Activities for Explicit Language Instruction in EAP Writing CoursesActivities for Explicit Language Instruction in EAP Writing Courses
Second Language Writing IS Colloquium
TESOL 2009
Friday, March 27, 10:00-11:45
Recent research findings from EAP, corpus linguistics, and systemic functional linguistics support the need to make grammatical and lexical features of academic language explicit for learners in order to improve the accuracy and sophistication of student writing.In both L1 and L2 composition courses, grammar and vocabulary are often taught as discrete items (i.e. verb tenses, connectors, punctuation, word lists), divorced from authentic discourse contexts and even from writing instruction itself. However, in order to write coherent academic arguments, L2 writers must not only work on error correction, but also increase their syntactic and lexical repertoires and their awareness of when and how to use items in their repertoire.
Learners First: Activities for Explicit Language Instruction in EAP Writing Courses
Gena Bennett, Materials Writer, genabennett@yahoo.com
In making decisions about grammar in the L2 writing classroom, Byrd and Reid (1998) advocate beginning with learners rather than structures. This presentation demonstrates how to use learner corpora to identify salient grammar errors in student writing, including creation and analysis of a corpus and activity design and follow up.
Causal Relationships: Getting Beyond Because, So, and Therefore
Margi Wald, Univ. of California, Berkeley, mwald@berkeley.edu
Students ‘tend to rely heavily on a small set of conjunctions’ to express reason-result ‘at the expense of using other causal-relational signaling devices’ (Flowerdew, 1998, p. 333). Students also struggle to ‘pack’ information into sentences to achieve clear yet lexically and syntactically ‘dense’ sentences (Christie, 2002). This presentation highlights sets of exercises developed to increase students’ repertoire of reason-result signaling devices while providing guided practice with repackaging information.
Best Practices in the Teaching of 'Flow'
Jan Frodesen, University of California, Santa Barbara, frodesen@linguistics.ucsb.edu
Focus on language in L2 writing instruction and activities has increasingly shifted from that of error correction to helping writers develop fluency. Although a complex notion, writing fluency may include the appropriate focusing of information at the sentence level, expressing ideas idiomatically through collocations common to academic writing, and creating discourse flow through cohesive devices such as the reference system. All of these goals can be greatly assisted by drawing on corpus-based grammars and dictionaries, which reveal the interactions between grammar and vocabulary as well as patterns dominant in academic registers. This presentation will demonstrate ways to use corpus findings to create activities for fluency development in advanced level undergraduate and graduate writing classrooms.
Criticality: Focus on Form
Diane Schmitt, Nottingham Trent University, diane.schmitt@ntu.ac.uk
This presentation demonstrates integrated reading and writing lessons that give students practice in noticing how writers use language to write critically in the articles they read and then guide students in using similar language to include more criticality in their own writing.
References
Byrd, P. & Reid, J. (1998). Grammar in the composition classroom: Essays on teaching ESL for college-bound students. Boston: Heinle & Heinle.
Christie, F. (2002). The development of abstraction in adolescence in subject English. In M. C. Colombi & M. Schleppegrell (Eds.) Developing advanced literacy in first and second languages: Meaning with power. Mahwah, NJ: LEA.
Flowerdew, L. (1998). Integrating ‘expert’ and ‘interlanguage’ computer corpora findings on causality: Discoveries for teachers and students. English for Specific Purposes, 17, 4. 329-345.
Additional references listed in powerpoint files.