Disciplinary literacy practices

THEME and INFORMATION structure facilitate the development of well-structured text, thereby providing cohesion within language. Systemic functional linguistics’ (SFL) research in multimodal business communication and representation has been confined to workplace and school contexts. Similarly, empirical research studies of finance have investigated students’ performance in finance courses and the effect of
class attendance on students’ performance. However, no published study has explored and analysed the textual features in tertiary finance texts. The importance of examining THEME and INFORMATION structure in tertiary settings becomes
pertinent since it plays a vital role in maximising accounting students’ learning experiences. The study aims to explore the multimodal literacy and numeracy social practices of five first-year Master of Commerce Accounting international students
enrolled at an Australian university. It is of interest as most international ESL/EFL students in Australia and elsewhere are enrolled in business programs (Alyousef & Picard, 2011).

This study reports on a case study designed to investigate and analyse the use of THEME and INFORMATION structure in a key topic in the Management Accounting course, namely budgeting schedules. It employed the multidimensional approach
proposed by Alyousef (2013) to describe the participants’ learning experiences and to investigate and explore the organisation of the multimodal texts. The Systemic
Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) revealed the frequency of two patterns: Theme reiteration and the linear pattern. Theme reiteration in accounting is used to define the accounting numerical values. Thematic choices in the budgeting
tables are constrained by the authoritative source of knowledge for the presentation of information structure in accounting statements. A number of other interesting findings related to the flow of information structure in the multimodal tables are presented and discussed. The study concludes with the pedagogical implications of the findings.

The revised draft of the National Education Policy (NEP 2019) proposes bilingual medium of education as alternate to English (only) Medium Instruction (EMI) in Indian Higher Education (IHE) (MHRD Gov. of India 2019). In continuation of this proposal, an attempt is made in this paper to review the much-debated practice of EMI in IHE. The top-down practice of EMI in IHE is compared with other non-English speaking countries that adopted EMI after 1999 (Maiworm& Wächter 2002, Airey 2015: 561-76, Dearden 2014). Based on the findings from the review and comparison, it is found that India could not achieve the advantages resulting from the EMI in HE like other countries that recently adopted EMI (Williams & Anne 2019, Ranking of National Higher Education Systems 2019, Cornell University 2019). Therefore, based on the experiments and experiences from the other countries, Academic Writing (AW) is proposed as a hard skill in the curriculum of IHE. Systematic introduction of AW can transform the colonial model of EMI towards Disciplinary Literacy as achieved by these successful non-English speaking countries especially the Nordic countries in the post-Bolgana era (Airey & Linder 2007, Kuteeva, Airey 2010, Maria & John Airey 2013: 533-549). The proposed AW can replace EMI by focusing on academic literacy in any Indian and other targeted international languages. Therefore, the top-down implementation of EMI can be reformed and reversed as Disciplinary Literacy Matrix (DLM) where L1 can be any of the Indian languages and the L2 can be any international languages depend upon the discipline. AW is introduced with the anticipated outcome in a knowledge economy. Therefore, India can internationalize its HE by attracting more students across the world, and use the knowledge HE generates to changes the life-world of the society at large and advance India towards a global leader of innovation.

Empirical research studies of finance students’ language use have investigated students’ performance in finance courses and the effect of class attendance on students’ performance. Similarly, research on accounting students’ texts has been directed at readability of accounting narratives and lexical choices. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) based research in
multimodal communication and representation has been confined to school and workplace contexts. Whereas multimodal communication investigations in tertiary contexts has been conducted across the fields of mathematics, science and computing, and nursing, business courses have not been explored. The purpose of this paper is to report on a case study designed to investigate the key multimodal academic literacy and numeracy practices of ten international Master of Commerce Accounting students enrolled at an Australian university. Specifically, it aims to provide an account of the salient textual and the logical patterns through the analysis of cohesive devices in a key topic in the Principles of Finance course, namely capital budgeting techniques and management reports.

This study is pertinent as most international ESL/EFL students’
enrolments in Australia and elsewhere is in business programs. This study is underpinned by Halliday’s (1985) Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach to language and Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) cohesion analysis scheme. The study employs a Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse
Analysis (SF-MDA) for the analysis of cohesive devices in the participants’ multimodal texts. Lexical cohesion formed the largest percentage of use, and in particular repetition of the same lexical items, followed by reference.The findings contribute to the description of the meaning-making processes in these multimodal artefacts. They provide a potential research tool for similar investigations across a broad range of educational settings. Implications of the findings for finance students and educators are finally presented.