Professional and Academic English, Volume 31, Number 1

Journal of the IATEFL English for Specific Purposes Special Interest Group WHITE PANTONE 213 C Alternative option using “&” instead of “AND” ISSN 2520-2545 Vol. 31 No 1 June 2024 Copyright Notice Copyright for whole issue IATEFL 2024. IATEFL retains the right to reproduce part or all of this publication in other publications, including retail and online editions as well as on our websites. Contributions to this publication remain the intellectual property of the authors. Anyrequests to reproduce a particular article should be sent to the relevant contributor and not IATEFL. Articles which have first appeared in IATEFL publications must acknowledge the IATEFL publication as the original source of the article if reprinted elsewhere. Published by IATEFL, 2-3 The Foundry, Seager Road, Faversham, ME13 7FD, UK. www.iatefl.org Disclaimer Views expressed in Professional and Academic English are not necessarily those of the editor(s), of the IATEFL ESPSIG, of IATEFL or its staff or trustees. 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Price £4.50, free for ESPSIG members http://espsig.iatefl.org www.iatefl.org Editor-in-Chief Dr Katalin Egri Ku-Mesu University of Leicester, United Kingdom Editor Dr Veronico Tarrayo University of Santo Tomas, Philippines Editorial Board Dr Mahdi Aben Ahmed Jubail English Language and Preparatory Year Institute, Saudi Arabia Dr Sharif Alghazo University of Jordan, Jordan Dr Hung Phu Bui University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Patricia Lorena Bustos Gonzalez Universidad de los Andes, Colombia Dr Elis Kakoulli Constantinou Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus Michelle Joubert University of the Free State, South Africa Andrew Northern Imperial College London, United Kingdom Martin Percy University of Westminster, United Kingdom Dr Jemma Prior Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy Dr Mark B. Ulla Walailak University, Thailand Anna Whinnett Norwich Institute for Language Education (NILE), United Kingdom Layout design © Express Publishing, 2024 Journal of the IATEFL English for Specific Purposes Special Interest Group Vol. 31 No 1 June 2024 ISSN 2520-2545 5 Contents Erratum Professional and Academic English, Vol.30, No.2 ................................................................................... 6 Articles Ian Michael Robinson Implementing ESP through a CLIL perspective: Materials development for university courses ..............................................................................7 Matthew Walpole The use of genre analysis to develop laboratory report writing workshop materials for Chinese postgraduate engineering students ................................................. 25 6 ERRATUM Erratum Professional and Academic English, Vol. 30, No. 2 We would like to apologise to Dr Nadjat Khenioui for identifying Tunisia as her country of work and residence erroneously on p. 19 of Professional and Academic English, Vol. 30, No.2. Her correct details are as follows: We apologise for any offence caused. Dr Katalin Egri Ku-Mesu Editor-in-Chief Professional and Academic English Dr Nadjat Khenioui Algiers University 3 Algeria e-mail: k[email protected] 7 Implementing ESP through a CLIL perspective: Materials development for university courses 1 Introduction Teaching English language modules in Italian universities often involves integrating English for Specific Purposes (ESP) to meet the specific needs of students in non-language degree courses. In these modules, although the texts predominantly concern the specific degree course subject matter, the emphasis on the outcome is the language and not the domain content. It is important that English lessons be as effective as possible, and one way to achieve this is to develop materials for the course because, as Woodrow (2018) states, ‘the major argument for using practitioner-developed materials is that they can be very needsspecific’ (p. 156). However, materials development is never easy and must be based on sound principles and practices (Harwood, 2010; Tomlinson, 1998). These notions concerning designing material to be used and how to implement this in the classroom can be found in the ESP literature, but ESP practitioners should be open to looking beyond this field and gaining benefits from other areas of ELT. Recently, the university the author works for organised a campus-wide innovation project to help enhance teaching. The aim was to encourage innovative teaching practices in the university even though what was to be considered innovative was given in a list of techniques rather than being described analytically. It seemed that many of the strategies considered as criteria for an innovative teaching method can be found in most Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) This article explores how a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) perspective can be used to develop classroom material for an undergraduate module for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in social sciences. CLIL has become an important current trend in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching and general education and can be combined with ESP with interesting results. The pedagogical methodology underlying CLIL has been carefully explored and exposed (e.g., Ball et al., 2015; Coyle et al., 2010) as has that of ESP (e.g., Anthony, 2018; Dudley-Evans & St. John, 1998). The article compares some important aspects of ESP and CLIL to find convergence and divergence points. The course material was developed following CLIL and ESP principles. The material was then employed in undergraduate classes for students of one particular field of the social sciences: a Social Work degree course. Results, although partial, suggest that the approach is valid and that employing CLIL principles in ESP course design can be beneficial in structuring lessons and motivating students. Ian Michael Robinson University of Calabria, Italy email: [email protected] ABSTRACT ARTICLES 8 literature as well as in ESP lessons taught in various university departments. Therefore, a combination of CLIL and ESP came about, as described below. This article arises from this project and the subsequent work carried out with undergraduates on a Social Work degree course at a university in southern Italy. These students have an obligatory ESP language module for this course: English for Social Work. This project involved using pedagogical elements that form part of CLIL methodology in designing and implementing the ESP course. After a brief literature review to show similarities and differences between CLIL and ESP, as well as a short description of an example of the material developed, reflections will be shared, and conclusions will be drawn. 2 Literature review 2.1 CLIL CLIL came about in Europe as a result of a European Commission Policy paper in 1976 (Richards & Rodgers, 2014), and the term was first coined by Marsh (1994). Coyle et al. (2010) define CLIL as ‘a dual-focused educational approach in which the additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language’ (p. 1). Any language can be used in CLIL lessons, but English is the most common example utilised in CLIL (Dalton-Puffer, 2011). Coyle et al.’s definition would seem to make it easy to write about CLIL; however, it is not always that simple. There is not always clarity in the literature as to whether CLIL is different from bilingual education, immersion, English as a medium of instruction (EMI), contentbased instruction (CBI, also sometimes referred to as Content-based Language Teaching or CBLT), multilingual learning, or ESP. Some authors put CLIL as an umbrella term for almost all of the above; for example, Mehisto et al. (2008) claim it covers ‘a dozen or more educational approaches’ (p. 12). For others, especially from a US perspective, CLIL is a form of CBLT in Europe (Cammarata et al., 2016; Cumming & Lyster, 2016; Lightbrown, 2014) - CBLT is sometimes referred to as CBI. Brinton and Snow (2017) state that at ‘the heart of CBI is the integration of language and content’ (p. 3), and they go on to place CLIL as a subset of the umbrella term of CBI. Dalton-Puffer (2017) only goes so far as to say that ‘CLIL shares fundamental assumptions with CBI’ (p. 155). Richards and Rodgers (2014) write that they have ‘features in common’, but they are not identical because they ‘differ slightly in focus’ (p. 116). Brinton and Snow (2017) identify the start of CBI as being in North America in the early 1960s and so it predates CLIL, and often the differences seem to come from a geographical perspective. For this article, a Eurocentric approach is taken that uses the terms CLIL and CBI as different concepts and will leave it to others to argue the hierarchy of the two. To help understand this better, Dale and Tanner (2012) put CLIL in the middle on a line that goes from immersion, where the subject is taught in the second language (L2) and no emphasis is put on the learning of that L2, to CBLT, where the content is used as a vehicle to teach the language but the students are not necessarily requested to learn the content subject. Another problem involved in all of this is that CLIL can have different meanings for different people and ‘one size does not fit all’ (Coyle et al., 2010, p. 14); this can relate to the number of hours that a subject should be taught in the L2 to qualify as a CLIL course, to the amount of Implementing ESP through a CLIL perspective: Materials development for university courses ARTICLES 9 JOURNAL Implementing ESP through a CLIL perspective: Materials development for university courses 9 L2 used in the class, to who is teaching the lesson, and to whom. However, there are two discernible forms of CLIL (Ball et al. 2015; Dale & Tanner, 2012): hard and soft. The term hard CLIL refers to when it is the subject teacher who teaches using CLIL and does it for the majority, if not all, of the lesson time; soft CLIL refers to CLIL undertaken by the language teacher and probably for just some of the language lessons. Gaye (2020) writes that this problem of who should do the teaching is present in ESP literature as well. Much of what CLIL should be is defined in some of the major publications on this subject and here can only be very quickly summarised. What can be noted is that these authors base their research on strong pedagogical reasoning. An important theoretical framework for CLIL is the 4 Cs of context, communication, cognition and culture (Coyle, 2008; Coyle et al., 2010), and all four of these elements must be continually addressed in the CLIL lessons. However, this is only a part of CLIL. Coyle et al. (2010) argue that ‘CLIL demands an analysis of what is meant by effective pedagogies in different contexts’ (p. 28). It is this reference to effective pedagogies that helps distinguish the outlining of CLIL and tries to get it away from what Freire (1972, as cited in Coyle et al., 2010) called a ‘banking model’ of education or a transmissive mode of teaching, where teachers (the educators) try to deposit information into the heads of students (the educands). Moving away from this is a move towards a social constructivist model focussing on ‘interactive, mediated and student led learning’ (Coyle et al., 2010, p. 25). Some traditional teaching involves teaching what is in the syllabus or course book, taking a surface approach to learning rather than an in-depth one, as it is reasoned that they merely need to receive information. This can result in very superficial learning. CLIL utilises Vygotsky’s idea of scaffolding into the zone of proximal development to overcome this. In brief, this refers to the idea that teaching should start with students’ level of knowledge and move forward in small steps, focussing on process skills the students can deal with cognitively. If this jump from one cognitive level to another is too big, then the students cannot cope and learn. This relates to Krashen’s comprehensible input theory, with input needing to be a little higher than the learner’s current language level, the i +1 idea (Krashen & Terrell, 1983). Coyle et al. (2010) note that for ‘context learning to be effective learning, students must be cognately engaged’ (p. 29), which means being actively involved in lessons in group and pair work, actively questioning and answering, as well as being involved in problem-solving. At this point, the notion of higher-order thinking skills (HOTS), for example, creative thinking, problem-solving, and cognitively challenging tasks, becomes important, as does that of lower-order thinking skills (LOTS), which can include remembering, understanding, applying knowledge, as well as labelling and categorising. Coyle et al. (2010) use Anderson and Krathwohls’s revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy to show how these LOTS and HOTS can be organised. All of this is helpful because it focuses on the different processes and necessitates lower-order and higher-order questioning. This later could be referred to as Socratic questioning, facilitating a deeper approach to learning. Language is important in CLIL, and here also, main publications call upon other authors and research to support what CLIL is. Content relies upon language, and language must have content to communicate if it is to be more than just empty words. This puts the use of language in a fundamental position in pedagogy, and with language being stressed, it is necessary to see how it is used. It must be remembered that students are asked to learn content, which is quite cognitively challenging with a level of L2 that might not be completely 16 Implementing ESP through a CLIL perspective: Materials development for university courses JOURNAL A) Crime and Punishment Crossword 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 Across 1. If it is this, then it is not a crime. 3. A part of your body at the end of your arm; also, you can give somebody this to help them. 5. If you didn’t lose, then you probably did this. 6. The person who is in charge of the trial. 9. The person or people who try to prove that a person is a criminal. 12. Definite article. 13. You do this when you want to find information on the Internet. 14. At the end of the trial, there must be one of these. 17 JOURNAL Implementing ESP through a CLIL perspective: Materials development for university courses 20. Did you commit the crime? _______  , I didn’t. 21. If you don’t know a word, you can look it _______ in a dictionary. 22. To voluntarily stop or give up. 25. I will send you _______ jail for two years. Down 1. A person who has studied law and helps people in trouble. 2. You can fire bullets with this (but be careful). 3. It can cover your head, useful in the cold. Robin had one of these. 4. A useful verb for people who want to marry 7. Opposite of innocent 8. The police put the criminal _______ arrest. 9. Another word for jail 10. When the trial has finished, it is _______ . 11. The police _______ a person with murder. 15. Water that comes from the sky 16. The prisoner stays _______ jail. 17. The place where 6 across and 19 down do their work. 18. Not south, north, or west 19. Twelve people who listen to a trial and must decide if the person committed the crime or not 23. The criminal can _______ her last meal before the execution. This type of game activity helps students approach the lesson’s theme. Games tend to make the lesson seem more manageable and more user-friendly. Indeed, very often, students start the crossword without being told to. They already know what a crossword is and what they must do, and so the instructional language for this almost becomes redundant. Some relevant vocabulary that will be used later is embedded in the crossword. B) Brainstorm in small groups: Different crimes CLIL assumes learners have innate knowledge and abilities rather than blank vessels (or tabula rasa) to be filled. Small-group brainstorming allows the students to share their knowledge and become active participants. It also allows them to try using the target language in a safe environment, but it is also often a zone of translanguaging. All the crimes that appear during the lesson must be mentioned in the feedback session. The teacher might need to make sure of this. 18 Implementing ESP through a CLIL perspective: Materials development for university courses JOURNAL C) Match the words (a-d) to the pictures (1-4). a) noose b) gallows c) dangle d) pistol CLIL methodology encourages the use of images, and these can be very effective in a LOTS activity such as this. This scaffolding activity helps prepare students for work later on in the task. The vocabulary may not seem to be useful for students beyond this particular task, but, as noted before, in their future occupation, they could encounter people from cultures where these practices are still, unfortunately, employed. D) Let Him Dangle Use these words to complete the song as you hear it. • Bentley • Chris • Craig • Derek • Sidney Miles • Wandsworth Prison Songwriter: Elvis Costello Let Him Dangle lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group The song by Elvis Costello is not reproduced here but can be found on his 1989 album Spike. The song refers to the death penalty punishment of Derek Bentley after an attempted robbery he was involved in alongside Chris Craig went wrong and resulted in the shooting of a police officer called Sidney Miles. It was argued that Bentley gave Craig the order to kill Miles. However, although Craig fired the shot, as he was underage, he could not be sentenced to death. The judge sentenced Bentley to death even though he was said to have the mental age of a child. The execution caused public outrage and helped lead to the abolition of the death penalty in England. This multimedia approach to the lesson helps focus attention. The various names were removed from the lyrics, and students had to replace them in the correct places. Songs are not often used in ESP lessons, although Anthony’s (2018) definition of ESP does seem to allow for such an approach. E) Read this account of the incident described in the song. Underline the parts that are referenced in the song. Let him have it: the short, sad life of Derek Bentley by Geoffrey Watson (2016). This text is divided into different sections (similar to the song, it is not reproduced here): The background; The murder; The charges; The trial; The aftermath. 1 2 3 4 19 JOURNAL Implementing ESP through a CLIL perspective: Materials development for university courses Here, the task is more important than the text – following Ball et al.’s (2015) principle of the primacy of task – as students are aware that they are reading to perform a specific task, which will then aid them in achieving the objective of communicating about crime and punishment. F) Brainstorm in small groups: Different punishments This is similar to the brainstorming activity before in its rationale. The students are co-constructing their own knowledge. G) What phrases can you use when making suggestions? e.g., If it were up to me, I would … CLIL is content and language, so specific time and attention must be paid to the language aspect of the lesson. Again, the language is elicited from the students. The teacher can add any extra forms the students need to produce. H) Discussions Is there ever a justification for the death penalty? What penalties would you consider correct for the following crimes? Use different forms of suggestion where possible. a) shoplifting a pen from a supermarket b) driving a car while drunk c) finding a wallet with 250 euros in it and keeping the money d) a woman is drug-raped at a party e) three young men with knives mug a man and steal his money and telephone f) a bank official takes ten euros from all the bank accounts in the bank and transfers it all to his account g) a dentist avoids tax by asking all his patients to pay in cash (with no receipts) h) a woman’s dog bites a man in the street i) a right-wing Christian plants a bomb near a mosque j) a university teacher/lecturer asks students to pay 2000 euros to pass an exam The lesson has been sequenced so the students can face a higher-order thinking task. The difficulty of the task has been adjusted by dealing with various aspects before asking the students to do this activity. This helps adjust the cognitive load that the students face when doing this task. 20 Implementing ESP through a CLIL perspective: Materials development for university courses JOURNAL I) Writing How does criminal activity affect the work of social workers in your area? The task culminates in a challenging academic language task using HOTS and CALP. In each stage of the activity, the 4 Cs of CLIL have been referred to because the content has always been important, but so too have the communication, cognition, and culture. An end-of-course questionnaire was administered to the students. The questionnaire referred to the course as a whole, and the students gave mainly positive feedback. For the sake of this article, it would have been useful to have a more detailed enquiry into each specific lesson and have students reflect on this CLIL approach. However, this would have meant taking too much time away from the lessons in a course that would benefit from more time being dedicated to achieving the learning objectives of the course. 5 Brief reflections During the implementation of the material in the lesson, various aspects led to some reflections. The lesson starts with a crossword, and this ludic device encourages students to participate. Indeed, many students started doing the task before being told to. It is a collaborative activity and encourages students to activate the relative schemata and start linking ideas of crime and punishment. This easily leads to the brainstorming activity in which, by giving students time amongst themselves to ponder the theme of crime, they are the active agents in the generation of knowledge. Either through their own collective knowledge or with the help of dictionaries (very often electronic ones accessed via their smartphone or portable computer), they can list and describe crimes in the target language. The students are at the centre of the lesson, and the teacher facilitates and guides them. Some specific vocabulary needs to be dealt with for the upcoming task, and this is done using picture prompts so that the cognitive load is not excessive. Using a song to focus on a specific crime and then on a reading task concerning that crime was efficient. There is a growing literature on the use of songs in EFL and a call for them to be used in ESP (see, for example, Robinson, 2024; Tegg, 2018). Various elements must be considered, but the song chosen for this lesson was pertinent and clear enough to use. The students had no previous knowledge of the singer, but this did not create obstacles to the fulfilment of the task, nor, it seems, to their enjoyment of it. CLIL literature strongly encourages a multimodal approach to lessons. The difficulty of the material (an authentic song with all the related potential linguistic problems) was compensated for by the relative ease of the task (a gap fill), which helped scaffold students into the following reading comprehension task. This careful build-up from a gaming start, through lower-order thinking tasks to higherorder thinking tasks with changes in task type and modality, provides momentum to the lesson and, therefore, motivation to continue. The concentration on language components is further reinforced by examining and eliciting the functional language of suggestions (the language for learning). This all leads to the final objective of the lesson, in which learners discuss crimes and punishments and suggest alternative punishments. 21 JOURNAL Implementing ESP through a CLIL perspective: Materials development for university courses The lesson uses a specific content carrier to arrive at the linguistic objectives. During the lesson, learners communicate about the content and cognitively and critically assess aspects of the content (using language through learning). They also have the opportunity to investigate the culture of crime and discuss it from a cross-cultural perspective. Dealing with the discussion nonjudgmentally is important, as each person should be allowed to express their opinions freely. Some areas of the lesson could be particularly sensitive, especially if a student has been subject to these crimes or knows somebody who has committed them. This would be a difficult topic if any students were studying from prison. The possible sensitive nature of the lesson could create problems for some, but the structure of the lesson is a benefit to its implementation. 6 Concluding ideas This article aims to report on a project that combines the pedagogic ideas clearly stated in CLIL literature with a university-level ESP course in social work. The material designed for the ESP course always referenced ideas from CLIL, but the final learning objective for the students was always a linguistic one rather than the dual focus of content and language. The course design paid attention to the 4Cs of CLIL. The content referred to the carrier contents of social work, the university course, and the context of the course (often compared to the context and culture of social work and university life in English-speaking countries). The way that this was communicated and the various communicative acts during the lesson were also planned, especially with attention paid to cognitive abilities. CLIL and ESP have vast and growing literature, with ESP having a longer history, and both borrow ideas from different areas. The categories ESP and CLIL, with their respective definitions, tend to build walls around what is defined to help achieve autonomous validity. The first part of this article was written to help demonstrate this and show the similarities between ESP and CLIL. It was also necessary to define CBI as this is another area in which different definitions have been applied to the same term. ESP has a vast, ever-increasingly diversified, specialised literature spanning its history since its conception in the 1960s. CLIL has much in common with ESP, especially its languagespecific domains and attention to genres. The principal literature for CLIL appears to be an almost fully formed idea. CLIL has taken much from ESP, as from EFL, SLA, and general pedagogy. This has allowed CLIL to present many ideas on how to implement the teaching of the content of a non-linguistic discipline, which can very often be found in one book. CLIL does not need to define what to teach in the classroom, as that has already been decided by the various bodies involved in curriculum design. What is essential in CLIL is how to teach, with a clear focus on the language used in the classroom. A good CLIL lesson has small defined steps that lead coherently and congruously from one to the other, in terms of content progression but also regarding the language involved. This attention to detail when teaching lessons (including a variety of material, multimedia approach, social learning, interaction, scaffolding, and saliency) gives teachers various tools, techniques, and methods to employ in the classroom. These are all no doubt found in ESP lessons, too. However, the complexities within the ESP canon of literature mean that it is not always so easy to find this in an easily accessible format. The sound pedagogical arguments used to support CLIL were necessary in setting up CLIL as a valid pedagogy rather than just one based on claims of what it can do. In Italian academic life, there is much talk of ‘contamination’. This is when 22 Implementing ESP through a CLIL perspective: Materials development for university courses JOURNAL ideas from one discipline permeate into another one. This is often seen as a positive step. This article encourages the contamination of ESP and CLIL, especially in bringing CLIL pedagogy into ESP. It could be that the two approaches are very similar for much of a lesson, but in the end, the learning objectives differ: ESP has to concentrate on the language in all its various forms and the specificity needed for the particular special purpose involved; CLIL needs to concentrate on the language but also the content. The university course seems to have benefited from following CLIL teaching guidelines in the ESP classroom. The careful structuring of the lessons would appear to have helped learners to the extent that they liked the lessons, felt as though they were an integral and active part of the lessons, and wanted more of the same rather than feeling bored, frustrated, and outside the learning experience, and wanting less (information garnered from the endof-course satisfaction questionnaire). This would suggest that such an approach could be beneficial in other ESP or EAP contexts, and it might be that, upon reflection, many people would discover that they are already doing something similar. It could be useful to encourage ESP practitioners to reflect upon their courses, examine them from a CLIL perspective, and find the advantages of this contamination. 23 JOURNAL Implementing ESP through a CLIL perspective: Materials development for university courses References Anthony, L. (2018). Introducing English for specific purposes. Routledge. Ball, P., Kelly, K., & Clegg, J. (2015). Putting CLIL into practice. Oxford University Press. Brinton, D.M. (2017). Distant relations or kissing cousins? English for specific purposes and content-based instruction. In M. A. Snow, & D. M. Brinton (Eds.), The content-based classroom (pp. 243-252). University of Michigan Press. Brinton, D. M., & Snow, M. A. (2017). The evolving architecture of CBI. In M. A. Snow, & D. M. 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(2016, Summer). Let him have it: The short, sad life of Derek Bentley. NSWBarAssocNews 96. Bar News: The Journal of the New South Wales Bar Association, 40-43. Woodrow, L. (2018). Introducing course design in English for specific purposes. Routledge. Ian Michael Robinson is a Researcher and Assistant Professor at the University of Calabria in Italy. He has taught in various places, including Greece, Japan and the UK, as well as in Italy. He has been involved is in teacher training for many years and is especially concerned in CLIL training. Author biography 25 The use of genre analysis to develop laboratory report writing workshop materials for Chinese postgraduate engineering students 1 Introduction and rationale International students undertaking science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects at universities in the UK is a continued area of growth. This is particularly true for engineeringand technology-related subjects, with recent data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency showing that in both 2019/2020 and 2020/2021, this area was second in demand for non-UK students, behind business and management only (HESA,2023). However, these figures do not reveal the whole picture: it is no longer simply the case that students travel to the UK to study. With the advent of Transnational Education (TNE) programmes, UK universities are increasingly developing degree programmes abroad (QAA,2023). The University of Sussex has recently established a joint institute in China to deliver engineering-, robotics-, and artificial intelligence or AI-related undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. A corollary of this provision is the need to provide appropriate and specific English language support to students on these programmes to maximise learning potential. As a lecturer in English for academic purposes (EAP) at the University of Sussex with responsibility for the STEM cluster of schools, it is part of my role to target and develop tailored support for the TNE postgraduate cohort of approximately 100 students. This action research project centres on the development and evaluation of a laboratory report writing workshop for Chinese postgraduate engineering students in a transnational education setting. The material is informed by the application of Parkinson’s (2017) genre analysis of student laboratory reports. A needs analysis is followed by an exploration of the laboratory report genre before Parkinson’s move analysis is cross-referenced against faculty expectations and sample student reports. An ensuing workshop consisting of seven core tasks guiding students through the macrostructure and key language structures of the laboratory report genre was designed and delivered to a cohort of approximately 100 students based in China studying robotics and artificial intelligence-related postgraduate courses. The workshop impact is assessed through the collection and analysis of student and staff questionnaires, with particular insight gained from responses showing increased awareness and application of the Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion (IMRD) macrostructure to subsequent report submissions. Matthew Walpole University of Sussex, United Kingdom email: [email protected].uk ABSTRACT JOURNAL 32 The use of genre analysis to develop laboratory report writing workshop materials for Chinese postgraduate engineering students JOURNAL 6 Response: Students Following the workshop, an open-ended questionnaire was sent to participants to gain insight into student responses to the content in relation to their learning contexts. Based on knowledge of the cohort and their demanding schedules, and in order to try and maximise quantity and quality of returns, only three simple questions were asked, covering motivations for attendance, aspects of content deemed helpful, and areas of consideration for improvement. In relation to ethical considerations, a statement of informed consent was provided to ensure that students were made aware of how the data would be ‘processed, interpreted, and used’ (Cohen et al., 2007, p. 58). This also included guarantees of confidentiality and anonymity, as well as clarity concerning their right not to participate and to withdraw at any stage or not to complete particular questions. Being a short but openended questionnaire, the estimated completion time was stated. It was also important to mention to participants the potential of the research in relation to improving their situation (Cohen et al., 2007,p.318). Of the approximate 100 attendees, 59responses were received. An analysis of these responses follows. 6.1 Motivations for attendance Why did you attend this workshop? Responses to this question generally showed that participants were focused and clear on their reasons for attendance in relation to their assessment needs. It should be stated that attendance was not compulsory, yet almost all students in the cohort chose to attend. Anecdotally, the course coordinator based in China mentioned that the workshop was popular, as the students did not have many opportunities for English for Academic Purposes development, and so had been keen to attend. It was encouraging that many comments were given regarding the broad acquisition of knowledge in terms of the expected conventions of the genre to aid assessment performance; for example: • To improve writing ability and write standardised reports. • Before participating in this workshop, I often couldn’t find the idea of writing the report. Bad report writing made me not confident to get a high grade in this class. • Because I have not learned to write English reports, and I do not understand the requirements of English reports. • Because I think it is necessary to learn something about how to write science lab report so that our report can meet up Sussex’s standard. • Because I seldom have the chance to write an English report, nor do I have the requirements for it. So I think it is necessary to learn. • This is because I hope to improve my ability to write science lab report and to make my writing more standardised. 33 JOURNAL The use of genre analysis to develop laboratory report writing workshop materials for Chinese postgraduate engineering students 6.2 Helpful aspects Did you feel the workshop was helpful? If so, how? Responses here reflected the aims of the workshop and the chosen approach. This was encouraging as students engaged with the macro-elements of report writing, in contrast to some literature, which suggests that Chinese students may be focused more on microaspects of the English language when writing (Chau et al., 2012). A focus on macroorganisation over errors at a micro-level is identified by Glasman-Deal (2021) as a key aspect of science research writing. Student comments included terms such as ‘structure’, ‘framework’, and ‘format’ in particular: • It was really helpful. It let me know the format and the structure of the science laboratory reports. • Through this workshop, I understand the structure of the report and what should be written in each section. • It was definitely helpful to me. The workshop stated some necessary points like moves and macrostructure in science reports. • The seminar helped me to learn the framework for writing. • I hoped to learn a better writing structure. • It’s very useful. It gives us some advice when we don’t know the format and writing method. • I probably know how to write a report, I have an overall framework in my mind. From a pedagogical perspective, the terms ‘notice’ and ‘pay attention’ appeared unprompted numerous times, echoing Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis and the importance of conscious learning (Ellis, 1997); for example: • It can let me know the problems that I need to pay attention to in all aspects of English paper writing, especially those I haven’t noticed before. • The workshop was very helpful and taught me a lot of things I didn’t know or notice before. • This is really very helpful. I have a very clear understanding of the standards of writing and what needs attention. An additional point to note is that the importance of contrastive analysis was considered, again unprompted, by students for both questions 1 and 2. Interestingly, I had yet to consider a comparison of standardised laboratory reports written in Chinese with those in English as part of genre analysis research. Indeed, writing is a form of communication, and communication is cultural. Different cultures often have different expectations when organising writing, so a contrastive analysis is important (Hedge, 2000). This is an action point for further research. Participant comments in relation to this included the following: 34 The use of genre analysis to develop laboratory report writing workshop materials for Chinese postgraduate engineering students JOURNAL • The workshop corrected some behaviours and thoughts of mine which don’t matter in academy of China, but do matter in that of Britain. • The academic atmosphere is different between foreign and domestic. I think essay writing in China is still a little different from that abroad. • There are many differences in format and content between Chinese and foreign academic reports. • I think writing in China is still a little different from that abroad. 6.3 Areas for improvement What do you think could be improved about the workshop? Students were largely complimentary here, with comments such as ‘The workshop was perfect and helped me a lot’ and ‘This class is very clear and has a good atmosphere to learn, so it’s perfect for me!’. However, it is worth noting that my position as both a researcher and an authority figure (teacher) is a factor that could be considered in this instance, given Chinese cultural attitudes towards the teacher as an authority figure: participants may be less willing to report true feelings if these could in some way result in the teacher losing face (Ho & Crookall,1995). Nonetheless, and fortunately, some developmental comments were made regarding aspects that, as a teacher, I also felt. These were primarily related to logistics dictated by the TNE context: the nature of online vs face-to-face provision, UK vs. China time difference, and a longer amount of time to explore materials/examples, discussion and analysis more deeply. There was, however, a clear demand for ‘more’, which was encouraging and can provide useful feedback for stakeholders to enlarge and expand provision potentially: • The only thing I think could be better is I wish I could attend this workshop in person. • Just I hope one day I can join your class in person and face to face. • More practice, more examples, more discussion. • The workshop will be held late because of the time difference. It would be better if it could be held earlier. • It would be better to provide more detailed examples. Providing more examples of mistakes can help us avoid them. • It may be more activities, more courses, more lectures. • I want to read more materials, and have more knowledge reserves and exercises. 7 Response: Lecturers Following the submission and marking of the cohort’s assessed laboratory reports in the 2022-2023 academic year, I sent a follow-up questionnaire to the lecturers teaching all modules on the two MSc courses to gauge the perceived impact that the in-sessional workshop may have had on the quality of student reports. Similarly, ethical considerations for this round of data collection were followed, with statements of informed consent, rights to withdraw, and confidentiality/anonymity provided. The aim of the research in relation to potentially improving the situation was also stressed. Thirteen responses were received. Of these, ten indicated noticeable improvements in both appropriate structure and language demonstrated in student report submissions compared with previous cohorts. Although 35 JOURNAL The use of genre analysis to develop laboratory report writing workshop materials for Chinese postgraduate engineering students this is encouraging, a significant number of additional variables could influence this, so this feedback should be treated with caution. In addition, feedback was limited as opportunities to comment further to gain more detailed qualitative insight were not taken. Therefore, additional forms of data collection and/or script analysis may provide deeper insight following subsequent submissions in the next academic year. 8 Conclusions and limitations This action research project originated from an authentic need to create scaffolded material to support a PG TNE cohort with the appropriate structure and language for submitting laboratory reports. As an EAP practitioner responsible for providing STEM support, I found the literature provided by the research-active community indispensable for my work context. Parkinson’s (2017) analysis of laboratory reports and subsequent suggestions for a teaching framework provided a platform for developing a workshop addressing structural and linguistic expectations of the genre. In terms of RQ1 (development), a skeleton move structure was drawn from Parkinson’s work, the viability of which was subsequently ‘tested’ by receiving affirmation of its applicability from relevant faculty and by cross-referencing prototypical moves against grade classification for a number of scripts. Findings from the latter may cautiously indicate that an EAP teacher may be able to independently gauge the quality of student report writing, to some degree, through the identification of prototypical moves alone, without necessarily being a subject or content expert. Following this viability check, a workshop material was subsequently created by breaking down the report macrostructure and presenting Parkinson’s examples of key moves and language that students could then, with the support of the teacher, identify, analyse, and apply through several class-based tasks complemented by supplementary self-access material and guides. Regarding RQ2 (evaluation), assessing impact was attempted through student and staff feedback questionnaires. While a positive correlation between in-sessional input and quality of student output (in terms of grades) is not directly measurable due to the sheer number of variables, it would appear that some level of success was obtained in terms of raising awareness. In particular, based on positive student responses to the input material, attention to the macro-organisation was demonstrated, which is key in submitting reports that meet the prototypical expectations of the genre. To some extent, this was corroborated by lecturer responses, which indicated comparative improvement in structuring subsequent reports. Some helpful insights were also gained from the students in relation to future development, including the general need for ‘more’. The workshop certainly has scope for extension to form a series of workshops or a short course, with each session focused on one aspect of the macrostructure, allowing more time for material, structure, and language exploration. A greater range of whole engineering samples would also be more beneficial for analysis in comparison to the isolated sentence-level examples from Parkinson, and this is something I am actively attempting to obtain from faculty for the next iteration of the workshop. Finally, and as identified by the participants, an interesting area for follow-up research is a contrastive analysis of macrostructure, moves, and language structures for engineering laboratory reports written in Mandarin Chinese, and this has the potential to be a helpful joint research project in the future. 36 The use of genre analysis to develop laboratory report writing workshop materials for Chinese postgraduate engineering students JOURNAL References Badger, R., & White, G. (2000). A process genre approach to teaching writing. ELT Journal, 54(2), 153-160. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/54.2.153 Braine, G. (1989). Writing in science and technology: An analysis of assignments from ten undergraduate courses. English for Specific Purposes, 8(1), 3-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/0889-4906(89)90003-3 Bruce, I. (2015). Theory and concepts of English for academic purposes. Palgrave Macmillan. Chau, J., Wu, W., Chen, J., & Lughmani, S. (2012). ESL readers’ comprehension performance: The Chinese secondary context. ELT Journal, 66(3), 304-317. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccr088 Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2007). Research methods in education (6th ed.). Routledge. Ellis, R. (1997). Second language acquisition. Oxford University Press. Glasman-Deal, H. (2021). Science research writing for native and non-native speakers of English (2nd ed.). World Scientific. https://doi.org/10.1142/p605 Hedge, T. (2000). Teaching and learning in the language classroom. Oxford University Press. HESA. (2023). What do HE students study? https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/what-study Ho, J., & Crookall, D. (1995). Breaking with Chinese cultural traditions: Learner autonomy in English language teaching. System, 23(2), 235-243. https://doi.org/10.1016/0346-251X(95)00011-8 Jackson, L., Meyer, W., & Parkinson, J. (2006). A study of the writing tasks and reading assigned to undergraduate science students at a South African University. English for Specific Purposes, 25(3), 260-281. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2005.04.003 Kanoksilapatham, B. (2007). Introduction to move analysis. In D. Biber, U. Connor, & T. A. Upton (Eds.), Discourse on the move: Using corpus analysis to describe discourse structure (pp. 23-41). John Benjamins Publishing Company. Kanoksilapatham, B. (2015). Distinguishing textual features characterizing structural variation in research articles across three engineering sub-discipline corpora. English for Specific Purposes, 37, 74-86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2014.06.008 Maswana, S., Kanamuru, T., & Tajino, A. (2015). Move analysis of research articles across five engineering fields: What they share and what they do not. Ampersand, 2, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amper.2014.12.002 Parkinson, J. (2017). The student laboratory report genre: A genre analysis. English for Specific Purposes, 45, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2016.08.001 QAA. (2023). Transnational education. https://www.qaa.ac.uk/international/transnational-education Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press. Wallace, M. (1998). Action research for language teachers. Cambridge University Press. Wellington, J. (1996). Methods and issues in educational research. University of Sheffield, Division of Education. Ye, Y. (2019). Macrostructures and rhetorical moves in energy engineering research articles written by Chinese expert writers. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 38, 48-61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2019.01.007 37 JOURNAL The use of genre analysis to develop laboratory report writing workshop materials for Chinese postgraduate engineering students Matthew Walpole is currently a Lecturer in English Language for Academic Study at the University of Sussex, U.K. He develops and delivers in-sessional input for STEM and business subjects and also teaches on the MA TESOL & Applied Linguistics TEAP module. 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