Tag Archives: EAP

John Swales (1938-2025)

Posted on by
Reply

I recently heard the sad news that John Swales had died.

University of Michigan Obituary

He was an important person for EAP and I am glad to have been doing EAP when his influence was at its height.

When I first started teaching EAP writing, the popular books were Janelle Cooper’s  Think and Link (1979) and Bob Jordan’s Academic Writing (1996, 1st edition 1980). Both were very useful to a new EAP teacher.

However, they concentrated on teaching short academic text types and academic functions and notions, such as (Cooper, 1979):

  1. Sequencing
    • –Instructions, Processes, Past Events
  2. Classification
    • –Lists, Diagrams, Texts, Definitions
  3. Comparison & Contrast
    1. –Similarities, Differences, Concession, Analogies
  4. Cause & Effect
    1. –Consequences, Explanations, References, Elaboration

Although this was a great development in the way we see and teach language, it seems to me, though, that this was still a synthetic approach (Wilkins, 1976). This approach is still dividing the language into parts – albeit larger parts, called cognitive genres by Bruce (2008) – which the learner has to put back together again.

But most student assignments are NOT definitions, comparisons or classifications by themselves. The assignments may require the students to make use of these cognitive genres as they combine these texts into larger complete texts with a clear purpose and audience, called social genres by Bruce (2008). However, the early textbooks did not provide any help for the students on how to do this. What was needed was the concept of genre, brought to a wider audience by, e.g., Swales (1990).

As EAP teachers we need to concentrate on our students’ purposes in writing, the genres that they need to produce and how these genres are realised. In order to do that, we need to investigate exactly which genres our students need and then do the genre analysis to work out the linguistic realisations of these genres.

We tried to do that in our Successful Academic Writing book (Gillett, Hammond  & Martala, 2009).

Swales’s Genre Analysis(1990) was very important in helping to answer my problem and write the book

BALEAP Conference, Reading, 2015:
Richard Smith, John Swales, Meriel Bloor, Andy Gillett

References

Bruce, I. (2008). Academic writing and genre: A systematic approach. London: Continuum.

Cooper, J. (1979). Think and link. London: Arnold.

Gillett, A. J., Hammond, A. C. & Martala, M. (2009). Successful academic writing. London: Pearson Longman.

Jordan, R. R. (1999). Academic writing course (3rd ed.). London: Longman..

Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

.Wilkins, D. (1976). Notional syllabuses. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dedoose

Posted on by
Reply

I discovered Dedoose recently when one of the MA students I was supervising used it.

Dedoose is a cross-platform cloud-based application from UCLA  for analysing qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods research data that includes text, photos, audio, videos, spreadsheet data and more.

Overall, Dedoose is user-friendly. It offers a user-friendly interface, which includes a clear overview of your recent activities on the front page. It also includes a detailed user guide on their website and a demo project – a mixed methods study of literacy development – which will help you to explore Dedoose and see what it can do.

One advantage of Dedoose is the ease with which it allows data to be imported and the wide range of formats the software supports. For that reason, it is easy to import large amounts of text, numbers and pictures.

It is often the case that with qualitative data, when coding large amounts of text, it can be difficult to keep track of the codes assigned to different parts of the text. Dedoose allows the researcher to create a description of each code they have created, which makes the codes easy to track. It is also easy to clearly organise codes into parent, child and grandchild codes, according to their importance. They can then be moved up or down as many times as necessary. Dedoose also offers the option to delete a code if it is not found to be useful.

However, as with all qualitative data analysis, coding individual sections of text takes time and requires a large amount of work. Dedoose does, though, help to ease the pressure on the coding with, for example, the quick code widget.

Dedoose can also work to a limited extent with quantitative data. It is quite easy to import spreadsheet data from a survey, for example. Dedoose can understand numerical data, multiple choice data, Likert scale data etc and the data can easily be edited when it has been imported. Once the data has been imported, you can now analyse the quantitative data. You can can draw graphs and tables – which can be  exported – and you can also carry out simple statistical tests such as  t-tests, ANOVA and correlations.

It is also quite easy to combine these in a mixed-methods study.

One important feature of  Dedoose is that, as the application is cloud based, it enables users to work on a project collaboratively.

Dedoose works with a subscription model. It can be quite expensive in the long run, but it does allow a free trial period of one month and it provides the ability to subscribe for just one month (student price $12.95 per month) and could be useful for a small mixed-methods project such as an MA dissertation..

 

One-To-One Teaching

Posted on by
Reply

Introduction

Much ESP is taught in one-to-one situations. When I first started teaching businessmen English in Japan in 1976, the classes were mostly one-to-one. I then spent five years teaching English to adult professionals in an ESP institution in the UK mainly in a one-to-one context. More recently, I have been teaching a Syrian refugee through CARA. in a one-to-one situation online. The participant was an agricultural engineer working as a project manager. It was then that I first started thinking seriously about one to one teaching and what it involved and I will probably continue for ever!.

Some thoughts:

Continue reading →

Turnitin Similarity Report

Posted on by
Reply

I have been supervising dissertation students recently at several institutions.

One thing that has been mentioned several times is the interpretation of the Turnitin Similarity Report. One student showed me her Turnitin report in which she had received a similarity score of 32%. She was worried as she had been told that anything above 20% was problematic. I looked at her work and found that most of the 32% similarity was made up of typical EAP phrases. Examples are “questions have been raised over the ,,,”, “… have received very little consideration” and “this evidence leads us to reject the hypothesis that…” These are kinds of phrases that EAP students are expected to learn and use and are covered in books such as Jeanne Godfrey’s The student phrase book (Godfrey, 2013) and John Morley’s online Academic Phrasebank.

Continue reading →

Dissertation Management

Posted on by
Reply

I have been supervising MA student doing dissertations for many years now at several institutions and this is the time of year when we usually get started.

As soon as I am given the list of students who I will be supervising, I usually email each student and give them some information about me. I ask them to reply with some information about themselves. Some reply quickly, some reply slowly and some do not reply at all until I have sent several reminders.

Continue reading →

Reporting Findings from Interviews

Posted on by
Reply

I have been supervising students doing research at both undergraduate and graduate levels recently and many of the students have been doing qualitative studies, involving interviews. In doing so, I have found that many of them find it difficult to report their findings and provide evidence. I am not surprised as there does not seem to be much information available. As Robert Yin (2011, p. 234) has made clear:

At a minimum, a common kind of narrative data would take the form of quotations and paraphrased passages, representing your study participants’ descriptions their own lives, actions, and views. In qualitative research, even these briefer descriptions serve as an important form of data. Not surprisingly, the choices about how to present these narrative data are more than a matter of literary style. Methodological issues also are relevant. Yet, this type of narrative — whether brief or lengthy — has not received much attention in existing guides for doing qualitative research.

I have looked through the publications in the references list below. Most of them are excellent, but none of them provide the useful information that my students need.

There are some useful suggestions, but none of them – apart from Yin – are detailed enough:

Continue reading →

ESP/EGP Distinction: Is it Real?

Posted on by
Reply

I have been supervising MA TESOL and Applied Linguistics students this summer as they write their dissertations and I have most recently been marking them. May of the students have focussed on ESP (both EAP and EOP) for their research, but most of them have concentrated on general English (EGP).  I also attended a Business English conference in the summer. I saw some interesting presentations at the conference  and have have seen some interesting MA studies and it has made me realise that the distinction between EGP and ESP may not be so clear.

Continue reading →