Disciplinary registers in a first-year program

Abstract

With notable exceptions, few studies of teaching and learning of scholarly registers and genres to users of English as an additional language focus on curriculum. For a contextualized understanding of register-curriculum relations, this study investigates disciplinary registers in the Academic English Program at Vantage College, a new alternative-entry, first-year program at the University of British Columbia, Canada. In integrating content and language instruction, the curriculum adopts systemic functional linguistics as the informing theory of language. Program registers and their relations are investigated using Matthiessen’s (2015) context-based register typology. This novel case study highlights register-curriculum relations in key aspects, including discipline-specific variation in register instruction, planned learning trajectories, faculty collaborations, and relations between English for general and specific academic purposes.