Thursday 8 May 2014

New ideas on writing from IATEFL 2014



I was fortunate enough to attend IATEFL 2014 in Harrogate for 3 days. I attended lots of really interesting sessions as well as catching up with some online in the days after. Because of my current teaching and interests, I went to several sessions that in some way related to academic writing.
The first one of relevance was by Jennifer MacDonald, called Getting Discipline Specific in the EGAP classroom. This was an excellent talk, full of useful practical tips for teaching. When talking about writing she recommended using a genre approach.  Genres are “complex, evolving mental abstractions held by individuals within communities” (Johns, 1997, p22). In the same way that a holiday postcard would have certain typical, predictable features (a salutation, “having a lovely time here in…”, a mention of weather, food and activities, use of present continuous and present perfect continuous, and so on) an academic genre has certain conventions that we can help the students to identify. Swales (1990) recommends using a consciousness-raising approach and that instead of teaching how to write a genre, we should enable students to analyse texts themselves to develop an awareness of the texts they have to write.
MacDonald added to this by suggesting some practical tips on how to approach genre in the classroom. She suggested two good sources for finding texts: Google Scholar and the Directory of Open Access Journals. Google Scholar is my site of choice, but working for Sheffield University, I automatically have access to a large number of subscription only journals that others may not, which is why an open access site is a welcome addition. Activities that come from this include setting students the task of conducting a genre analysis on a text from their field. An extension of this is to ask students to write a text in the genre of their chosen field. One problem of this though is that EAP students’ intended genre is the IMRAD, but in order to write this, students need research, which they don’t yet have when on a pre-sessional. MacDonald recommended finding a text from Scientific American and having students extract which information would go into which section of an IMRAD report for higher levels or to compare a report and an essay for students at lower levels. When getting into the details, genre analysis involves identifying moves and steps: what purpose is achieved by certain sections, or certain phrases or sentences. MacDonald suggested focussing just on 2 or 3 salient points to make this more manageable for students.
An interesting contrast to this came from Edward de Chazal. This was not from a presentation but an article in Modern English Teacher which I was given in the IATEFL resources fair. In it he outlines his focus on  ‘Essential Elements’, which involves highlighting sections of a text and giving them labels, for example, ‘definition’, ‘explanation’ or ‘exemplification’.

Source: Modern English Teacher Volume 23 Number 2, April 2014, p5

The main purpose of this approach seems to be for reading, helping students to understand and think critically about texts, and getting them to notice the language used to give these elements. By focussing on the essential elements, students are drawn away from a bottom-up focus on vocabulary and grammar. Students can be encouraged to notice the language used to frame these elements, which helps them in their learning. De Chazal suggests this approach can aid the development of critical thinking because students can more effectively question a text when it is broken down into elements.
Source: Modern English Teacher Volume 23 Number 2, April 2014, p6
There are lots of similarities between the genre approach and essential elements. Both start with reading texts, both involve dividing a text into sections and giving labels to them, and both emphasise student noticing of language and features. Essential elements seems more useful for lower level students (de Chazal says B1+) as the labels are quite practical and it seems just to be asking “what and how?” The genre approach is perhaps more suited for higher level students because it asks more complex questions about purpose and audience, adding “who and why?” to the inquiry.
I don’t really consider essential elements to be a new approach; rather it seems to be a way of using the genre approach with lower level students by creating a set of comprehensible labels for what Swales refers to as steps. Still, it is a useful addition to the body of knowledge on teaching reading and writing. Another talk I went to shed further light on the issue.
On Friday in IATEFL I went to an excellent talk by Richard Badger, called ‘Writing Theory as Practice’, which began with the enlightening quote: “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not”, although he argued though that theory has to be part of practice. He gave a succinct analysis of 4 approaches to writing: product and process, genre (see above) and literacy, which emphasises the idea that writers develop by writing in real life situations. He argued that there were limits to all 4 approaches:
On a broader level, he argued that product and process are theories of writing, not of teaching and learning and that, as teachers, we need to have a more learner-centred approach to teaching writing. We should look at our learners and assess what elements of writing they are having problems with. From that we can decide what elements of the 4 approaches we want to use. Ultimately we should not be asking which model of writing is best, but asking what our students need.
This really struck a chord with me. A large part of my job is providing one-to-one writing support for university students. Each one comes with a different set of strengths and weaknesses. I need to talk to them, read their work and decide, on the spot, what kind of advice and support to give them. I therefore have to be flexible and pragmatic and I need to be able to apply different approaches depending on the individual student. It was music to my ears to hear a presentation that advocated a theory-based, student-centred approach to teaching writing.
References

JOHNS, Ann M. (1997). Text, Role and Context: Developing Academic Literacies. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

McCLARTY, Robert (ed) (2014). Modern English Teacher, Volume 23 Number 2. Hove, Pavilion Publishing and Media.

SWALES, John (1990). Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.




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