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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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Moves Like Swales

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  The CARS model In his seminal work on genre analysis published in 1990, John Swales introduced the revised version of his Create a Research Space (CARS) model. Adika (2014, p. 58) explains that this model  'describes the rhetorical moves that researchers utilize to claim research space in their disciplines in a highly competitive environment.' Specifically, the CARS model pertains to the introduction section of research articles (RA). Swales (1990) points out that introductions can be difficult to write. This is because RA authors have an array of options at their disposal for how they might approach the opening paragraphs.  The CARS model comprises 3 rhetorical moves, each with particular steps (See Table 1). Hyland (2006, p. 50) defines a rhetorical move as ‘a distinct communicative act designed to achieve a particular communicative function’. Put another way, a rhetorical move is a stretch of text anywhere from a phrase to a paragraph with a particular job (Rienecker...
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