A.K.Halliday - and a theory of learning-Sociocultural theory by Lev Vygotsky. Moreover, the argumentative essay should be assigned a central place in a lengthy apprenticeship process of socialization and acculturation to disciplinary conventions. Even more, after evaluating in pre-experimental conditions the relevance of the proposed solution, the author argues that adopting this pedagogic solution is the only way to prepare the adequate conditions susceptible to lead to the emergence of an indigenous didactic paradigm, which is supposed to be more responsive to the local language learners' needs in foreign language contexts.