Teaching research writing with a flipped classroom approach

Scientific Conference (2023, May 21)

We present a research article writing course that uses a flipped classroom approach for independent, personalised learning (Deroey & Skipp, 2023). The course aims to improve insight into the structural ... [more ▼]

We present a research article writing course that uses a flipped classroom approach for independent, personalised learning (Deroey & Skipp, 2023). The course aims to improve insight into the structural, stylistic and rhetorical features of research articles as well as the writing and publication process. Its five interlocking components are independent learning tasks, workshops, peer review, writing with reflection, and consultations. Learner autonomy is promoted through corpus work (Charles, 2018), analysis of disciplinary texts (Yasuda, 2011) and interviews with disciplinary experts. The course has been successfully delivered both fully online and on campus to several mixed-discipline cohorts of doctoral students. Before the workshops, students complete independent learning tasks by reading the e-coursebook and completing exercises, including applications to their own texts. The submitted tasks allow us to illustrate key points and design activities with examples from participants’ writing. Submissions of article drafts with reflections further promote and document the application of course content. Peer review happens independently of the instructor but uses a template to guide feedback. Writing consultations with the lecturer provide additional personal feedback. This course stimulates novice research writers to become writing researchers; maximises the added value of the workshops; and enables PhD students to manage their time better. We will explain how this independent, personalised approach works and formulate recommendations based on course evaluations and our experiences. References Charles, M. (2018). Corpus-assisted editing for doctoral students: More than just concordancing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 36, 15-25. Deroey, K. L. B., & Skipp, J. (2023). Designing and delivering an online research article writing course for doctoral students in Luxembourg during Covid-19. In B. Fenton-Smith, J. Gimenez, K. Mansfield, M. Percy, & M. Spinillo (Eds.), International perspectives on teaching academic English in turbulent times (pp. 81-94). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003283409-10 Yasuda, S. (2011). Genre-based tasks in foreign language writing: Developing writers’ genre awareness, linguistic knowledge, and writing competence. Journal of Second Language Writing, 20(2), 111-133. [less ▲]

Personalising a writing course with a flipped classroom approach

Scientific Conference (2023, May 13)

We present a writing course that uses a flipped classroom approach for personalised learning (Deroey & Skipp, 2023). The student-centred course design has at its core non-instructor-led activities and ... [more ▼]

We present a writing course that uses a flipped classroom approach for personalised learning (Deroey & Skipp, 2023). The student-centred course design has at its core non-instructor-led activities and allows us to accommodate linguistically and disciplinary heterogeneous groups of PhD students. It considers practical issues such as PhD students’ busy schedules (Casanave, 2010), their ability to work independently and limited staff resources. The course has been very successfully delivered several times, both fully and partly online. This writing course provides insight into the structural, stylistic and rhetorical features of research articles as well as the writing and publication process. Students first submit an ‘independent learning task’ in which they apply theory from the book to their writing. Teachers use this output to illustrate key theory points and to provide further practice in the subsequent workshop. Additionally, students submit article drafts with their reflections (Yasuda, 2011) and receive feedback through peer review and consultations (Cho & MacArthur, 2010). Our course design has several advantages. First, it allows personalised learning and differentiated teaching. Second, it limits the number of workshops and maximises their value. Third, it stimulates novice research writers to become writing researchers, promoting continuous learning. References Casanave, C. P. (2010). Dovetailing under impossible circumstances. In C. Aitchison, B. Kamler, & A. Lee (Eds.), Publishing pedagogies for the doctorate and beyond (pp. 47-63). Routledge. Cho, K., & MacArthur, C. (2010). Student revision with peer and expert reviewing. Learning and Instruction, 20, 328-338. Deroey, K. L. B., & Skipp, J. (2023). Designing and delivering an online research article writing course for doctoral students in Luxembourg during Covid-19. In B. Fenton-Smith, J. Gimenez, K. Mansfield, M. Percy, & M. Spinillo (Eds.), International perspectives on teaching academic English in turbulent times (pp. 81-94). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003283409-10 Yasuda, S. (2011). Genre-based tasks in foreign language writing: Developing writers’ genre awareness, linguistic knowledge, and writing competence. Journal of Second Language Writing, 20(2), 111-133. [less ▲]

Editorial 'Lecture discourse and lecture training'

in Journal of English for Academic Purposes (2023), 62(101223),

Lecture discourse and lecturer training

in Journal of English for Academic Purposes (2023)

The internationalization of higher education has gone hand in hand with a worldwide increase in English Medium Instruction (EMI) - the use of English as a language of instruction in countries where it is ... [more ▼]

The internationalization of higher education has gone hand in hand with a worldwide increase in English Medium Instruction (EMI) - the use of English as a language of instruction in countries where it is not an official language – as well as online lectures. This has led to lecturing contexts which are linguistically, communicatively, educationally and culturally complex. The challenges this creates for lecturers and students alike would benefit from a greater understanding of lecture discourse on the whole and EMI lecture discourse in particular as well as from insights into how we can support lecture delivery and comprehension. This special issue therefore brings together research on lecture discourse and lecturer training that contributes to the design and delivery of EAP lecture listening courses and (EMI) lecturer training. The papers cover spoken lecture discourse (Dang; Nesi & Alsop), multimodality (Morell et al.; Querol-Julián), lecture listening teaching (Crawford Camiciottoli) and lecturer training initiatives (Aish & Tomlinson; Deroey). Drawing on lectures from three corpora including one with an EMI component, Hilary Nesi and Siân Alsop identify the purposes and linguistic features of a specific type of story scenario in which lecturers describe a fantastic hypothetical situation. Their analysis reveals such scenarios to be more prevalent in the US MICASE lectures than in the BASE lectures from Britain, or the ELC (engineering) lectures from Britain, New Zealand and Malaysia. They are most commonly used to explain very abstract concepts and seem a technique to familiarize learners with technical terms and concepts. Arguing that such stories promote engagement with difficult concepts and do not require high level language skills, Nesi and Alsop advocate their use, even by EMI and novice lecturers. To better understand the lexical challenges of lectures and ways to facilitate lecture comprehension, Thi Ngoc Yen Dang compares vocabulary use in three different lecture contexts: EMI courses, non-EMI courses, and open access EMI courses. She discovers that non-EMI courses are more lexically demanding than EMI ones. The coverage of Dang et al.’s (2017) Academic Spoken Word List (ASWL) is analysed to establish whether and how it can be used as a shortcut to improve lecture comprehension in these contexts. Dang concludes that the ASWL would indeed be useful and recommends work with different levels of the list depending on the three course contexts. Also addressing lecture comprehension is the paper by Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli, which shows how freely available OpenCourseWare lecture videos can provide authentic texts and tasks for lecture comprehension practice. Based on research into these lectures, she presents a lesson plan and activities that focus on multimodal listening skills (in particular gesturing) and challenging linguistic features for L2 listeners (e.g., idioms, humour, figurative language, phrasal verbs, markers of stance, culture-specific references, and specialized terminology). She concludes by advocating multimodal listening skills training as a way to develop learners’ multimodal literacy. Continuing the theme of multimodality, Teresa Morell, Vicent Beltrán-Palanques and Natalia Norte describe how EMI lecturers on a professional development programme use semiotic and interpersonal resources to engage students during pair work. Their analysis of micro-teaching sessions from this training reveals the moves and pedagogical functions of ‘engagement episodes’ as well as the multimodal construction thereof through verbal and non-verbal communicative modes (spoken, written, non-verbal materials, space, and posture). This analysis leads them to argue for the development of multimodal interactive competence, especially in EMI lecturer training, as this may stimulate students’ activity, thus promoting active learning, language usage and critical thinking. Engagement is also the focus of Mercedes Querol-Julián’s contribution. Adopting a multimodal (inter)action approach, she examines how an EMI lecturer engages international students in an online lesson. This sheds light on the nature of interaction in this environment, viz. frequent discourse functions, the multimodal density and diversity of interaction stages and the importance of lecturer waiting time. The paper concludes with elements that could be included in training programmes for online EMI teaching, such as raising awareness of multimodal interaction resources, presenting discourse strategies for different interaction stages and managing students’ silence. In their paper describing an L1 lecturer support initiative, Fiona Aish and Jo Tomlinson illustrate how EAP practitioners can support internationalization in higher education. Specifically, they report on a project where EAP specialists use lecture observation and feedback to raise the lecturer’s awareness of sources of comprehension issues in the multilingual and multicultural international classroom. Their project explores ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ speaker linguistic competence in an English as an Academic Lingua Franca context. It illustrates how lecturers’ language can be adapted to an international audience and how EAP and ELT teaching techniques can facilitate comprehension. They detail the stages of the project, which they found simple and easy to set up. Finally, Katrien Deroey surveys EMI lecturer training worldwide in order to help practitioners with the design and delivery of such training. She summarizes the content, delivery, challenges and recommendations of published lecturer training initiatives in 18 countries. The main components are found to be language, pedagogy, communication and EMI awareness. Delivery happens mainly face to face in groups. Microteaching with reflection, feedback and observation is widely used and highly rated. Recommendations include framing the training as part of a broader continuous professional development programme which goes beyond language work and which is adapted to local, institutional and personal needs. Additionally, a basic EMI lecturer training framework is proposed. [less ▲]

Designing and delivering an online research article writing course for doctoral students in Luxembourg during Covid-19

in Fenton, James; Gimenez, Julio; Mansfield, Katherine (Eds.) et al International perspectives on teaching academic English in turbulent times (2023)

This chapter reports on the design, delivery and evaluation of an online research article writing course for doctoral students. The course format was a response to COVID-19 but was designed to be ... [more ▼]

This chapter reports on the design, delivery and evaluation of an online research article writing course for doctoral students. The course format was a response to COVID-19 but was designed to be sustainable through enabling flexible, interactive, personalised and independent learning. Its five major components are independent learning tasks, online workshops, writing output, peer review and consultations. Moodle is used for resources and assignments; WebEx for workshops and consultations. Students independently use the e-coursebook to read the theory and submit tasks based on their own texts and articles in their discipline ahead of a workshop on the topic. Additionally, they periodically submit article drafts and engage in peer review. Consultations with the instructor further personalise learning. Having described the course, the chapter goes on to evaluate its affordances and issues by reporting student feedback and teachers’ experiences. It was found that students greatly appreciated the systematic work on their writing in tasks and workshops. However, workshop preparation was very time-consuming for teachers and students would prefer them to be ‘offline’. Furthermore, multidisciplinary peer reviewing and the need to write throughout the course were positively perceived, although requiring greater flexibility in submission times. Consultations were also rated as extremely useful. We conclude with recommendations regarding online course delivery and a blended adaptation for post-COVID purposes. [less ▲]

Metadiscourse by native and non-native English speakers: importance marking in lectures

Scientific Conference (2021, May 27)

This talk has a dual purpose. In addition to mapping the use of one type of metadiscourse, viz. importance markers, across ‘native’ and ‘English Medium Instruction’ (EMI) lecture corpora, we elaborate on ... [more ▼]

This talk has a dual purpose. In addition to mapping the use of one type of metadiscourse, viz. importance markers, across ‘native’ and ‘English Medium Instruction’ (EMI) lecture corpora, we elaborate on analytical issues related to studying metadiscourse in spoken and disciplinary discourse. ‘Importance markers’ (Deroey & Taverniers, 2012) are lexicogrammatical metadiscursive devices combining discourse organization with evaluation along a ‘parameter of importance or relevance’ (Thompson and Hunston, 2000, p. 24). In lectures, they help students identify key content, which is useful for allocating processing resources while listening to what are typically dense monologues that require processing in real time. This in turns is likely to benefit understanding, note-taking and retention. Comparing the use of importance markers in a single-discipline corpus of engineering lectures by ‘native’ speakers and EMI lecturers, our aim was to contribute to the limited insights into the linguistic features of EMI lecture discourse generally and metadiscourse important for lecture discourse organization and hence lecture listening, specifically. Both researchers independently identified potential importance markers manually in lectures 46 engineering lectures (364,542 words) delivered in the Italy, Malaysia, the UK, and New Zealand,. Agreed instances were tagged and the tagged corpus imported into Sketch Engine to facilitate further analysis. Overall, native speakers and EMI lecturers differed little in importance marker frequency, range, types, and lexemes. In both corpora, the predominant verb marker was V n/clause (e.g. remember they don't know each other). The main difference was the far more common use of the listener-oriented 2 pers pron V n/clause marker (you must understand how to apply this one) by the non-native speakers but this was largely due to idiolectic variation. Contrary to most corpus linguistic metadiscourse studies, we report the inevitable analytical difficulties when identifying and classifying metadiscourse. Issues include establishing a definition that is broad enough to capture the various realizations of a metadiscursive function, while not ‘opening the floodgates’ to include instances that are not representative or that render the study unfeasible. For us this included distinguishing between evaluation of discourse and ‘real world’ entities, excluding very frequent phrases that could be viewed as importance markers but in this discipline probably served another function, and establishing a continuum of highlighting ‘force’. These considerations necessitated careful manual analysis of a relatively small corpus, which however means that generalization are limited and idiolectic bias more likely. [less ▲]

Designing and managing an online, personalised research writing course for postgraduates

Scientific Conference (2021, April 08)

This paper describes and evaluates an online research article writing course at the University of Luxembourg. Participants were self-referred PhD students from different disciplines. The aim of the ten ... [more ▼]

This paper describes and evaluates an online research article writing course at the University of Luxembourg. Participants were self-referred PhD students from different disciplines. The aim of the ten-week course is to improve insight into the structural, stylistic and rhetorical features of research articles as well as the writing and publication process. It also provides tools for students to develop their own writing. We will situate our course rationale and design within the literature, then compare these to both the reality of managing and delivering the course online as well as participants’ feedback as reflected in 30 surveys. We will focus on the following results: • The practicability of including multiple pedagogical elements in an online course was challenging. We wanted to integrate both independent and collaborative work, production and reflection. However, results of the surveys and our own experience show that the multiplicity of elements was often seen as complex and difficult to manage and multiple submission deadlines problematic. • Students favoured working alone over working together and uptake of writing groups (Aitchison, 2009) was poor. Multi-disciplinary peer groups were, however, positively reviewed (cf. Hyland, 2012). • The flexibility of the online environment was seen as positive, yet many reported problems finding time to write. However, participants did see the benefit in having to write regularly. Tools of reflection did not score highly. • The personalisation of learning input scored highly in the survey, but this was time-consuming to implement. Whilst instructor-student consultations were offered to further personalise feedback, these had a low uptake (8/30). • We wanted to create a course which included guidance on the writing and publication process (Starfield & Paltridge, 2016) as well as increased genre awareness (Swales, 1990) to prepare students for publication. However, tasks on language and structure were rated more useful by more students than this content. • More participants commented on the benefit of working through their language issues in live sessions over learning how to address language issues through the corpus-tools that were integrated into the course (Charles, 2018). Through sharing this information, we hope to generate a discussion with the audience about ways to optimise online writing courses and manage some of the problems associated with online delivery. Aitchison, C. (2009). Writing groups for doctoral education. Studies in Higher Education, 34(8), 905-916. Charles, M. (2018) Corpus-assisted editing for doctoral students: More than just concordancing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 36, 15-26. Charles, M. (2018). Using do-it-yourself-corpora in EAP: A tailor-made resource for teachers and students. Teaching English for Specific and Academic Purposes, 6(2), 217-224. Hyland, K. (2012). Disciplinary Identities: Individuality and Community in Academic Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nesi, H. & Gardener, S. (2012). Genres across the disciplines: Student writing in higher education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paltridge, B., & Starfield, S. (2016). Getting published in academic journals: Navigating the publication process. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Swales, J. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [less ▲]

Importance marking in EMI lectures: A comparative study

Scientific Conference (2021, February 23)

In this presentation we focus on how lecturers mark important information in their lectures. Being able to identify important information is fundamental to the learning process (Benson, 1989, p. 437), and ... [more ▼]

In this presentation we focus on how lecturers mark important information in their lectures. Being able to identify important information is fundamental to the learning process (Benson, 1989, p. 437), and the different levels of information in a lecture may be highlighted through a careful choice of language, including explicit macro markers (Chaudron & Richards, 1986; Allison & Tauroza, 1995; Jung, 2003; Titsworth & Kiewra, 2004). Previous research has focussed particularly on importance markers in native speaking (NS) lecturer discourse (e.g. Crawford Camiciottoli 2004; Deroey & Taverniers 2011, 2012; Deroey 2012, 2014, 2015). Our study expands this research to compare the use of lexicogrammatical importance markers in both NS and non-native speaker (NNS) lectures. A specially compiled corpus of about 365,000 words of Physical Science lectures was used in our study, featuring a balanced number of words from lectures in Italy (Johnson & Picciuolo, 2020; Picciuolo & Johnson, 2020) as well as in New Zealand, the UK and Malaysia (‘Engineering Lecture Corpus’ ). A qualitative analysis was done to annotate all instances of markers evaluating the importance of lecture content. These included verb, adjective or noun phrases containing an evaluation of importance. Assessment-related expressions were also marked. 378 separate instances were identified. More delicate analysis of the importance-marking phrases was done, with distributions and variations in frequent patterns identified in both NS and NNS lectures. While Verb phrases were found to be the most frequent in both NS and NNS lectures (62%), there was variation in the type of Verb patterns according to NS and NNS, as well as in verb choice. In general, though importance markers were distributed evenly over NS (=191) and NNS (=187) lectures, NS showed more variety than NNS in the type of pattern used, with adjective, metanoun and assessment-related expressions as well as idiomatic expressions figuring more frequently than in NNS, although there were significant differences also within the NS and NNS sub-corpora themselves. Whether these findings show that NNS are more aware of the risks of misunderstanding among their international student audiences (House, 2003; Mauranen, 2006), and thus use a smaller variety of less ambiguous importance markers, or that NNS have fewer language resources to draw on in the first place, awareness-raising among EMI lecturers is vital when preparing teacher training materials, given the expansion of ELF in international academic contexts where both lecturers and students are non-native speakers. References Allison, D., & Tauroza S. (1995). The effect of discourse organisation on lecture comprehension. English for Specific Purposes 14: 157-173. Benson, M.J. (1989). The Academic Listening Task: a case study. TESOL quarterly, vol. 23(3) 421-445. Chaudron, C., & Richards J. C. (1986). The effect of discourse markers on the comprehension of lectures. Applied Linguistics, vol. 7 (2) 113-127. Crawford Camiciottoli, B. (2004). Audience-oriented relevance markers in business studies lectures. In Del Lungo Camiciotti, G. & Tognini Bonelli, E. (Eds.), Academic Discourse: New Insights into Evaluation. Peter Lang, pp. 81–98. Deroey, K. L. B. (2012). What they highlight is: the discourse functions of basic wh-clefts in lectures. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 11/2: 112–24. Deroey, K.L.B. (2014). ‘Anyway, the point I'm making is': lexicogrammatical relevance marking in lectures. In Vandelanotte L., Kristin, D. Caroline G. & Ditte K. (Eds.), Recent advances in Corpus Linguistics: Developing and exploiting corpora, Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 265-291. Deroey, K. L. B. (2015) Marking importance in lectures: Interactive and Textual Orientation. Applied Linguistics 2015: 36/1: 51-72. Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2011). A corpus-based study of lecture functions. Moderna Sprak 105/2: 1–22. Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012). Just remember this: Lexicogrammatical relevance markers in lectures. English for Specific Purposes. 31 (4) 221-233. House, J. (2003). Misunderstanding in intercultural university encounters. In House J., Kasper G and Ross S. (Eds.), Misunderstanding in social life: discourse approaches to problematic talk, London: Longman, 22-56. Johnson, J. H., & Picciuolo, M. (2020). Interaction in spoken academic discourse in an EMI context: the use of questions. Conference proceedings of the Congress UPV 6th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd’20) Domenech, J., Merello, P., de la Poza, E. & Peña-Ortiz, R. (Eds.), Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València, pp. 211-219. Mauranen, A. (2006). Signalling and preventing misunderstanding in English as a lingua franca communication. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 177: 123-150. Picciuolo, M., & Johnson, J. H. (2020). Contrasting EMI lecturers’ perceptions with practices at the University of Bologna. In Miller, D.R. (Ed.), Quaderni del CeSLiC. Occasional papers. Bologna: Centro di Studi Linguistico-Culturali (CeSLiC), Università di Bologna. AlmaDL, p. 23. http://amsacta.unibo.it/6399/ Titsworth, S. B., & Kiewra, K.A. (2004). Spoken organizational lecture cues and student notetaking as facilitators of student learning. Contemporary Educational Psychology 29: 447-461. [less ▲]

Comparing Academic Languages: German, English, French

Scientific Conference (2019, October 30)

Teaching and learning in an internationalized context: challenges and strategies

Presentation (2019, April 26)

The internationalization of higher education has led to a variety of contexts in which native and non-native speakers of English teach students with different cultural, educational and linguistic ... [more ▼]

The internationalization of higher education has led to a variety of contexts in which native and non-native speakers of English teach students with different cultural, educational and linguistic backgrounds through the medium of English. In this talk, I will survey the key issues associated with ‘English Medium Instruction’ for lecturers and students. In addition, we will look at linguistic and pedagogical strategies that can facilitate teaching and learning in these contexts. [less ▲]