Academic texts are dense and complex and can be tricky for
native speakers to read, so for EAP students they present all kinds of challenges.
This in turn poses a challenge for EAP materials writers. Do we use absolutely
authentic texts because that’s what our students (will) need to deal with, or
do we simplify them in some way to make them more manageable?
There are good arguments in favour of using authentic
academic texts in EAP materials. As Alexander, Argent & Spencer put
it: “Teachers may be concerned that the
content and vocabulary of [authentic] texts will present too many difficulties
and should be left to a later stage, but the reality is that, for EAP students,
there is no later stage.” (EAP
Essentials, 2008). If students are already having to deal with academic texts
as part of their studies (or will very soon have to) then it doesn’t make much
sense not to tackle similar texts in an EAP class. Indeed, I’ve known former
students complain that their EAP course didn’t prepare them for the reality of
study in English because it was too easy, making for a shock when they got
thrown into their subject courses.
However, using a complex academic text in EAP materials can
have drawbacks too:
- students just get lost and confused and end up losing confidence and
motivation
- decoding the text becomes a distraction; the teacher ends up spending most of
the lesson ‘going through’ the text (whether they intended to or not) and the
main focus of the lesson gets rather sidelined
Weighing up these two perspectives is tricky and depends in
part on the aim of the materials and the target audience. If you’re working on
wider reading skills, a long authentic text might be exactly what you need,
whereas if you’re focusing on micro-skills (citation, hedging, vocabulary, or
other language features), then it could become an unwanted distraction.
Similarly, the level of text that in-sessional students on a
discipline-specific (ESAP) course can cope with will be very different from
what foundation level, pre-sessional and/or mixed-discipline students will be
able to manage.
It’s an issue I came across again in some recent writing
work and it prompted me to look back at what I’d said about choosing texts in How to Write EAP Materials. The tactics
I suggested there for making authentic academic texts more manageable included:
- use short texts: sometimes a very short text (such as an
abstract or a definition) or a short extract from a longer text provides just
enough context to illustrate a particular language point
- lower the cognitive load: by choosing texts aimed at high
school students (such as A level or IB texts) or very introductory
undergraduate texts, you maintain the academic style, but the content is less
daunting
- abridge texts: sometimes just taking out a complicated
example can make a text easier to understand without losing too much in terms
of authenticity
One additional tactic that I’ve been using a lot in the
materials I’ve been working on recently is to do a lot of the decoding work for
the student. By which I mean that you provide a heavily scaffolded task to get
the basic decoding out of the way relatively quickly before moving onto the
more specific focus of the lesson. Different options include:
- give students three or four single-sentence summaries of
the text and they have to choose the best one (and explain their choice)
- give paraphrases of key points which students have to mark
as either true or false, or give a set of paraphrases that students have to put
in order to create a summary
- give ‘student’ citations (either written or spoken for
variety) which paraphrase key points and students match them to the relevant
sections of the original text
By providing simple paraphrases of key points in the first
task, you’re doing a lot of the work for the student in getting to grips with
the main ideas in the text. This means that you can get onto dealing with the specific
focus of the lesson (analysing a particular language feature or working on a
micro-skill) more quickly. It also provides useful examples of paraphrasing,
introduces some key synonyms and is ‘authentic’ in the sense that it shows
students what they might do themselves when citing from a text.
I guess it all comes back to keeping the aim of the lesson
in mind. If the aim isn’t to work on understanding a long reading text, but you
still need to show the language in context, then find ways to help students
through that part so that you can get onto the real goal of the lesson with
minimum distraction.
How To Write EAP Materials is available to download as an ebook via
Amazon and
Smashwords.
Labels: authentic texts, EAP, ELT T2W, How to Write EAP Materials
