Innovative Methods and Practices of Academic Writing and Writing Instruction Writing in and across Disciplines
TEACHING AND ASSESSING ACADEMIC WRITING THROUGH AN INTEGRATED ESAP ASSIGNMENT
TEACHING AND ASSESSING ACADEMIC WRITING: WHAT DOES EAP STAND FOR?
Irina Nuzha
National Research University Higher School of Economics Saint Petersburg Russia
This presentation explores the ways of how academic writing should be taught to enable students to successfully communicate in the academic environment and the role assessment plays in this process. Being the way to consolidate and demonstrate subject knowledge (Hyland, 2011), writing seems to be in the center of teaching and learning at university and therefore is widely used as a major tool of assessment in higher education. However, the way knowledge is built, evaluated and shared, differs across disciplines (Martin, 2011), which reflects on the academic language, discourse models and rhetorical practices used in different subjects: ‘it turns out that engineers show , philosophers argue , biologists find and linguists suggest .’ (Hyland, 2009). This means that academic writing should be taught and assessed in a disciplinary specific context. Although writing skills are considered central to academic literacy (Russel et al, 2009), it is often argued that writing is the least developed skill and the majority of students can not write and this disability might be caused by an ineffective approach to teaching with the greater emphasis on language work (lexical resource, grammatical accuracy, punctuation) rather than core academic skills (developing an argument, using academic sources to support argumentation, incorporating appropriate academic sources into an essay through paraphrasing and synthesizing to avoid plagiarism, etc.). To engage students into academic communication and enhance their participation in the international academic community, the teaching/learning practices as well as assessment tools should mirror the academic process which involves extensive indepth reading, notetaking, listening to lectures, taking part in academic discussions and writing as the final stage of this cycle where the given knowledge is evaluated and transformed in a new situation. This concept is of high importance for Russian universities where academic writing is considered peripheral and is either a part of an EFL (English as a foreign language) or the Russian language course. The paper summarizes the results of a pilot case study implemented at the Saint Petersburg campus of National Research University Higher School of Economics, which suggests some practical implications of using an integrated approach to teaching and assessing academic writing in a disciplinary context.
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