Paraphrasing is a key skill for EAP students, and there are numerous techniques and tools that they can use to help them paraphrase. Whether they use these tools effectively to produce good paraphrases, though, is another question. A question, in fact, that Carol Bailey and Judi Withers at the University of Wolverhampton (UK) investigated in detail. This article is the report on their study, with its interesting findings and some useful take-aways for EAP teachers.
Marshall and Walsh Marr (2018) investigated faculty perceptions of teaching multilingual students in writing-intensive classrooms. They found that most instructors view students in binary terms, which may negatively influence the pedagogical methods they employ in classrooms where typical binary categorizations are often blurred.
This article looks at a content-linked ESL program and how its short- and long-term impacts on language and academic success.
This paper explores students attempts at Grammatical Metaphor through the use of nominalization. Student errors with nominalization are identified to create a framework of the intermediary stages students pass through as their writing develops.
This article reports on a corpus-based study of the discourse of university lectures, which aimed to identify linguistic patterns that could help EAP / L2 students with note-taking. It finds some ‘standard’ formulaic expressions, as well as other discourse markers used by lecturers to highlight key terms or concepts.
This article explores discrepancies between the topics included in ELT textbooks and the actual topics of conversation in English learners’ encounters with peers.
This article details the rationale and development of a new, easy-to-use scale to measure student comprehensibility. The scale is applicable to multiple L1 backgrounds, does not measure speakers against “natives”, and has practical uses in the classroom.
This study took place in the US against the backdrop of increasing numbers of international students. The concern of the researchers seems to be that international students in US universities might be perceived differently by EAP teachers as compared to their subject teachers (e.g. a Biology lecturer or a History tutor).
Durrant’s research project on the Academic Vocabulary List reminds us of the need to consider all vocabulary lists with a critical eye
In this article, Swan & Walter criticise top-down approaches to teaching general reading and listening comprehension and highlight what it might be more effective to focus on instead.
