Applying semantic gravity wave profiles to develop undergraduate students’ academic literacy

Abstract This study draws on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT), particularly semantic gravity waving, as a strategy for academic literacies practitioners to conceptualise how knowledge in their field might be organised and presented. Students can be guided to notice meanings related to context-dependency at the discourse and lexico-grammatical levels through the presentation of semantic gravity waving profiles. For this study, semantic gravity waving profiles have been found useful for explaining the rationale of a genre pedagogy approach, the structure of an Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion (IMRD) genre, and teaching both lexical coherence for a theoretical framework section, and accurate use of determiners with non-count abstract nouns such as “research”. Therefore, semantic gravity profiling seems to provide explanatory power as a pedagogical tool in the classroom. Findings from a mixed method survey with sixty students as well as extracts from student texts before and after semantic gravity waving profile pedagogical interventions are provided.