Academic reading – EAP Essentials

Should EAP teachers read research?

In order to compete in the EAP field, teachers need to be able to read research.

I recently attended an online discussion of the IATEFL Research Special Interest Group, hosted by Graham Hall asking the questions: (How) do teachers read research, why, and (how) does it help them/us in the classroom … and beyond? It was an interesting discussion with a variety of viewpoints across a range of teaching contexts. The overall aim was to understand how research and theory might impact on teachers’ practice. For some teachers, the reasons for not reading research were the time and effort involved in understanding difficult academic texts, which don’t always give a clear indication of what their findings mean for professional practice. These teachers felt they didn’t need to engage with new theories in order to teach effectively in their classrooms.

What can you see in texts?

Learning to see further in and with texts

How do you select texts to use with your EAP students? Do you choose them yourself or encourage students to bring articles that interest them to class? What do you notice in a text that helps you to decide it will be useful for your students? Below is a text from Access EAP: Foundations (Unit 4, lesson 3 p. 70) that was adapted for use with low proficiency EAP students (CEFR B1) from a published academic article. What features of this text seem salient to you? If you were using it with a group of students, what tasks would you develop?

Paraphrasing & summarising – escaping the prison of sources

Helping students to gain confidence to move away from close paraphrasing of sources.

I teach a class to Foundation students called Text Practices, which is designed to move students from focusing on what a text is about, the topic, to understanding what a text is doing, which is how lecturers and researchers at university view texts. I’ve just marked the first assignment and it has made me realise how little impact I’ve actually had on helping students to escape from the prison of the texts they want to use. With one or two exceptions, the students ignored my advice to write more simply than the sources they read in order to show what they have understood. When they borrowed ideas from sources, these were often ’patchwritten’ or ‘plagiphrased’ by copying sentences and substituting synonyms for some words.

Reading academic articles efficiently

Helping EAP students to become the masters and not the servants of the texts they read .

A friend has just sent me two articles related to his research interests. They are only tangentially interesting for me but I want to respond to them so as to have a little email exchange and an interaction. I no longer get the chance for the detailed and interesting discussions we used to have when we worked together. I haven’t got time to read the complete articles and it isn’t necessary for my purpose so instead I can sample them in about five minutes to extract some nuggets to use in my email interaction. Sampling academic articles is also a skill I teach my EAP students so they can become masters of their sources rather than servants (Alexander et al., 2018, pp.137-144).