Academic discourse as situated practice: An introduction

• Academic language (AL) fulfills communicative, epistemic and socio-symbolic functions.
• AL has to be studied as situated written and spoken discourse practice.
• Contextualization competence must be included in the description of demands of AL.
• Talking academically is closely linked to positioning practices in interaction.

This introduction systematizes previous research on academic language (AL), differentiating between communicative, epistemic and social functions of academic discourse. Pointing to some limitations of existing – mainly register-based – approaches to AL, such as the written language bias, the abstraction from actual language users and contextual realizations, we advocate a practice-based approach to academic discourse. We put forward a concept of academic discourse practices that is grounded in interactional sociolinguistics and ethnomethodological conversation analysis. It acknowledges the situatedness of academic discourse practices, their role in identity construction and stresses the importance of contextualization competence for mastering such discursive demands. Finally, we give an overview of the contributions to this issue and explicate their interrelations.