Faculty Publications and Conference Presentations

The trend towards an embedded approach to English for Academic Purposes (EAP) has led to calls for more collaboration between EAP practitioners and subject tutors (Wingate 2012). In this paper, we argue that this does not go far enough. The field of EAP can be seen as comprising two areas of important work which, at present, remain somewhat distinct: research and pedagogy (Ding and Bruce 2017). Both are interested in student writing, and both have approached student writing primarily through the lens of genre. Existing research on student writing (e.g. Nesi and Gardner 2012) draws heavily on methods of analysis applied to published academic texts (Hyland, Flowerdew, among many others). Taken together, EAP research has led to a good set of useful conclusions about specific features of text such as hedging, nominalisation, etc., on the one hand, and broad generalisations about ‘science’ v ‘social science’, for example, on the other. Our survey of the literature leaves us with the observation that there are too few voices within the EAP research side of the field that go beyond investigating what’s typical in academic writing to asking the question that practitioners engaged in pedagogy want answered: what is good academic writing? We report on a project in which EAP practitioners have joined forces with subject tutors to explore this very question. Based on the experience of this project, we argue that a call for ‘collaboration’ between EAP and subject tutors is not ambitious enough. Significant gains are to be made if tutors with expertise in EAP and tutors with expertise in a specific academic discipline take a ‘dual practitioning’ approach to what both sets of professionals dedicate a significant proportion of their career to: student education. Such an approach recognises equal value of contribution to a shared interest. Subject tutors are rightly respected for their knowledge of their respective academic field. EAP tutors possess not only the knowledge of academic text in terms of both product and process, but the metalanguage to make this knowledge explicit. In addition to benefitting the field of EAP itself, a dual practitioning approach will help to prevent a deficiency model which undermines the values and intentions of academia and academics.

In the past few years’ creativity seemed to have been the buzzword driving contemporary programmes of education and having a substantial impact on curriculum design worldwide. However, many of those programmes simply include the word ‘creative’ and leave students to their own devices, without effective guidance or examples of what creativity actually means or can lead to. This also appears to be the case in China, where students are closely supervised throughout their primary and secondary education, and once they progress to university they are expected to study independently without such supervision. One of the ways to encourage autonomy and creativity in HE learning is stimulating the interest and curiosity in that specific area, however not every module can be interesting and inspire curiosity and not every student will find interest in fields that perhaps are not so closely related to their major. This presentation will describe how interest, curiosity and creativity were enthused in year 2 University EAP students at an English Medium Instruction Collaborative University in China through research led learning and teaching.

A wide range of resources have been developed to support the learning of high frequency words and academic vocabulary. In contrast, technical vocabulary, which can account for as much as 30% of the words in a technical text (Chung & Nation, 2004), has received less attention from language practitioners so far. Our project aims at developing resources to assist science and engineering undergraduate students in the learning and use of technical vocabulary. This presentation will discuss data collected by survey and focus groups and explain the principles of resource development. Sample learning objects will be demonstrated