How good it is to have no deadline coming up! My doctoral (EdD) thesis was accepted by the Open University last week and I am now free to get on with all the creative projects that have been on hold for the last year and a half, such as the construction of this website 🙂
It therefore seems fitting that my first blog post provides some details of the research on which the thesis I have just finished writing was based. The following is a summary of the work I have been engaged in over the last few years. I have expanded on my abstract and tried to avoid too many technical words in this summary.
Aim and Context
My study explored an exam-practice approach to teaching academic reading and writing on an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course in China. This approach meant that academic reading and writing were taught in separate ‘skills’ classes and the content was, as the name exam-practice approach suggests, test practice. Specifically, the reading materials were almost entirely IELTS test preparation papers and the writing materials taught ‘rules of academic style’ for a generic kind of essay that was written without any reference to course content (these materials reflected the local EAP exams which were very similar to the IELTS test). The academic writing lessons also included coursework that was related to the students’ subject studies in either Business and Economics or Engineering.
Data Collection and Methods of Analysis
The data for my study was collected through interviews with teachers who taught on the programme and the textual analyses of teaching materials. Interviews were conducted with EAP teachers in order to identify their perceptions of the exam-practice approach academic reading and writing practices. I used corpus linguistics software (WordSmith Tools) to perform a comparative analysis of the lexical content of EAP materials with a reference corpora of academic writing (BAWE filtered by discipline). This basically means that I used computer software to count the number of times words (or sequences of words) were used in the EAP materials compared to those used in actual student writing.
Findings
Separateness, randomness and purposeless emerged as key themes in the interview data. The separateness of reading and writing skills, and randomness and purposelessness of the content of teaching materials confused and demotivated both teachers and students. Teachers’ main concerns were the negative impact of the exam-practice approach on the effectiveness and efficiency of vocabulary learning, and a mismatch between course aims and assessment. Teachers reported that visuals in the form of diagrams had proved very helpful in the teaching process, especially with Chinese students, but there was less certainty over the place of visuals in student writing. Contextual factors influencing the development of the local EAP programme were identified – local management, material and technological resources, time constraints and the student body (lower level English proficiency and academic awareness than teachers expectations). A strong local discourse circulating amongst teachers was identified that indicated they felt a lack of purpose in their professional role.
The results of the corpus analysis indicated that:
- the reading input did not provide a coherent model of target situation writing
- there is a mismatch between the local academic reading and writing teaching
- there was a lack of non-lexical elements (e.g. figures, tables and formulae) in the local teaching materials, which is contrary to the expectations of target disciplinary writing.
- all the above were evident in the different frequencies of words used in the corpora (i.e. derived from statistics rather than intuition)
Teachers proposed possible solutions to the problems in the form of an English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) approach and/or the use of a course book. Both remain problematic. ESAP solves the problems identified by teachers and my corpus analysis but is difficult to implement due to the need for interdepartmental cooperation and institutional time constraints. The course book solves many of the issues raised by teachers but, as several teachers pointed out, ‘There isn’t one that fits.’ Some teachers also criticised the assessment methods but there was no agreement as to how this could be improved.
Conclusions
My own conclusions drawn from this study are that EAP course aims, teaching approaches and assessment need to be consistent, with a purpose related to students’ target situation needs. There is nothing earth-shattering in that discovery! The problem in my research context was that the attempt to construct an EAP course around an assessment system that was not academic led to a confusing and misleading model of academic reading and writing for students. It also led to the separateness, randomness, purposelessness and frustration reported by teachers. Therefore, course developers need to be aware of the relationship between teaching and assessment and make sure their purposes are consistent. EAP teachers also need to appreciate the importance of figures, tables and formulae in academic writing.
There are various implications for EAP practice embedded in that summary, and there are numerous limitations involved in my study but I will not go into all the details here. I also have a lengthy reference list that I might share a t a later date (I’m not sure what the regulations are on publishing actual sections of my thesis so for now, this informal summary must suffice).
Perhaps I’ll make a video presentation summarising the contents of my thesis as preparation for my viva.
Ten years ago. Wow.