Genre and disciplinary competence: A case study of contextualisation in an academic speech genre

The process of disciplinary socialisation has been linked to a gradual mastery of a discipline’s genres. This article takes a view of genre, as indexing a wide range of often implicit understandings about knowledge creation and use within a discipline, and as fully rhetorical. Within such a framework, novice and near-expert examples of one academic assessment genre – the student architecture presentation are compared. The face-to-face nature of the academic presentation directs attention to the interpersonal dimension involved in the speaker persuading the audience of the value of their design. The analysis thus focused on identifying the rhetorical strategies that successful students used to accomplish this interpersonal dimension in a manner valued by disciplinary experts. From our data, it seemed that the contextualisation practices that students drew upon to facilitate intended interpretations of their design distinguished successful from less successful presentations. These practices were found to include a narrative style, metaphorical images, and dynamic grammar. Such practices served to animate students’ design artefacts and to help take the audience beyond the design artefacts into the world of the students’ designs that the artefacts represented.