Know your roles: Alleviating the academic-professional tension in the case analysis genre
Thomas D. Mitchell, Silvia Pessoa, María Pía Gómez‐Laich · English for Specific Purposes · 2020
The case analysis, a prominent genre within business administration and information systems (IS) programs, is challenging for students because of competing demands to perform both academic/learner and professional/mock-consultant roles. We examine case analysis student writing that sits in the middle of the pedagogical to professional continuum (Gardner, 2012), where the academic-professional tension is most prominent. The data come from an upper-level IS course at an English-medium American branch campus in the Middle East where we collaborated with IS faculty to scaffold a particular case analysis genre, the case development. In this genre, students analyze their own experiential narrative about a place they visit and make technology-based recommendations to improve the experience. Using systemic functional linguistics (SFL), we unpack the linguistic features of case developments where students attempted to navigate this academic-professional tension. We contrast examples of students who successfully navigated between these two roles with less effective student writing. We conclude by presenting a mentor text that highlights the linguistic features of a case analysis that eases this tension with a productive coexistence of learner and professional roles. Our analysis has implications for helping both students navigate between these roles and teachers conceptualize assignments that explicitly articulate their goals.