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Teaching Academic Writing

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  I was recently asked to outline my approach to teaching academic writing. I am sure that with more experience, both practical and theoretical, this current outline will grow and adapt. However, this is where I am now and this piece will serve as a record upon which future me could reflect. Current approach Keeping in mind that ‘EAP classes cannot produce fully developed academic writers,’ my main aim is to raise students’ awareness of what is involved in academic writing and help them see how they might continue to develop as academic writers beyond the EAP course (Alexander, Argent, & Spencer, 2018, p. 200). Generally, students might share certain concerns about academic writing, which can help us to plan a scheme of work. Some of these concerns relate to language structures, academic style, and collating, summarising and paraphrasing other writers’ ideas to build arguments. On the other hand, teachers might be concerned about subject-specific technical terms that might be u...
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Task: Differentiation

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  What differentiation is and isn’t Tomlinson (2001, p. 1) explains that differentiation ‘provides different avenues to acquiring content , to processing or making sense of ideas , and to developing products so that each student can learn effectively.’ [emphasis added]. Content refers to the input or what we expect students to learn, process comprises multiple sense-making approaches deployed by students, and product is the output or how learning is demonstrated. The common thread running through these approaches is that they are designed with the purpose of significant student development in mind (Tomlinson, 2001). Tomlinson goes on to clarify that differentiation is not to be confused with individualized instruction as it was practised in the 1970s, where the aim was to come up with something different for each of the more than 30 students often found in a class. She emphasises that it includes ‘whole-class, group, and individual instruction’ (2001, p. 5).  The task I wa...
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Teaching English for Academic Purposes to Non-native English Speakers

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  All students at English-medium universities encounter a variety of challenges. However, non-native speakers of English, in particular, will be presented with a unique set of challenges largely due to a lack of linguistic competence and possible educational and cultural differences. In this post, I highlight just a few of these challenges and suggest ways in which lecturers might help students overcome them.  Key graduate attributes Many of these challenges might be directly linked to the key graduate attributes of scholarship as outlined by Alexander, Argent & Spencer, 2018 (Fig. 1). Each of these comes with its own set of conventions and demands that might be new and alien to students from a different educational and cultural background. For example, the concept of autonomy, which is complex and perhaps not always clearly defined, might give rise to conflicting ideas and even resistance in some students. That said, students do need to be exposed to carefully designed ch...
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