Achieving academic literacy: disciplined discourse

Concerns that students increasingly come to tertiary studies ill‐prepared for academic pursuit in the disciplines have generated a broad range of supplementary tuition in Australian Universities during the past decade. Many researchers and tertiary teachers have from experience realized that tertiary learning skills are very much context‐, or discipline‐specific. This paper is concerned with making context‐specific expectations known to students through a process of ‘showing how’, rather than ‘telling what’. Two highly specialized teaching structures were used to generate appropriate questions for students, thereby providing parameters for their search and research and ultimately, their writing in the discipline.