Abstract
For learners in vocational education, acquiring the specialized language of their field is important in facilitating the ability to communicate appropriately with colleagues and customers. Spoken and written discourse in a range of workplace settings has received some attention, but less attention has been given to discourse in vocational education contexts. This article concerns Builders’ Diaries; this is a key written text produced by trainee carpenters, both in an educational setting and once they move into the workplace as apprentices. Writing the Builders’ Diary gives trainees experience in producing a text important also to carpenters in the workplace. An analysis that focuses on language and meaning is used to investigate the purposes served by the Builders’ Diary in educational settings and the meanings expressed in it. Drawing on insights from Applied Linguistics, the analysis uses a small corpus of trainee diaries as well as interviews with qualified carpenters/tutors. It includes a comparison of writing done early on while the trainees are still in an educational setting, and towards the end of carpentry training, once the trainees have moved into the workplace. The study demonstrates the effectiveness of apprenticeship and situated learning in trainees’ acquisition of written workplace discourse.
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Notes
In what follows we use small caps as a convention to denote moves and steps. So henceforward, Move 4, Step 1 is indicated as m4 s1 detailing work: task.
The Bonferroni correction for multiple tests has been applied: P = 0.05 is divided by the number of tests (26 rows in Table 10) giving a p-value of 0.002 in order to reach significance.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the carpentry students who contributed to our corpus of Builders’ Diaries, and also the time and professional expertise of their tutors in assisting in our analysis. We acknowledge too the generous funding support of Ako Aotearoa (NPF14-010).
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Appendices
Appendix 1: A diary entry written by an apprentice
20th May.
8 h
On-site fitting of double hung bedroom window. Removed old window after setting up mobile scaffold. Repaired weatherboards, installed new window, beefed up weights, put on facings, head flashing and architraves inside. Primed all exposed timbers.
Appendix 2: A diary entry written by an on-campus trainee
Day 41.
We continued putting up the trusses. The offset truss had to sit in the top plate, therefore we had to mark out where they were going to sit then cut out part of the top plate. Jason and I continued working on the Jack trusses. There were 4 in total on each end. They all had intersections which had to be flush with one another. It took a while but we managed to do it nicely.
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Parkinson, J., Mackay, J. & Demecheleer, M. Situated Learning in Acquisition of a Workplace Genre. Vocations and Learning 11, 289–315 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12186-017-9191-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12186-017-9191-x