Using Infographic Narratives to Investigate Undergraduate Students’ Disciplinary Literacy Development: An Innovative Narrative Inquiry Approach for English-Medium Education Contexts

Abstract The vast growth of English-medium education (EME) worldwide has drawn substantial scholarly attention. Recently, a growing number of studies have addressed how students develop the disciplinary content and language required for navigating EME programs, conceptualized as disciplinary literacy (DL in EME; Dafouz et al., 2023, see also Airey, 2011). However, few have foregrounded students’ perspectives on their disciplinary literacy development (Dafouz et al., 2023). This study argues that narrative inquiry, defined as “the study of experience as story” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2006, p. 477), is a valuable approach to students’ lived experiences, providing nuanced insights into the complex processes involved in DL development within EME contexts and making it possible to construct trajectories without extensive longitudinal data collection. For this study, four detailed student narratives were constructed from extensive semi-structured interviews with final-year undergraduate EME students in Austria. These narratives reveal key developmental factors and phases, phase-dependent challenges, effective teaching practices, and the importance of curriculum design in supporting the development of disciplinary literacies. Furthermore, this study demonstrates the potential of narrative analysis (Benson, 2013, 2018; Polkinghorne, 1995) and presents infographic narratives as an effective method of representing students’ “DL in EME” trajectories.