Scaffolding the Case Analysis in an Organizational Behavior Course: Making Analytical Language Explicit

Abstract

This article describes an innovative interdisciplinary collaboration between English faculty and an organizational behavior (OB) professor to scaffold case analysis writing in an upper-level OB course at an English-medium university in the Middle East. Case analysis writing is challenging for students as an academic genre or type of writing because they do not always know when to report on the case, when to explain OB concepts, and when to go beyond reporting or explaining by using analysis in support of claims. Combining the English faculty’s linguistic knowledge with the OB professor’s disciplinary knowledge, we developed visual support materials to make the valued features of case analysis writing explicit for students. We describe two sets of instructional materials that we used to help students meet genre expectations. We provide evidence from multiple data sources, including on-going analysis of student writing, that points to the effectiveness of our innovative interdisciplinary collaboration. Our findings provide evidence of the benefits of distributed responsibilities in teaching and assessing university students’ communication skills in disciplinary contexts, particularly for L2 learners.