Writing in and across Disciplines
DEVELOPING SPECIFICITY IN THE WRITING CLASSROOM
Anne (Margaret) Vicary¹, Sarah (Margaret) Brewer²
¹University of Reading, Reading, UK ²University of Reading, Reading, UK
The Academic English Programme at the University of Reading delivers 15 disciplinespecific programmes at Master’s and undergraduate levels. This number is steadily increasing. The programmes are noncredit bearing, and attended on a voluntary basis. To attract and retain students, EAP lecturers need to ensure that they are well acquainted with the academic culture, content and performance tasks required of students on their degree programme. Timepoor Master’s students are strategic – they are only likely to attend extracurricular classes if their direct relevance is easily perceived. An EAP lecturer performs a delicate balancing act, ideally adopting a friendly, investigative yet nonthreatening approach in an effort to learn from discipline specialists while fostering a certain academic confidence with students in the Academic English classroom. Building these relationships successfully results in meaningful teaching and learning taking place within disciplinespecific writing programmes. The challenge is to facilitate and formalise this process to enable the highest level of integration possible. At Reading we use the complementary parameters of context, embedding and mapping, first established by Sloan and Porter in their CEM model (2010), to plot the level of integration of our courses with their particular degree programme. This metalanguage allows us to discuss in a concrete way how to work on reviewing and developing our courses. This workshop will give examples of courses run with differing levels of integration and encourage participants to review the level of integration of their own courses in the light of these models.
References
Sloan, D. E. and Porter, E. (2010). Changing international student and business staff perceptions of insessional EAP: using the CEM model. Journal of English for Academic Purposes , 9, 3, September 2010, pp. 198210.