《大学英语读写》课程教学资源（B）Ⅱ_大学英语读写（B）Ⅱ_Ken's book.pdf_P31-P35

Unit A2 Study skills or academic literacy? A second key question concerning the nature of EAP is closely related to the first. Extending the idea of specificity, it focuses on what diverse disciplinary expectations mean in practice for teachers and students. The question is whether we regard EAP as essentially skills-based, text-based or practice-based and, as a result, ask what EAP actually is. In other words, it touches on how we should understand EAP’s role in the academy, on its status as an academic subject, on its relation to the disciplines and on the assumptions which underlie instruction. This unit surveys these three main perspectives through the changes which have led to their emergence. EAP AND CHANGING CONTEXTS These three conceptions, of study skills, socialization and academic literacy, have developed in succession, with later views incorporating earlier ones (Lea and Street, 2000). This represents a movement towards a more context-sensitive perspective, reflecting changes in both higher education and our understandings of academic communication. In particular, conceptions of EAP have changed because: ■ We have gradually learned more about the different teaching contexts in which students find themselves and about the particular communicative demands placed on them by their studies. In the early days, EAP was largely a materials and teaching-led movement focusing on texts (e.g. Candlin et al., 1975) and responding to the growing number of L2 students beginning to appear in university courses. Since then a developing research base has emphasized the rich diversity of texts, contexts and practices in which students operate in the modern university. ■ There are growing numbers of students from ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds entering university. These students, from social groups traditionally excluded from higher education such as working-class, mature, ethnic minority and international students, mean that there is now a more culturally, socially and linguistically diverse student population in universities in many countries. In the UK, for instance, only 2 per cent of the population went to university in the 1950s compared with more than a third of the eligible age group today (HEFCE, 1999). While disparities in the participation of certain social groups continue, with individuals from working-class families still massively underrepresented, 16

and with provision stratified in terms of resources and status, it is nevertheless the case that undergraduate classes are no longer dominated by white middleclass monolingual school leavers in full-time enrolment. One result is that teachers can no longer assume that students’ previous learning experiences will provide appropriate schemata and skills to meet course demands, while students themselves bring different identities, understandings and habits of meaning-making to their learning. ■ Students now take a broader and more heterogeneous mix of academic subjects. In addition to single-subject or joint honours degrees we now find complex modular degrees and emergent ‘practice-based’ courses such as nursing, management and teaching. These new course configurations are more discoursally challenging for students who have to move between genres, departments and disciplines. The diverse learning needs of such students are therefore focused in the challenges to communicative competence presented by disciplinary-specific study, by new modes of distance and electronic teaching and learning, and by changing circumstances both within the academy and in society at large. Diversity therefore takes on a particular importance at the same time as employers demand work-ready graduates equipped with the technical and interpersonal communication skills to cope in the modern workplace. In sum, many of the old certainties about teaching and learning in higher education are slowly being undermined. This has not only given EAP greater prominence and importance in the academy, but also forced us to evolve and to ask new questions. Instead of focusing on why learners have difficulties in accessing the discourses of the academy, EAP now addresses the influence of culture and the demands of multiple literacies on students’ academic experiences. The responses of EAP to these challenges are discussed below. Task A2.1 ➤ What might be the main consequences for EAP teachers of these evolving patterns of participation in higher education? What tensions might surround this expansion for students themselves? A STUDY SKILLS APPROACH TO EAP Study skills can be understood narrowly as the more mechanical aspects of study such as referencing, using libraries, dissertation formatting, etc. (Robinson, 1991), but they are generally seen more broadly. Richards et al. (1992: 359), for instance, give the following definition: Abilities, techniques and strategies which are used when reading, writing, or listening for study purposes. For example, study skills needed by university students studying from English language textbooks include: Study skills or academic literacy? 17 A SECTION ★

adjusting reading speeds according to the type of material being read, using the dictionary, guessing word meanings from context, interpreting graphs, diagrams, and symbols, note taking and summarising. The basis of the approach is that students need more than linguistic knowledge to be successful in their studies. Interest in study skills, in fact, emerged from a perceived over-emphasis on linguistic forms in early register-based materials. Registers refer to broad areas of activity such as communication in technical, scientific and legal fields, and early ESP materials writers, such as Herbert (1965) and Ewer and Latorre (1969), followed this approach by analysing corpora of specialist texts to establish the statistical patterns of different registers. Halliday et al. (1964: 88, 190) set out this programme in one of the earliest discussions of ESP: Registers . . . differ primarily in form . . . the crucial criteria of any given register are to be found in its grammar and lexis. . . . Every one of these specialized needs requires, before it can be met by appropriate teaching materials, detailed studies of restricted languages or special registers carried out on the basis of large samples of language used by the particular persons concerned. When translated into the classroom this view can be seen as an early form of generic skills, but the reaction against register analysis in the 1970s moved interest away from the lexical and grammatical properties of register to the communicative tasks students had to engage in. Driven by work in education, an understanding of learning moved to examining the learners’ experiences and to the actual context and situation that they learn in (e.g. Entwistle and Ramsden, 1983). The main idea of the study skills approach is that there are common reasoning and interpreting processes underlying communication which help us to understand discourse. Rather than focusing on linguistic form, it is seen as being more productive to focus on interpretative strategies and other competences. These skills were mainly taught using general ‘carrier content’ which provides an academic topic to contextualize the language skills to be learnt. For example, the life cycle of plants might be used to teach biology students the language of process (Bates and Dudley-Evans, 1976). Emerging together with a growing interest in needs analysis, the skills approach identified priorities from among the four main language skills for a particular situation. As the definition above indicates, these often involved reading, but analyses such as Munby’s (1978) taxonomy suggested a wider range of skills and paved the way for more streamlined, and more empirically grounded, understandings of the competences students might need in order to engage in target behaviours (Hyland, 2003). In particular, this auditing of skills helped clarify the relationship between teaching and target behaviours as well as itemizing the skills contributing to those behaviours, 18 Introduction A SECTION

Study skills or academic literacy? A such as how library searches,note taking,lecture comprehension,etc.,could be integrated to assist learners with their writing skills.Focusing on skills also high lighted the fact that students could benefit from training in learning strategies such as organizing their study time,setting study goals,memorization,exam strategies, thre m A me paing as well as second-language learners,as many new undergraduates were unfamiliar with the requirements of the tasks they faced in this new learning context.By the late 1980s study skills was perhaps the dominant EAP approach(Jordan,1989:151). One consequence of the study skills approach was a movement away from an exclusive concern with descriptions of language use towards an interest in language learning,a movement which reached its extreme with Hutchison and Waters's (1987 rejection of a specific academic register at all and the apparent abandonment of EAP as a distinct field of education.Despite Hutchison and Waters's attempts to emphasize the processes of learning over the distinctive nature of what was to be learnt,it became increasingly clear that the diversity of target tasks and genres which learners were forced to confront was not easily approached exclusively through a learner-centred model.Equally important,as our understanding of tho sc【arget tasks and genres developed it grew increasingly obvious that they were rather more r disciplines,and drew the con sses,leading to an approach geared more to target genres. Task A2.2 ★ g and w sistin of al mic skills his?Do the tudent in?Select one skill and identify the r t engag -skills for it DISCIPLINARY SOCIALIZATION A simple study skills model therefore gave way to a more discipline-sensitive and but require students to understand the ways language forms and strategies work to construct and represent knowledge in particular fields.A growing body of research into knowledge creation,teaching and learning began to link literacy with 19

such as how library searches, note taking, lecture comprehension, etc., could be integrated to assist learners with their writing skills. Focusing on skills also highlighted the fact that students could benefit from training in learning strategies such as organizing their study time, setting study goals, memorization, exam strategies, and other study techniques. Detaching EAP from purely language issues in this way therefore meant that EAP became relevant to native English-speaking students as well as second-language learners, as many new undergraduates were unfamiliar with the requirements of the tasks they faced in this new learning context. By the late 1980s study skills was perhaps the dominant EAP approach (Jordan, 1989: 151). One consequence of the study skills approach was a movement away from an exclusive concern with descriptions of language use towards an interest in language learning, a movement which reached its extreme with Hutchison and Waters’s (1987) rejection of a specific academic register at all and the apparent abandonment of EAP as a distinct field of education. Despite Hutchison and Waters’s attempts to emphasize the processes of learning over the distinctive nature of what was to be learnt, it became increasingly clear that the diversity of target tasks and genres which learners were forced to confront was not easily approached exclusively through a learner-centred model. Equally important, as our understanding of those target tasks and genres developed it grew increasingly obvious that they were rather more complex than first thought. Teachers came to see that many communicative activities are specific to particular disciplines, and drew the conclusion that the best way to prepare students for their learning was to provide them with an understanding of the assignments they would encounter in their academic classes, leading to an approach geared more to target genres. Task A2.2 ➤ According to Dudley-Evans and St John (1998: 95) the term ‘skills’ is used at two levels: five macro-skills: speaking (monologue), listening (monologue), interacting, reading and writing, each consisting of several micro-skills such as ‘using cohesive markers’ and ‘revising a first draft’. How far do you agree with this? Does it adequately represent the main skills that EAP students must engage in? Select one skill and identify the micro-skills for it. DISCIPLINARY SOCIALIZATION A simple study skills model therefore gave way to a more discipline-sensitive and discourse-based approach which saw learning as an induction or acculturation into a new culture rather than an extension of existing skills. The language competences required by the disciplines may grow out of those which students practise in school, but require students to understand the ways language forms and strategies work to construct and represent knowledge in particular fields. A growing body of research into knowledge creation, teaching and learning began to link literacy with Study skills or academic literacy? 19 A SECTION ★

Introduction a more general understanding of the disciplines(e.g.Hyland,2000;Swales,1998). We began to see that the experiences of students,like those of academics themselves. involved interactions with others within the particular social and institutional contexts in which they studied.Like academics,learners are not independent of either each other or their contexts.As Text B1.2 suggests,attention turned to the different kinds of writing that students are asked to do and to their orientation to the particular tasks,interactions and discourses of their fields of study. This appr roach draws attention to the homogeneity of disciplin Each disci of doin which co nces that allow them to participate as group members.Wells (9:90)puts this succinctly: Each subject discipline constitutes a way of making sense of human experi- ence that has evolved over generations and each is dependent on its owr particular practices:its instrumental procedures,its criteria for judging relevance and validity,and its conventions of acceptable forms of argument In a word each has developed its own modes of discourse.To work in a Unlike the study skills a ach,then,disciplinar rated view which links a ua er and knowledge is constructed thro gh snecific teaching and learning practices in diverse disciplines.We can see,then,that this is not simply a minor shift of perspective but a basic reappraisal of EAP and its role in the academy.It suggests an important new sphere of activity which is much broader than skills teachin g it locates eap at the heart of university teaching and learning and of students'orientation to,and success in,their fields of study. iperspective also draws attention to the importance of discourse and its ro cipli ary groups. ways.It is of s widely used in emp d in eral sens wa sof representing aspects of ys o thin hel old th ers/wr litical disc age,or text.that has be put to use as com nication it is la age in us related:b g in certain discourses we partici te in and build our communities and disciplines The concept of community will be discussed in more detail in Unit A2.5,but it is worth pointing out here that the EAP literature tends to see academic discourse communities as hierarchical with members of different rank and prestige.An important distinction is made between experts and novices in this pecking order, with newcomers socialized into the practices of members(Lave and Wenger,1991;

a more general understanding of the disciplines (e.g. Hyland, 2000; Swales, 1998). We began to see that the experiences of students, like those of academics themselves, involved interactions with others within the particular social and institutional contexts in which they studied. Like academics, learners are not independent of either each other or their contexts. As Text B1.2 suggests, attention turned to the different kinds of writing that students are asked to do and to their orientation to the particular tasks, interactions and discourses of their fields of study. This approach draws attention to the homogeneity of disciplinary groups and practices. Each discipline might be seen as an academic tribe (Becher, 1989) with its particular norms and ways of doing things which comprise separate cultures. Within each culture students acquire specialized discourse competences that allow them to participate as group members. Wells (1992: 290) puts this succinctly: Each subject discipline constitutes a way of making sense of human experience that has evolved over generations and each is dependent on its own particular practices: its instrumental procedures, its criteria for judging relevance and validity, and its conventions of acceptable forms of argument. In a word each has developed its own modes of discourse. To work in a discipline, therefore, it is necessary to be able to engage in these practices and, in particular, to participate in the discourses of that community. Unlike the study skills approach, then, disciplinary socialization implies an integrated view which links language, user and context. What counts as legitimate knowledge is constructed through specific teaching and learning practices in diverse disciplines. We can see, then, that this is not simply a minor shift of perspective but a basic reappraisal of EAP and its role in the academy. It suggests an important new sphere of activity which is much broader than skills teaching: it locates EAP at the heart of university teaching and learning and of students’ orientation to, and success in, their fields of study. This perspective also draws attention to the importance of discourse and its role in defining disciplinary groups. The term ‘discourse’ is widely used in the social sciences and in a variety of ways. It is often employed in a general sense to refer to different ways of representing aspects of the world, evoking the ways of thinking and talking that recur across different speakers/writers and texts. Here discourses help to scaffold the activities of social groups and their affiliations so we talk of scientific discourse or political discourse. More specifically it refers to a stretch of language, or text, that has been put to use as communication – it is language in use. These two uses are related: by engaging in certain discourses we participate in and build our communities and disciplines. The concept of community will be discussed in more detail in Unit A2.5, but it is worth pointing out here that the EAP literature tends to see academic discourse communities as hierarchical with members of different rank and prestige. An important distinction is made between experts and novices in this pecking order, with newcomers socialized into the practices of members (Lave and Wenger, 1991; 20 Introduction A SECTION