Teaching writing to technical university students

 

Introduction

Teaching English for academic purposes (EAP) is a significant component of L2 teaching at a university level. Teaching EAP at a technical university, however, is even more demanding. It requires not only teaching academic language skills, but also placing them in the context of English for specific purposes (ESP). Aware of the challenges, we prepared a course for Computer Science graduate students (holding a BSc diploma). The goal of one-semester course in Technical and Scientific Writing is to teach students the conventions and processes involved in EAP [3], as well as revision and evaluation strategies [2, p. iii], within the scope of ESP teaching.

The curriculum

a) Academic English in writing

The academic writing course for technical university students needs to cover a wide range of topics. The students should learn different registers present in EAP and the specifics of the writing process. The curriculum encompasses the most basic issues, as well as the most complex ones. It includes the elements a technical university student will most likely use in their academic career.

The course begins with the discussion of what is ‘academic’ writing, and then guides the students through the basic textual elements, paragraphs, with their structure and division into different types. Students learn the specifics of the writing process and text organization. At this stage we strongly emphasise paraphrasing and summarizing, the ways of quoting, and the issue of plagiarism, which may be perceived differently in different cultures. Finally, we move to more complex forms of writing. They can be selected on the basis of needs analysis or interviews with students, gauging their needs for different written forms, such as abstract or scientific report.

The programme is organised in such a way that it covers various aspects of academic writing. Its main focus is not only teaching the students formal requirements of academic writing, but also implementing them in their own writing. Therefore, we teach not only the structural elements, but also grammatical and stylistic aspect of writing.

b) The ESP component: written forms and samples

The ESP component in teaching writing heavily influences several aspects of this course. First and foremost, it influences the forms being taught. In terms of smaller segments, the students are shown the types of paragraphs they might find most useful in their academic work, such as definition of process description paragraphs. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we are not able to include forms as complex as an article. Thus, we try to focus on article abstracts, as well as scientific reports or laboratory notes. This heavy emphasis on the scientific and technical aspect of writing also affects the sample selection for teaching materials, which will be discussed in the following sections.

Sources and materials

Teachers of writing need to keep in mind that L2 writing is mostly ‘goal-oriented’ [1, p. VIII] field, with particular emphasis on performing [7, p. XV]. Fortunately, they have at their disposal a vast amount of materials pertaining to theoretical instruction and practical activities.

Every teacher may adopt a different approach to the selection of teaching materials. It is, naturally, possible to use a specific handbook, but it is also possible to apply a topic-oriented syllabus, and select the teaching materials for the topics covered during class. With that in mind, teachers can either use traditional instruction materials, online resources, or they can select appropriate materials and provide their own input.

The first group of resources constitutes academic writing handbooks. They cover a wide range of approaches and exercises. Also, depending on the profile of the book, they are either very general, or focus on specific field of academic writing, such as paragraphs. Among the multitude of handbooks one can find works such as Writing Academic English by Alice Oshima and Ann Hogue [4], covering the basics of academic writing, from the very sentence structure, to more advanced issues such as essay organisation.

The second group includes materials available online. In most cases, they are materials prepared by writing centres at universities or colleges, such as Purdue University [6] or Monash University [4]. The resources, and sometimes downloadable materials, are reliable and universal, which makes them a practical source of homework or a good source of samples for in-class work.

Finally, the third group consists of materials prepared by the teacher. The form of these materials depends solely on the instructor and the teaching methodology, and comprises both theoretical materials and in-class practice activities. Highly intelligible manner of presenting theoretical part can be a Powerpoint presentation, outlining the most important issues. Teacher can also provide handouts, summarising the main points of a discussed topic.