Hans Malmström

Reading in tertiary education: undergraduate student practices and attitudes

This paper reports the findings of a study of undergraduate student use of, and attitudes toward, textbooks and other assigned reading. More than 1200 students of various subjects at three Swedish universities were surveyed. Most students said reading played an important role in learning generally and attributed positive characteristics to their textbooks. However, students’ self-reported reading behaviour was at odds with these attitudes, with many students reporting some degree of non-compliance with reading assignments and a small group of students expressing active resistance to completing reading assignments. Although textbooks were perceived as valuable, students reported a preference for learning course content from other resources, such as lectures and lecture notes. Textbooks were perceived as alternatives, rather than complements, to attending class. Differences were found across academic disciplines. Implications of these findings for educational administration and classroom practice are discussed.

Engaging with terminology in the multilingual classroom: teachers’ practices for bridging the gap between L1 lectures and English reading

Abstract In some academic settings where English is not the first language it is nonetheless common for reading to be assigned in English, and the expectation is often that students will acquire subject terminology incidentally in the first language as well as in English as a result of listening and reading. It is then a prerequisite that students notice and engage with terminology in both languages. To this end, teachers’ classroom practices for making students attend to and engage with terms are crucial for furthering students’ vocabulary competence in two languages. Using transcribed video recordings of eight undergraduate lectures from two universities in such a setting, this paper provides a comprehensive picture of what teachers ‘do’ with terminology during a lecture, i.e. how terms are allowed to feature in the classroom discourse. It is established, for example, that teachers nearly always employ some sort of emphatic practice when using a term in a lecture. However, the repertoire of such practices is limited. Further, teachers rarely adapt their repertoires to cater to the special needs arguably required in these settings, or to exploit the affordances of multilingual environments.

Appraisal, preaching and the religious other: The rhetorical appropriation of interreligious positions in sermonic discourse

Abstract This paper explores preachers’ deployment of Appraisal (affect, judgement, appreciation, and dialogic engagement) in preaching on interreligious themes. Adopting a comparative discourse analysis, the paper investigates two American sermons representing diametrically opposed theological responses to other religions, a pluralist sermon in the Unitarian Universalist tradition and an exclusivist sermon in the biblical-evangelical tradition. An analysis of the two preachers’ Appraisal choices reveals two distinct Appraisal profiles. A discussion is then offered demonstrating how Appraisal is conducive to the appropriation and conservation of a specific interreligious persona during preaching.

“Listen and Understand What I Am Saying”: Church-Listening As a Challenge for Non-Native Listeners of English in the United Kingdom

This article uses computer-assisted analysis to study the listening environment provided by Bible readings and preaching during church services. It focuses on the vocabulary size needed to comprehend 95% and 98% of the running words of the input (lexical coverage levels indicating comprehension in connection with listening) and on the place of infrequent vocabulary in liturgical discourse. The finding that 4,000 words and 7,000 words, respectively, are needed to reach the target levels for lexical coverage suggests that non-native listeners with vocabularies of just a few thousand words may be seriously challenged by church listening.