The topic of writing was considered before in the ESP and genre part of this course. Whether ESP or EAP, the core issue is to set a respective format for learners to follow and for teachers to instruct easily.
Before the lecture, I took part in a KEYS course named "success to academic writing" conducted by AUT. The content was mainly about the writing process, the structure, topic sentence, how to write a paragraph, and so on. It sounds like cliches without any novel ideas, but undoubtedly that on the practice level, it is operable. After all, students are required to meet the assessment standards and teachers are supposed to assess students according to certain criteria. It is said that students should know what they want to know. But in most cases, students may ask "What am I supposed to know?". With a clear frame, things may be easier to manipulate.
While according to a research concerning writing in higher education conducted by Lea & Street (1998), things are more complicated than it appears. On the one hand, although academic staff can list the constitutes of a successful writing, they meet difficulties when trying to explicit a "well-developed arguement". On the other hand, for students, they meet more complexity when taking different subjects with diverse requirements. EAP involves not only the right structure but also the characteristics of specific disciplines.Humanities and scientific researches are different in writing. So, what does the meaning of "academic writing skills" lie in?
Each year, thousands of non-native English learners take IELTS, by which they can study in English country. Does the fixed format of IELTS writing help when they start academic learning? Question remains!
Reference:
Lea, M. R. & Street, B. V. (1998). Student writing in higher education: an academic literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education; June 1998, 23(2)
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Thanks for that Chanjuan. In your posting your focus is on academic writing. As I understand it, however, academic writing is just one aspect of numerous areas of concern in an EAP course. These include study skills and academic socialisation in addition to academic literacies. As Lea (2004) stresses, "literacy is not a unitary concept; reading and writing -- literacies are cultural and social practices, and vary depending upon the particular context in which they occur" (p.740).
ReplyDeleteAs for ESP, and depending on the specific purpose of any particular ESP course, writing may be a less important element of it than, say, speaking or listening. Take English for nursing, for example -- not a lot of writing, but a lot of need to engage in listening and speaking with patients, doctors and other colleagues.
Lea's point about literacies as cultural and social practices highights the fact that while reading and writing involve form and structure, which you encountered in the KEYS course, they also also entail understanding the cultural and social context. You don't learn about that in a one-off course.
And, of course, an IELTS score says nothing about a candidate's understanding of the cultural and social context in which they are to be engaging.
Cheers, Mike
Citation in my comment on Chanjuan's post.
ReplyDeleteLea, M.R. (2004). Academic literacies: a pedagogy for course design. Studies in Higher Education, 29 (6).
Always very interesting and fulfilling reading.
ReplyDeleteReading the comments, always makes me wonder. Most of the students who, from China and Asia at least, have a single purpose in mind. The attainment of a higher education qualification. Once this has been achieved, more than likely, they will return to their home country. The improvement of ; writing' or ' speaking' is not the priority. How do I know this? It is not from any academic source or reading but purely from a myriad Asian English language learners eyeing me on a daily basis. Most of them are at a library (be it the city library or AUT).
I do think that we are beating a different drum. We need to start looking at ' what really motivates a learner'. Personally, I feel that this is more important than anything. Partly because I have experienced it myself and also because I have seen a handful of my students experience this. I hope that we have all had the experience.