Academic register : the voice of authority

Abstract

College students' acquisition of "academic discourse" has been the focus of a long-standing debate in composition studies. Despite much critical attention, academic discourse is still an enigma. Yet many theorists contend that unless and until students learn the conventions of academic discourse, they will not gain access to the academic community and will be unable to participate in the "critical literacy" (Bizzell 1988) of the academy. But before we can begin to respond to the question of "how--or whether--to teach it (academic discourse) " (Bizzell 1986), shouldn't we do more to discover what it is we talk about when we talk about academic discourse? "Academic Register: The Voice of Authority" is a descriptive empirical research project which draws on the sociolinguistic concept of register to describe the mode of academic discourse students may encounter most frequently: the spoken language of their classroom instructors. Data collection took place in classroom situations in which the informants taught college-level rhetoric, composition, or literature. The research corpus totals over 55,000 words and is analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively to produce variables of a hypothesized register I call "academic register." Examples and discussion from the research corpus are provided and analyzed at morphological, lexical, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic levels of language. Some examples of variables I hypothesize to be characteristic of academic register in this corpus include the use of intrusive phrases; polysyllabic words and word clusters; affixation; complex conditionals; multiple negation; lengthy sentences and utterances; clausal and prepositional density; and nominalization and denominalization. A key application of the findings for composition studies is the claim that student acquisition of academic discourse through imitation (Bartholomae 1985) may be problematic despite instructors' abilities to provide models for academic register.