Disciplinary variations in English domain-specific personal epistemology: Insights from disciplines differing along Biglan's dimensions of academic domains classification

Studies of cross-disciplinary variations in relation to English have been predominantly focused around identifying lower-level linguistic or structural elements. Variations in the use of these elements are assumed to be associated with the epistemological standards of academic disciplines and reflect differences in the discipline-specific conceptions of the nature of knowledge. However, research in this area has approached disciplinarity mostly from this restricted viewpoint of linguistic surface elements and has seldom explored likely differences in the epistemological stances of learners of other academic disciplines towards English. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate the English domain-specific personal epistemology of students of five academic majors differing along Biglan's Soft/Hard and Applied/Pure dimensions of academic domains classification. To this end, surveys were administered to 150 senior students of five academic disciplines—Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, Law, Psychology and English—to explore both their discipline-specific and English-specific personal epistemologies. The data were analyzed using one-way and multivariate analyses of variance and a series of correlations. The analyses revealed significant differences in both discipline-specific and English-domain-specific epistemological stances of the participants across soft and hard academic majors. The analyses further revealed that the participants viewed knowledge of English along the epistemological standards of their own disciplines.