Using feedback comments to develop a rating scale for a written coursework assessment

The importance of critical thinking and critical reading skills in higher education and language courses is established and frequently explored, particularly with the shift from traditional to more contemporary teaching methods. The purpose of this study is to elaborate on the implementation of teaching practices with focus on development of critical reading and critical thinking. Both critical reading and critical thinking are considered to be essential parts of the ESP (English for Specific Purposes) and EAP (English for Academic Purposes) syllabi, including English language courses which target the students who are highly proficient in English. This study attempts to summarize and elaborate on the importance of critical reading and critical thinking skills and to provide further details regarding introducing and teaching these skills through various practices in the context of Advanced English / English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses. In addition, the study will focus on students’ perceptions of their critical thinking and critical reading competencies, compared and contrasted with students’ performance and results when introducing activities and tasks which require critical reading and critical thinking. The research methodology is qualitative and includes a 5-point Likert scale survey targeting the student population in EAP courses. Finally, the study will suggest teaching practices and activities which can be used to foster critical reading and critical thinking skills in the context of EAP courses.

The development of English as a universal language led to the emergence of a new field in English language teaching which is called English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Moreover, English is recently considered as an international language, and with advancements in technology, accordingly, there is a widespread growth in demand for English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses fluctuating in teaching length and mode. The present study, thus, attempts to consider the EAP Learners' Perceptions towards the use of tasks taught in universities as EAP courses for students and what English skills and abilities are required from them on the job.

This paper reports on a study examining the attitudes and perceptions of a group of in-service teachers who are new or relatively new to facilitating self-directed learning (SDL) before and after they taught a course with an integrated SDL component. The study also investigates the impact on those teachers' attitudes of an orientation package designed to familiarise teachers with the concept of SDL and support them in promoting it to students of the course. The study took place in a university setting with teachers of English for Academic Purposes course with an integrated SDL component.

This study employs a corpus-based method in analysing the noun and noun premodification in journal articles relevant to the field of International Business Management. Following the frequency-based tradition, the noun and noun premodification are identified and extracted by using the node-and-collocate approach. The corpus is divided into five sub-corpora for the purpose of analysing the noun collocations and noun premodification types in each section and between different sections in the journal articles, namely, Introduction, Literature Review, Methods, Results and Discussion sections. The findings show that general adjective is the most common noun premodifier, followed by noun premodifier in both the Introduction and Literature Review sections, whereas general adjective and noun premodifier are both commonly used as premodifiers for nouns in Methods and Results sections. Besides, the general adjective is the most dominant premodifier in Discussion section. The findings also indicate that ed-participial and ing-participial premodifiers are not commonly used in the relevant journal articles. With regard to the use of noun premodification types between different sections in journal articles, general adjective+noun collocation is more pervasive in Introduction, Literature Review and Discussion sections. On the other hand, noun+noun collocation is more commonly found in Methods and Results sections. Following Hoey’s Lexical Priming, the results show that priming occurs at grammatical level within the discourse. The noun collocations identified are compiled for the possible use in the English for Academic Purposes Course. Keywords: corpus-based method; noun premodification; frequency-based; collocation; textual colligations DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2017-2301-09

This article reports an empirical study that investigates academic language challenges faced by university students in an Outer Circle context with almost four decades of English-medium instruction (EMI) education . The study also examines the relationship between students’ reported language challenges and their perceived academic success in EMI courses, as well as their self-rated proficiency in English. Quantitative analyses on questionnaire data collected from 198 undergraduate students indicate that Bruneian students did not generally experience major language-related challenges in their EMI courses, although academic writing and speaking were at times problematic. Furthermore, language challenges were found to be significant predictors of students’ perceived academic success in EMI but their self-rated English proficiency was not, suggesting that students’ beliefs about their language abilities and competence were not applied to the academic context. Finally, some implications in relation to early exposure to EMI education, and enhancing the provision of language support through English for academic purposes courses, are discussed.

The introduction of modern information and communication technologies (ICT) into the classroom has led to a number of challenges and opportunities for instructors across the field of education. Wikipedia, a collaborative encyclopedia, has proven to be one of the most controversial online platforms throughout academia, with many higher education instructors banning its use outright. Despite the prevailing negative attitude, there has been a recent shift in thought among some in the field regarding its utilization as a teaching tool in a number of applications. One popular use is as the centre of a writing project, most commonly the creation of a new article or the improvement of a pre-existing one.This paper outlines a case study conducted at the Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies in the autumn semester of 2019, in which first year international veterinarian medicine students wrote Wikipedia articles as part of a semester-long project in an English for academic purposes course in order to improve academic writing skills such as researching, analysing, summarizing, and editing. Analysis of two questionnaires and the students’ work suggest that despite some challenges, a Wikipedia article writing project can serve as an engaging, rewarding, and effective method to teach academic writing skills.

Syllabus design for general EAP writing courses: A cognitive approach

Being a language teacher means they are not only fluent in using the target language but also possess competence in the study of language. Hence, linguistic knowledge is one essential skill a language teacher needs to possess. Using a descriptive qualitative research design of the content analysis, this article aimed to investigate the linguistic competence of an English teacher and its implementation in the classroom. The recordings of online classroom sessions of an English for Academic Purposes course were observed. The teacher, as the main object of the study, was also interviewed to enrich understanding through open-ended questions. The collected audio-visual data was then analyzed and categorized based on the linguistic features employed by the teacher. While existing studies focus on the linguistic competence of pre-service teachers, the findings are inclined to negative results. Hence, by investigating the teaching practice of a teacher with 30 years of experience, the findings revealed the descriptions of linguistic features evident in the data and explained how those features helped the teacher in carrying out the teaching and learning session. Subsequently, it is recommended that English teachers increase their language awareness as well as linguistic competence so that they can perform better in meeting the students’ needs in acquiring and improving English language skills.

In recent decades, three forms of practitioner research have emerged: Reflective Practice, Action Research, and Exploratory Practice. While Reflective Practice and Action Research focus on teachers-as-researchers, Exploratory Practice positions learners as co-researchers, alongside teachers, teacher educators, and others. This article adds to those which examine the notion of learners co-producing research by exploring the potential of multimodal methods for data generation and analysis; it does this by critically analysing posters produced by learners as they puzzled, explored, collaborated, and disseminated their developing understandings on a pre-sessional English for Academic Purposes course in the UK. Focusing particularly on these ‘sticky objects’, to which emotions and beliefs attach, I argue that learners, like teachers, can ask robust questions, engage in creative investigative practices, integrating research and pedagogy. I posit that learners can develop profound insights into their practice which contribute to theory-building more broadly. This ‘fully inclusive’ notion of co-produced research challenges traditional assumptions about who does what in research and pedagogy, indicating an ethical imperative for learners to be included as co-investigators contributing their understandings to developments in theory and practice.

How General English Proficiency Contributes to Learners’ Performance in the English for Academic Purposes Course

This study intends to develop Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Module for English for Academic Purposes Subject at Sultan Ageng Tirtayasa University. The MOOC aims to equip learners, regardless of department, faculty, or participating campus, with the necessary English language skills to succeed in an academic environment. In order to improve the effectiveness of online learning from these courses, an elearning platform, such as MOOC, that can accommodate a large number of students from departments and faculties, as well as from other campuses that are members of the Study Program Implementing Collaborative Free Learning Curriculum -Independent Campus". The MOOC is developed through Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation (ADDIE) model that is organized systematically to address issues with learning that relate to instructional media that meet students' requirements and personality traits. A questionnaire was used for evaluation, and the elements were taken directly from the Computer System Usability Questionnaire (CSUQ). The ADDIE (Analysis, Design, construction, Implementation, and Evaluation) approach was used to guide the construction of the MOOC in this study, and the results of the usability evaluation add to the body of knowledge already available on MOOCs. The MOOC achieved a very good rating with an average score of 82.66%, indicating it effectively meets these quality standards. The average score of 78.50% translates to a good rating, indicating a positive user experience with the MOOC. When respondents were asked to comment on the MOOC's strengths the capacity to make students' learning easier emerged as the most prevalent.

Thesustainable development of society has attracted a lot of research efforts. Astrategic aspect to the society’s evolution is introduced by the game theory(Fernandez, 2011, p. 1). The research question is as follows: how to organizethe process of teaching and learning in education for sustainable development?The aim of the research is to model the process of teaching and learning ineducation for sustainable development. The present research involves a processof analyzing the meaning of the key concepts “education for sustainabledevelopment”, “game theory”, “social situation”. Moreover, the studydemonstrates how the key concepts are related to the idea of “the process ofteaching and learning”. The empirical research was carried out in the Englishfor Academic Purposes course of Riga Teacher Training and Educational Management Academy in 2008-2009. Thesample included 10 students. The findings of the research allow modelling theprocess of teaching and learning in education for sustainable development.Directions of further research are proposed.KEYWORDS: Education for SustainableDevelopment, Game Theory, Social Situation, the Process of Teaching andLearning.

Academic English writing is an essential yet challenging domain for English learners (ELs). This study explored graduate-level ELs’ perceptions of applying ChatGPT in educational settings, particularly in relation to their second/foreign language (L2) development. We collected students’ argumentative essays and conducted focus group interviews from four intact classes of an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course at a top-tier Chinese university. Whereas the students generally had a positive attitude toward the use of ChatGPT in higher education and highlighted functions that expedited the accomplishment of academic tasks and/or facilitated academic English writing on the language level, they also tended to be cautious and defined ChatGPT as a tool that required the guidance of human agency. Such views and perceptions provide insights into how to integrate AI tools such as ChatGPT strategically and appropriately into teaching and learning in EAP courses, especially at the graduate level.

Designing EAP reading courses at the university level

The goal of this study was to explore the psychometric properties of the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9; R. L. Spitzer, K. Kroenke, & J. B. W. Williams, 1999). Factor analysis and Rasch rating scale analysis were used to examine the psychometric properties of the PHQ-9. The sample consisted of 202 adults with spinal cord injury (SCI). The PHQ-9 items appear to form a usefully unidimensional scale. One "double-barreled" item, "Moving or speaking so slowly that other people could have noticed or being so fidgety or restless that you've been moving around a lot more than usual," misfit the Rasch model. Category probability curves indicate respondent difficulty in distinguishing between the 2 intermediate rating scale categories: several days and more than half the days. Combining these categories eliminated this problem and resulted in all items fitting the measurement model. The measurement properties of the PHQ-9 can be improved by collapsing rating scale categories and by restructuring several double- and triple-barreled items. Adopting these changes may improve sensitivity in measuring depression after SCI.