SQUARING THE CIRCLE: TEACHING EAP TO LARGE MIXED GROUPS
This paper highlights core considerations for
managing and sustaining the interest of large mixed ability EAP classes . These
include providing a variety of
authentic and purposeful learning tasks and staging lessons with flexible
timeframes. Other key factors like collaboration, open-endedness and enquiry
are elaborated with examples for classroom application. The article recommends
the selective use of methodologies from a continuum of approaches that range
from sheltered to deep end strategies
with different degrees of instructional
scaffolding to be used throughout, according to learners’ needs. The teaching of the five skills (Reading,
Writing, Listening, Speaking and Study Skills) is essential to progress in
tandem with the profound dimensions of EAP since there is no consensus as to a
single ESP/EAP approach. This ensures skill transference, disposition towards
study, overall development of competence and ultimately, the students’ academic
success.
In a paper
entitled “ESP and the curse of Caliban”,
Henry Widdowson invokes the teacher/student relationship between the
magician Prospero and the savage Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In the second scene of the play, in response to
Caliban’s complaints, Prospero regrets having taught him language:
Prospero:
I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thy own meaning, but wouldst gabble, like
A thing most brutish, I endow’d thy purposes
With words to make them known.
[…]
Caliban’s
reply has all the resentment of the colonised language learner:
Caliban: You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is I know how
to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning
me your language!
Widdowson notes that Prospero’s educational programme
had been a kind of ESP – “English for Slavery”, if you like. However, not only had
the programme failed to recognise the student’s real needs – his learning
purposes – but like many learners (including ESP students) Caliban had actually
learnt (or acquired) something other than what his teacher thought he was
teaching him. (Widdowson comments wryly that “one must assume that cursing did
not figure as a function in Prospero’s language course”!) Underlying this
example is a serious point about needs analysis. The idea of designing a course
to meet real needs by first identifying those needs seems thoroughly reasonable
– especially when the needs seem to be so clearly definable. But the limitation
of the Prospero approach lies in its being purely goal-oriented – the needs it analyses are based exclusively on the
learner’s eventual purposes in using the language – occupational purposes for
Caliban, academic purposes for our students. By focusing only on the intended
outcomes, it fails to acknowledge the importance of what the learner needs
along the way – the language required to learn the language. A more process-oriented approach would go
beyond the inventory of items identified in the initial needs analysis to take
into account the ways in which the language is learnt. It would thus acquire a
broader educational function than just language training.
Large Classes
If you are teaching large classes, you will be only too well aware
of the challenges involved, and you will certainly have developed your own
strategies for coping with these challenges. All classes, of whatever size,
entail to some extent mixed levels of attainment. The larger the class, the
more problematic this becomes. Demands on the teacher common to any teaching
situation–in terms of classroom management, involving and motivating students,
attending to individual learning styles – are magnified exponentially in the
large class, and in the large language class the situation is complicated
further, as the ‘content’–i.e. the language–is also the medium of instruction.
But if the problems are common ones writ large, so perhaps are the strategies
for coping with them. It should be self-evident, but it is always worth
reminding ourselves, that we need to make the most of planning strategies that
will maximise student interest and involvement. Thus, the basic desiderata for
any language class – variety, pace, interest – are particularly important in the larger class.
Variety
Variety of tasks is an of maintaining effective means of engaging
students with different levels of attainment, and in the large class, a way
involvement. A couple of examples:
- If the focus of a lesson is on vocabulary,
some students can work with dictionaries, collecting and comparing definitions,
examples, collocations; stronger students can work on occurrences of the items
in reading texts, inferring meaning or building up componential analysis
charts; while the most competent students can produce their own short texts to
exemplify and demonstrate their understanding of the new items. Students can
then be re-grouped to share and benefit from the outcomes of each other’s work.
- It is not always necessary to set up
differential tasks. For example, another kind of variety may be achieved,
paradoxically, through a process of repetition: students can be asked to write
outline notes as a basis for summaries of different texts – or different
sections of the same text – and then, without referring back to the original
text, to use their notes to report what they have read to a partner, then to
another, and another, and so on. At each successive stage, the partner’s
questions and requests for clarification should enable students to revise and
refine their oral summaries, so that they can eventually produce more reliable
written versions.
- Variety also applies to modalities of
classroom interaction: switching from individual work to pair work; switching
from teacher-fronted, whole-class activity to group work; switching from what
Halliwell in Teaching English in the
Primary Classroom (1992) calls
‘stirrers’ to what she calls ‘settlers’ – i.e. from highly active tasks to more
reflective phases.
Pace
Teachers know instinctively when a lesson has pace–or loses
pace–though often this awareness only comes in retrospect. When planning
lessons, therefore, it is important to try to predict the pace that will be appropriate for different stages of a
lesson, and the moments in a lesson where a change of pace may be desirable.
Setting strict time limits for activities such as brainstorming or gist reading
will encourage students to adopt the appropriate cognitive and strategic
approaches, whereas other more reflective activities, for example, a discussion
or planning an outline for an essay, will benefit if they can be more
open-ended.
Interest
It should be axiomatic that relevant content will automatically be
of interest to EAP students, but if the class represents a range of different
disciplines, the issue of relevance becomes more complex. I will return to the
question of discipline specificity; but even assuming that you succeed in
selecting a relevant topic, intrinsic interest alone will not necessarily
ensure students’ continuing engagement, and this is likely to be
exacerbated by the
dynamics of the
large, mixed-level class. At
each stage of the
lesson, students need to feel a sense of achievement, and interest
needs to be sustained through a varied sequence of purposeful activities. Here
we can appeal to communicative principles that apply to any general-purpose
class: the importance of creating opportunities for:
• discovery learning
• genuine exchange of information
• using the language in problem-solving processes
To these three basic principles I should like to add three more,
which seem to me to be key factors in the large, mixed-level EAP class: collaboration, open-endedness and enquiry.
Collaboration
Literally ‘working together’, collaboration entails the principle
of co-operation, i.e. working together to achieve a common purpose. This
implies activities in which each participant– both partners in a pair or each
member of a group– has to make a distinctive and necessary contribution towards
achieving that common goal. There are many ways in which this principle can be
realised,for example:
- brainstorming activities, in which everyone’s ideas are
important
- problem-solving activities, in which each member of the group has
a piece of
information that forms part of what the whole group needs to know
in order to find a solution to the problem
- jigsaw activities, in which members of the group have each heard
or read or
researched complementary blocks of information, which they then
have to collaborate to put together
- peer reviews, in which students read and comment on each other’s
written work
- collaborative writing, in which members of the group have to make
individual
contributions to a joint
written product
- more extended workshop
activities, such as mini-research projects, surveys and poster presentations, where both the process and product are multiplex, and
so accommodate differential contributions from
different individuals.
In large multi-level classes, where the extent
to which the teacher can be involved in all the learning activities in the classroom is physically limited,
collaborative ways of working are essential, in order to make the most of the
available human resources – i.e. the students. The most practical way of
converting this limitation into an opportunity for learning is to create
opportunities for students to adopt some aspects of the teacher’s role, both
for themselves and their peers. This shift of responsibility pays off not just
in terms of efficiency, but should also help to make students better learners,
as they are placed in a position where they have to participate more, and
develop learning skills, such as negotiation, self-monitoring and
self-evaluation, which will be valuable in their specific disciplines as well
as their language learning.
Open-endedness
Much of the work done in language classes, perhaps
especially in the domain of EAP, is closed-ended, for example, transformation
and slot-and filler exercises with single correct answers, or production tasks,
apparently open, but in fact constrained by strict models or genre conventions.
This unitary approach can produce a sense of frustration for many students in
large mixed-level classes, often denied the opportunity of using the language
available to them at their own different levels of competence. The virtue of
open-ended language tasks is that they can give all the students in the class a
sense of achievement, of being able to use the language effectively. Some
examples might include:
- giving students a set of graded questions
and allowing them to select the ones that they wish to answer
- adapting tasks which are traditionally
closed-ended (e.g. categorising, matching,
multiple choice) in such a way as to accommodate a
number of acceptable answers. The process implied is one of justification, in
which the emphasis is not so much on ‘getting the right answer’ as on
explaining one’s reasons for selecting a possible answer.
- students working in groups to compile their
own entries to develop an ongoing
lexicon. This also has a strong element of
collaboration, as it avoids putting pressure on individuals to come up with
‘the right answer’ and gives everyone the opportunity to contribute towards
formulating joint definitions
Enquiry
A concept that has gained increasing recognition in
language learning theory comes from the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky –
the Zone of Proximal Development, or ZPD.
Vygotsky defines the ZPD as “the distance between the actual developmental
level... and the level of potential development through problem solving under
adult guidance....” Put very simply, then, the ZPD refers to the potential area
of language development just beyond a learner’s current level of competence.
Another way of encouraging students in the large multilevel class to become
involved while operating in their Zone of Proximal Development is to foster a
spirit of enquiry in the class through an open mode of questioning. This means
asking – and getting students to ask – questions that do not have predictable,
closed answers, i.e. questions that begin elaboration posed in frames such as Could you explain how…? or Could you explain what you mean by…? A
good principle here is to focus on referential
questions–genuine questions to which the teacher does not know the
answer–rather than display questions whose
main purpose is to allow the students to display their knowledge of the
language. Nunan (1989) notes, “it is
not inconceivable that the effort involved in answering referential questions
prompts a greater effort and depth of processing on the part of the learner.”
Thornbury (1996) writing
about teacher talk, adds this comment to Nunan’s rather speculative conclusion:
I would go further, and
argue that the effort involved in asking referential questions
prompts a greater effort
and depth of processing on the part of the teacher. Try
conducting a lesson in
which every question is referential! For teachers brought up in
the
‘elicit-standardize-drill‘ school, it can be a salutary experience.
Since the language
teacher is rarely, if ever, also a subject specialist, the EAP class would seem
to be a highly natural environment for referential questioning, as the teacher
can ask real questions to which students can give real answers. But asking
genuine, enquiring questions should not only be the province of the teacher: it
may also become something that students are encouraged to do, and the
mixed-discipline EAP class should again offer a natural environment for what is
often maintained as a principle in language classrooms, but perhaps not so
often put into practice–the genuine exchange of information.
Mixed Disciplines: ESAP
or EGAP?
EAP has been subdivided, by Blue (1993) and others, into two
categories, producing two further acronyms: EGAP (English for General Academic
Purposes) and ESAP (English for Specific Academic Purposes). But even if an EAP
class consists of students from the same discipline, it is comparatively rare
for all the students to be following exactly the same elective sub-disciplines.
So the problem of specificity is one that to some extent confronts most EAP
course designers and teachers. Research findings in this area are inconclusive
– perhaps reassuringly so. In a survey paper published in 2001, Caroline
Clapham of Lancaster University points out that the relationship between
subject specificity and students’ comprehension is relatively unpredictable, as
it may be difficult to know precisely what students have studied previously and
difficult, if not impossible, to know what interests and previous knowledge
they might have outside their subject disciplines. So while schema theory tends
to suggest that comprehension will be more successful when bottom-up text
processing is combined with the top-down advantages of contextual familiarity,
this does not necessarily provide a strong case for an ESAP approach to
selecting texts. Clapham also notes the difficulty of finding subject-specific
texts or assessing their suitability, and suggests that genre rather than topic
may be a more useful yardstick for text selection. Her conclusion is that “it
seems sensible for EAP teachers to teach what Dudley-Evans and St John (1998)
call ‘common core’ EAP”, exposing students to a range of EGAP academic texts,
covering a range of transferable text functions such as introductions,
literature surveys, reports of research methods and discussions of results, which are common to most
disciplines. At certain points it will no doubt be necessary to diverge from
this common core and give students the opportunity to deal with text functions
which are more subject-specific, such as describing technical processes, for
example. However, given the difficulty of identifying the right material, the
best source for such texts may well be the students themselves, if they can
provide examples, such as journal articles or recordings of lectures, which
they have actually had to tackle – or will do so – in the course of their
studies.
finding subject-specific texts or assessing their suitability, and
suggests that genre rather than topic may be a more useful yardstick for text
selection. Her conclusion is that “it seems sensible for EAP teachers to teach
what Dudley-Evans and St John (1998) call ‘common core’ EAP”, exposing students
to a range of EGAP academic texts, covering a range of transferable text
functions such as introductions, literature surveys, reports of research
methods and discussions of results, which are common to most disciplines. At
certain points it will no doubt be necessary to diverge from this common core
and give students the opportunity to deal with text functions which are more
subject-specific, such as describing technical processes, for example. However,
given the difficulty of identifying the right material, the best source for
such texts may well be the students themselves, if they can provide examples,
such as journal articles or recordings of lectures, which they have actually
had to tackle–or will do so–in the course of their studies.
Approaches: Methodology
Although there is no consensus as to a single ESP/EAP approach,
there is perhaps one controlling principle underlying most approaches and
proceeding from descriptions obtained through needs analysis of eventual
application – the principle of authentic and purposeful tasks. The ‘invention’
project at the University of Cali, Colombia, is a very good example of this principle in action.
Students are required to invent a device related to their major field and to
present a model or graph of the structure, function and characteristics of the
device invented, including semantic maps with advantages and disadvantages
according to the feasibility of the device, unknown vocabulary, and a short
written text to accompany the presentation. Clearly, this concept could be elaborated
with different genres, such as a report or a technical manual. The invention
idea is particularly satisfying as it can conform, if undertaken in groups, to
the desirable conditions of project work for mixed levels, creating
opportunities for students to make significant contributions to the achievement
of a common goal while being able to work at their own language level.
The variable factor in
designing tasks for the ESP/EAP classroom is control, and it may be instructive
to view the options available to the teacher/materials designer as a continuum
of approaches exhibiting varying degrees of control. The more ‘sheltered’ end
of the continuum is represented by Phillips (1981), whose approach is
summarised in four key principles:
• reality control: the level of task difficulty should be controlled by simplifying
the specific purpose of the task and
not just simplifying the level of the language.
• non-triviality: the
learner must perceive the learning task as meaningfully generated by the special
purpose.
• authenticity: the
language acquired by learners must be authentic.
• tolerance of error: errors should only be regarded as unacceptable if they compromise
communicative adequacy
The other extreme of
this methodological continuum is the ‘deep end’ strategy described by Hall
& Kenny (1988). Working on a pre-sessional EAP course in a university in
Thailand, they were concerned about preparing learners for the kind of
activities that they would actually be faced with in their subsequent studies. The
point of departure for their course was therefore to confront their learners
with actual tasks that they would eventually have to deal with. The rationale
for these ‘shock tactics’ was to encourage “initiative, the sharing of ideas
and a focus on the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of investigation rather than on the ‘what’.”
In practice it seems unlikely that the
methodology applied in any given situation will be fixed at any particular
point along this continuum, but rather that it will tend to fluctuate at
different times – perhaps even at different moments within the same lesson –
for different purposes. One important implication at the task-based end of the
continuum is a variation in the role of the teacher. The more authentic the
task, the less likely it is that the language teacher will be in control of the
content, and consequently the teacher’s role is bound to shift from being an
omniscient repository of knowledge to enabling learning to take place by
adopting the role of guide or advisor. Here the notion of scaffolding comes into play.
The concept of scaffolding is part of
Vygotsky’s ZPD theory and referred
originally to the need that the child has in first language acquisition for
‘social interactional frameworks’. Scaffolding is the term given to the kind of
structured support that favours the child’s cognitive and language development,
received from parents and other adults. This has been extended (in the work of
Applebee & Langer 1983) to the notion of instructional scaffolding. In
instructional scaffolding, a skilled language user supports the learner by
modelling the language the learner needs for a given task. As with the child, a
process of structured questioning that also provides scaffolding helps to
extend or refine what the learner already knows. The teacher’s role is not to
evaluate the learner’s answers, but through supportive questioning routines, to
support, encourage and provide additional prompts. As the learner becomes
increasingly competent, the scaffolding can gradually be removed until the point
where the learner is able not only to carry out the particular task
independently, but also to generalise and transfer his/her newly-gained
competence to other comparable
According to Applebee (1986) there are
five criteria for effective scaffolding:
1. Student ownership of the
learning event. The instructional task must allow students to make their own contribution to
the activity as it evolves.
2. Appropriateness of the
instructional task. This means that the tasks should build upon the knowledge and skills the
student already possesses, but should be difficultenough to allow new learning to
occur. (ZPD)
3. A structured learning environment. This
will provide a natural sequence of thought and language, thus presenting the student
with useful strategies and approaches to the
task.
4. Shared responsibility. Tasks
are solved jointly
in the course of instructional interaction, so the role of the teacher is
more collaborative than evaluative.
5. Transfer of control. As
students internalise new procedures and routines, they should take a greater
responsibility for controlling the progress of the task such that the amount of interaction may
actually increase as the student becomes more competent.
One major problem for EAP teachers–amplified in the
mixed-level, mixed-discipline class–is the selection of appropriate texts. It
may be difficult to maintain a strong position on authenticity if authentic
texts are found to be too complex, while the content level of simpler texts may
alienate students whose subject knowledge exceeds the level of the texts. If we
go back to the principle that authenticity should reside in the language that students learn rather than
in the texts themselves, one way out of this impasse might be to select
articles on relevant topics in journal–even popular journal–written for
informed, but not specialist, readerships.
Perhaps the defining contrast between reading skills for the
general-purpose learner and the EAP learner is the issue of purpose. EAP
students need to be able to read selectively for a specific purpose, to
evaluate what they read, and to make use of it in some practical further
application, for example, recording or transferring information, making notes
to incorporate in a piece of writing, using the information to support an
argument, and so on. The implications of this purposefulness are usually
interpreted as a need to focus on macro reading skills:
- predicting,
- skimming and scanning,
- distinguishing primary from secondary
information
and on micro reading skills :
- recognising text functions (such as
generalisation, definition, explanation)
- recognising discourse relationships (such as
condition, cause and effect, comparison and contrast)
- acquiring specialised vocabulary.
The emphasis in EAP reading programmes thus tends to
be on specific aspects of intensive reading, which will equip learners to cope
with the practical reading demands of their particular disciplines. What is
perhaps less widely acknowledged is the value of extensive reading for students
who need to gain the confidence to deal with substantial amounts of text in their
future studies, confidence which can only come from experience. This point is
made by Carrell & Carson (1997), and more forcefully by Day and Bamford .
They claim that “extensive reading should be an integral, even major, part of
preparing students for academic reading”. In addition to boosting confidence,
engendering a positive attitude towards reading, and developing vocabulary and
knowledge of the world, they suggest that “extensive reading may play a role in
developing the capacity for critical thinking,” which is a key
success factor in higher
education. They cite Grabe (1986), discussing the teaching of reading in an EAP
setting:
- recognising discourse relationships (such as
condition, cause and effect, comparison and contrast)
- acquiring specialised vocabulary.
The emphasis in EAP
reading programmes thus tends to be on specific aspects of intensive reading,
which will equip learners to cope with the practical reading demands of their
particular disciplines. What is perhaps less widely acknowledged is the value
of extensive reading for students who need to gain the confidence to deal with
substantial amounts of text in their future studies, confidence which can only
come from experience. This point is made by Carrell & Carson (1997), and
more forcefully by Day and Bamford . They claim that “extensive reading should
be an integral, even major, part of preparing students for academic reading”.
In addition to boosting confidence, engendering a positive attitude towards
reading, and developing vocabulary and knowledge of the world, they suggest
that “extensive reading may play a role in developing the capacity for critical
thinking,” which is a key success factor in higher education. They cite Grabe (1986), discussing the
teaching of reading in an EAP setting:
Discovery and creative
thinking are emergent processes where the mind […] makes
Non obvious connections and
relations between previously independent domains of
knowledge[…]…second language students usually opt for ‘safe’ responses. While
there are many causes for
this phenomenon; a chief one is the lack of background
knowledge assumptions which
form a basis from which to begin more speculative
thinking, and which form a
basis for many English language assumptions. The point
is that prior reading
experiences are crucial for having the information base to make
non obvious connections.
Day &Bamford (1998)
cite an impressive range of research results from the 1980s and 1990s in EFL
and ESL settings across several continents that show significant gains from
extensive reading, not only in terms of students’ reading proficiency, as might
be expected, but across the board in general language proficiency, and
specifically in terms of vocabulary, writing, listening and positive affect.
The success of these extensive reading programmes, in
which students were encouraged to read widely for pleasure, suggests a possible
reversal of the historical reaction against literary texts for EAP students.
Recent research reported by Hirvela (2001) lends some support to the idea that
EAP students may derive benefits from reading literary texts (in terms of
exposure to different rhetorical styles) that might complement the more obvious
value of their reading of non-literary texts. Hirvela’s sample is small and his
results are therefore somewhat inconclusive, but he suggests that “students can
begin at one end of [Widdowson’s] ‘scale of specificity’– the broad end,
involving literary texts and writing in response to them – and move toward the
narrow end, where they focus on non-literary texts and write papers that use
the texts in ways other than response.”
Writing
I would like to focus on two ongoing debates about writing as an
EAP skill. The first area of methodological controversy that I want to mention
is a kind of mirror image of the debate about appropriate degrees of
specificity for reading texts – that is to say whether EAP writing classes
should aim to develop general academic writing skills, in the hope that skills
and strategies will be transferable to subsequent special-purpose writing
tasks, or whether they should be devoted to teaching students to analyse and
reproduce the specific written genres that belong to their eventual fields of
study. The arguments here are very similar to those we mentioned before in
terms of reading, i.e. that specific varieties of academic written discourse
are so diverse that it would be difficult for the EAP teacher to deal with them
directly–or adequately.
The other, larger debate is about the competing
claims of product-focused and process-focused approaches. A focus on product
would typically involve:
• the identification of specific discourse features in a particular
genre
• modelling by reading examples of texts in the appropriate genre
• noticing through tasks that draw students’ attention to
characteristic features of the genre
• genre analysis, where students identify major text features
• information transfer and text comparison
• controlled production (text completion, text reconstruction, text
re-ordering)
• text production
The process approach, popularised by White and
Arndt (1991), breaks down the stages of writing into brainstorming, drafting,
revising, re-drafting, further revising and re-working, further evaluation, and
writing a final draft. Here the stages of revision and re-drafting that in a
product-focused approach might be indiscernible–or even elided–are privileged,
and this implies a central role for the teacher and for peer editors in giving
feedback and advice as the student’s text evolves.
In fact, it seems quite possible to me to view
the product/process debate as something of a false dichotomy, since it should
be possible to adopt a process approach to ‘explode’ the final stage of the
product-based writing cycle. In other words, to have a hybridised ‘product via
process’ approach.
An issue associated with the implementation of a
process approach is the effect of response to student writing. There has been a
great deal of research into this question over the past decade, reported
recently in a survey paper by Dana Ferris (2001). The conclusions she reports
provide some interesting contrasts between students’ responses to teacher
feedback and their responses to peer feedback. It appears that students tend to
value teacher feedback and try to make use of it at revision stages, though the
changes they attempt do not always improve–or even weaken–their writing.
Sometimes they actually avoid or ignore feedback from the teacher. Feedback
from peers, on the other hand, is enjoyed and valued, though not to the
exclusion of teacher feedback, and it is more likely to be considered if it is
kept separate from teacher feedback; its effects also tend to vary, depending
on the variable nature of the peer interactions involved.
There is surprisingly little research available
on the effects of feedback on errors. The research that has been carried out in
this area suggests that the best error feedback is carefully prioritised and
selective, and indirect–in the sense that the location of errors is identified,
rather than the errors being explicitly corrected. The conclusion drawn is that
students should be encouraged to develop self-editing skills, and this in turn
would seem to lend support to a process-writing approach.
Listening
With listening, as with reading and writing, one of the most
contentious questions is the conflict between the ‘deep-end’ challenge of fully
authentic materials (in this case the real lecture, a lengthy stretch of
discourse heard only once) and materials that are simplified for learning purposes,
perhaps heard more than once, and therefore more easily processable by
learners. As anyone who teaches listening will attest, there are important
issues of learner confidence at stake here. Learners can be more easily
discouraged by the obstacles involved in authentic academic listening than by
difficulties in any other domain of language learning. However, there are
significant features of the spoken discourse of academic lectures that are
absent from the recorded performances of written texts that are commonly
available in published listening materials. These include the lecturer’s use of
body language, a variety of interpersonal strategies used by the lecturer to
establish and sustain contact with the audience and confirm that they are
following the discourse, the use of rhetorical questions, and the use of visual
aids, handouts and reading assignments. It also seems that this lecture is the
exception rather than the rule, in that I prefer to rely on a written text
rather than speaking spontaneously or (re)constructing my lecture from notes.
Authentic lectures also
tend to exhibit features commonly associated with unplanned speech, such as
hesitations, false starts, reformulations, redundancies, repetitions, fillers
and discourse signposts. Most of these features are designed to make the
content of a lecture more accessible, and paradoxically, the sanitised versions
of lectures, ‘cleaned up’ for commercial recordings are actually rendered more
difficult by their absence.
The solution would seem
to lie in a combination of training students to deal with bottom-up elements of
comprehending spoken discourse via published materials and exposing them to
samples of authentic lectures, with all their useful untidiness. Flowerdew
(1994) also suggests a practical measure that attacks the problem from the
other side: training the lecturers who teach students to adjust their mode of
lecturing, so as to improve their projection and style of delivery, incorporate
more discourse signals, announce a ‘menu’ of main points, include regular
summaries and plenty of repetition and reformulation.
Speaking
Speaking tends to be the
neglected Cinderella among the skills. To some extent, speaking for EAP
students bears a reciprocal relationship to listening in much the same way as
writing does to reading. That is to say, the skills of structuring and delivery
required to give an effective oral presentation are parallel to the features
that we want students to be aware of when they are listening to lectures.
However, there are other specific speaking skills that can be identified in
various academic settings. Jordan (1997) lists asking questions during
lectures, seminars and tutorials, taking part in seminar discussions,
interacting in collaborative situations, such the laboratory or workshop or
project group, and describing data or experimental procedures.
Despite the fact that students tend to be judged most
immediately by how well they can cope with the spoken language – and this
judgement is often transferred to an informal evaluation of their overall
language competence–EAP speaking skills remain somewhat neglected by
researchers. Speaking in a seminar situation is complicated by a number of
extra-linguistic factors. Lynch and Anderson (1991) mention:
• the publicness of the performance
• the need to think on your feet
• the requirement to be able to call up relevant subject knowledge
• the need to present logically ordered arguments
• the fact that speakers may be assessed on their contributions
Wilkins’ (1976) distinction between synthetic and analytic approaches to syllabus design provides a useful frame of
reference here:
A
synthetic language teaching strategy is one in which the different parts of
language are taught separately and step by step so that acquisition is a
process of gradual accumulation of parts until the whole structure of language
has been built up.
[analytic syllabuses] are organised in terms of
the purposes for which people are learning language and the kinds of language
performance that are necessary to meet those purposes.
The teaching of EAP speaking skills often tends to
reflect the synthetic approach
applied to the other skills: breaking up and focusing on the use of the spoken
language in discrete elements, such as grammatical structures, language
functions, and appropriate microskills. An analytic
approach implies using the language holistically to carry out communicative
activities, something more akin to the task-based model elaborated by Jane
Willis (1996). The TBL(task-based learning) cycle involves preparation, task
performance, analysis and reflection (based on recordings of students’ own
performance and/or native speakers’ performance of the same or a similar task)
and a follow-up repetition of the task–something like the re-drafting stage of
the process writing cycle. This would seem to be an appropriate way of
addressing some of those features of a seminar discussion that are so
important, but often slip into the interstices of the EAP teaching programme.
Study skills subsume some of the language skills
surveyed above, as they include operations such as listening and note-taking,
reading skills for study purposes, oral presentations, seminar discussions, and
essay/ report writing. They also extend to research skills, such as finding and
using reference sources (these days including the Internet), presentation
skills (in writing as well as speech) and processing skills (these days
including word-processing). But in addition to these tangible study techniques,
academic success is also dependent on a deeper level of affect and attitude and
disposition towards study.
• encourage independence of mind
• foster self-awareness
• increase self-evaluation skills
• build up self-confidence
• develop flexibility and adaptability
• improve capacity for learning in general
Waters and Waters propose three types of
problem-solving activities to raise awareness of study competence and its
relationship to study skills – Direct Study Tasks, Indirect Study Tasks and
Skills Transference Tasks. The Direct approach involves the student in tasks
which quite explicitly develop particular competences; the Indirect approach
ostensibly demands the application of study skills, with the potential for
developing study competence remaining implicit; the Skills Transfer approach
combines these two, getting students to employ study skills to carry out a
task, and then explicitly to discuss the nature of the relevant competences.
It seems to
me that Waters and Waters have identified quite a profound dimension of EAP
that goes much deeper than the mechanics of technical language training for
academic purposes. Their concluding statement, I think, provides EAP teachers
with a challenging goal:
…learning to study effectively needs to be seen primarily as a process
of making a certain turn of mind personally meaningful in relation to handling
academic data, rather than as merely a matter of exposure to and practice of a
repertoire of study techniques.
STUDY SKILLS
(Techniques for Effective Study)
note-taking skimming & scanning using
a bibliography
•self-awareness
•logical thinking
•critical questioning
•autonomy
•self-confidence etc
STUDY COMPETENCE
(cognitive and affective capacity
for study)
(based
on Waters & Waters (1992))
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