From dot points to disciplinarity: the theory and practice of disciplinary literacies in secondary schooling

Abstract

This thesis explores the disciplinary literacies of Business Studies and Music, with a focus on the written component of the HSC examination in the final year of schooling in New South Wales. The syllabus contains dot points of topics to be covered in the course but these offer little guidance for teachers or students in how to compose an answer to an HSC examination question and they obscure relations between different aspects of disciplinary knowledge. To help teachers move beyond syllabus dot points, this thesis aims to illuminate the distinctive literacy demands of Business Studies and Music. This is achieved by using analytical frameworks from Systemic Functional Linguistics and Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis to explore the features of successful HSC writing in these two subjects. Analysis reveals that successful writing in Business Studies explains patterns of cause and effect with profit as the main motive. In contrast, successful HSC writing in Music describes musical events in terms of concepts of music and principles of musical composition. In the analysis, concepts of music are systematised as networks and taxonomies to reveal the relations within and between concepts. The analysis also includes a typology of images (graphic notation and non-traditional notation) used to represent music to enable an investigation of how image and written text are interrelated in successful HSC responses.