Most teachers are familiar with giving students tasks such as role-playing buying some bread in a shop. Advanced students might be taught how to complain and get a refund if they don’t like the bread they’ve just bought. You might also have given a writing task: Write about your summer vacation (hidden motive = great practice for the past simple tense!)But all of this is very synthetic production. It’s simplified, often unnatural, and the given situations are often not that useful to an academic context. (We’ll see some more useful material later.) These types of typical general English role plays don’t allow students to move up to native-level competence.
Most teachers are familiar with giving students tasks such as role playing buying some bread in a shop. Advanced students might be taught how to complain and get a refund if they don’t like the bread they’ve just bought. You might also have given a writing task: Write about your summer vacation (hidden motive = great practice for the past simple tense!)
These days, the goal of many students is to study overseas in an English-speaking university, for part or all of their university studies. Many students entering overseas educational establishments arrive with a good range of English expressions. – Afterall, you’ve carefully prepared them to buy bread in a shop, so at least they will never starve! These students might also have done well academically back home, and know a lot about their subject in their mother tongue. They are fundamentally smart individuals.
I used to tell my students that 50% of your success in English relates to how much confidence you have.
In some cultures, “critical” = bad – it has political associations.
One way to develop confidence and start to develop critical thinking skills is to get the students to start to analyze their own habits and practice in applying the English they know to academic situations – ie self awareness.Students need to be taught study skills in addition to functional language knowledge. They also need more English practice outside of class, since we might only see our students for a couple of hours each week. Ideas for building confidence and getting more language practice:
The first thing you can do: start to encourage habit formation of replacing ‘simple’ words with their academic equivalent.Building confidence is a key issue here, and some of that confidence can be addressed by the students getting more time to practice English, as discussed above.Whereas in many general English course books, students are given a very artificially constructed role play model, this isn’t sufficient for EAP. EAP students need more challenging academic topics. Using topics that come from academic curricula material and from real media are much better. The function of speaking in EAP is not to get a material reward, such as a loaf of bread. The purpose is to be able to demonstrate the ability to organize ideas, process other people’s ideas, and display solid knowledge about the topic area. Don’t provide simplistic material. Challenge your students and push them to critically analyze that material.Students also need to learn how to plan their ideas for extended participation in a debate or seminar. Just like in preparing for this webinar, even native English speakers need a chance to think about what they want to say before they say it if it is to sound good – at least, I hope my talk sounds good.The staging of the Speaking Task page below offers a good model for:Reading background informationHaving an informal initial group discussion – this is the opportunity to get some further ideas from other peoplePlanning through brainstorming or mind-mapping – a very efficient way to organize ideas without needing to write a long script; allows students to mentally rehearse ideas that they think are importantSpeak in small groups – now is the time to show off your ideas about the topic; if students have made their notes on card prompts, don’t let them be afraid to read from them to remind them what they want to talk aboutShare with the whole class – students have already spoken in front of other students.
So much of academic assessment is based on the ability to write essays. Written formal language is quite a different style to how we casually think.
Some teachers don’t actually recognize this – there is a zero tolerance approach to plagiarism in the West
Writing skill – Paragraph structureHere, we see the key framework needed for an academic essay.
Then, we have the chance to identify this framework in action in a reading text.
The first activity uses a framework support to guide students to write an effective topic sentence from the outset. Also, the topic itself isn’t purely just ‘about me’, but adds the more sophisticated angle of ‘identity’. Students are now automatically weaving the necessary structures together with nice vocabulary.Again, we’re back to the habit-formation training of brainstorming and planning before you write or speak.
This is where the design of a good EAP book becomes important, as it might be difficult to find target grammar in authentic materials, and organize those materials in a meaningful syllabus.