With English-medium education (EME) in higher education comes students’ need to express new academic knowledge through appropriate disciplinary linguistic resources in an additional language (Airey & Larsson, 2018). This involves mastering both oral and written discourse skills to understand and produce not only the materialized genres but also the symbolic genres of the discipline (Dressen-Hammouda,, 2008). However, explicit instruction in genre-specific literacy is often absent, as it is assumed to be acquired naturally. To explore how genre knowledge develops, the present study analyzes the longitudinal development of Business students’ oral disciplinary discourse when presenting oral Business case studies — a common materialized genre in the discipline — by focusing on their use of cognitive discourse functions (CDFs) — a fundamental symbolic genre that students must acquire to acculturate to their academic discipline. These data are analyzed thematically and statistically, leading to results that show how students seem to learn how to express their acts of thinking about Business content without receiving intentional instruction in this area.
