First-year students in higher education settings tend to face ongoing challenges with variations in discursive practices and genres within their discipline. Within this context, a Diagnostic English Language Needs Assessment (DELNA) was administered to first-year engineering students to assess the strengths and needs of their ability to navigate academic language. The purpose of this paper is to report on our initiative to support student’s development of academic literacy, specifically their disciplinary language proficiency through the implementation of pedagogical support activities.

Please see 'Notes' below for any suggested/official citation information added by the author(s) of this work. Otherwise, you can cite the HSS Commons instance of this publication as follows:

• D'Silva, F., Kinnear, P., (2025), "Developing disciplinary discourse in a first-year engineering course: The DELNA initiative", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.31468/dwr.909)

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1. DELNA
2. diagnostic
3. disciplinary
4. discipline-specific
5. Discourse
6. discursive
7. engineering
8. engineering communication
9. genre
10. pedadogical support
11. reading skills
12. undergraduate students
13. workshop

Original publication: D'Silva, Faye; Kinnear, Penny. "Developing disciplinary discourse in a first-year engineering course: The DELNA initiative." Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie, vol. 31, 2021, pp. 126-135. DOI: 10.31468/dwr.909. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie. Copyright © the author(s). Work published in DW/R is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license