Search results for "English for academic purposes"

Beyond the “student” position: Pursuing agency by drawing on learners’ life-worlds on an EAP course

2018

AbstractIn today’s world, individuals should be able to maintain their expertise amidst constant changes. Thus, this type of agency should be supported in higher education. One approach for a teacher-researcher to examine supporting agency and how it manifests itself in higher education courses is through the learning design. In this article, learning design is defined as the planned course path and the way in which that path is enacted in the course in a real-life setting. Thus, the learning design of a blended EAP course is examined, with a focus on the course assignments in two different groups in two consecutive years. Different types of agency were assumed through the tasks and those t…

Knowledge ecology for conceptual growth:Teachers as active agents in developing a PluriLiteracies approach to Teaching for Learning (PTL)

2017

This article explores how a group of educators and researchers enacted an inclusive process of conceptual growth involving teachers and teacher educators as active agents, knowledge builders and meaning-makers in the development of a Pluriliteracies approach to Teaching for Learning (PTL). The evolution of a working model based on five emergent principles, foregrounded the need for stakeholders across different languages, cultures and disciplines, to work together from the start so that learning spaces were created where teacher development went alongside researcher development, and theorizing was not only inclusive of praxis but validated by it. A growth cycle emerged using theories of pra…

How to Foster Critical Literacy in Academic Contexts: Some Insights from Action Research on Writing Research Papers

2013

This chapter attempts to identify problem areas and suggest possible remedial means to rectify critical literacy deficits of students who write research papers in Cultural and Media Studies (CMS) at the Institute of English Studies of Opole University, Poland. Despite sufficient levels of English proficiency and ever easier access to CMS sources, students report daunting problems in selecting and framing their research objectives, stating their positions, and arguing for them. They also find it hard to evaluate materials in terms of relevance and credibility. In brief, they often lack what can be described as critical literacy—a set of skills to interrogate the social, institutional and ide…

Using corpus tools to analyse learner language in a UK EAP context

2014

This study analyses the language of successful spoken requests used by Chinese intermediate level English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students in Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) at a UK higher education institution. Using corpus tools, the authors examined the frequent words, chunks and moves in request data and compared this to general reference corpora. Findings suggest that successful spoken requests often made use of high frequency modals and chunks. The data also demonstrated that the use of appropriate request moves were often associated with success, even if the language used contained linguistic errors. The findings have important implications for how spoken requests are taught in…

Experimenting with computer conferencing in English for Academic Purposes

1995

Are We Really Teaching English for Specific Purposes, or Basic English Skills? The Cases of Turkey and Latvia

2018

English for specific purposes (ESP) has evolved as an important sub-field of English language education to meet the career-related needs of non-native speakers of English in a wide variety of contexts. As such, ESP instruction in specialized subject areas ranging from vocational (e.g., tourism and hospitality) to professional (e.g., international law or banking) to academic (e.g., thesis and dissertation writing) is often integrated in the training and degree programs offered at higher education institutions. However, the ability of these institutions to provide adequate ESP instruction has often been called into question, with critics indicating that insufficient resources and planning, la…

Deviance, did you get it? An experiment in reading to learn

1991

Abstract This article reports an experiment in which an attempt was made to test reading a scientific text under as natural study conditions as possible. After reading a lengthy text from a Sociology textbook in English, five out of 25 Finnish college students understood a basic concept the way it had been defined by a sociologist; 4 weeks later, after going over the text the second time in Finnish, the number increased to 12. However, even after the second reading of the text in their first language, only half of the students had learnt the basic concept. This indicates that the problems in studying were not only linguistic problems; they seem also to have been study skill problems in gene…

Teacher-researchers Exploring Design-based Research to Develop Learning Designs in Higher Education Language Teaching

2012

Due to constant changes and developments of the 21st century societies and working life, the environments in which learning takes place have changed. Novel ways to research learning in those environments and to explore how learning could be supported with the learning design are needed in order to bring about changes in teaching practices. One of those ways could be design-based research (DBR), an iterative, interventionist and flexible research strategy, which would allow cycles of developing theory of learning as well as implementing design principles in practice. This article describes how we, as teacher-researchers, have adopted a design-based research approach in two separate studies i…

Information and Communication Technology within English for Academic Purposes Studies

2009

Learner agency within the design of an EAP course

2015

To meet the demands of today’s society and working life, higher education should support the development of learner agency. How the agency of individual learners emerges in university courses and what kind of agency empowers the learners to face new challenges should be considered. In this article, the focus is on learner agency enabled and expressed on a higher education language course. One learner’s experiences of a blended English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course are explored and used to examine the design of the course. The data reveal that the learner’s views of language-use categories and of herself as a language user emerged as central parts of her agency. Although the learner was…