Part of the Academic English online conference with Cambridge, Robert McLarty gave an insightful webinar on How much A does an EAP course need?
How many of us work on foundation courses where students are being prepared to enter mainstream tertiary education where they will be studying in English? Apart from the context of a university or polytechnic and the learning environment of lectures, seminars and tutorials, how different is the English they require compared to that needed to work or even just travel in English?
In this webinar Robert looked at the four skills; listening, speaking, reading and writing and compared the content of a general and an academic English course. For each skill he looked at the difficulties associated with it, the learning outcomes, strategies to adopt and some useful activities to help in the classroom.
A popular technique suggested by Robert was to use visual aids when encouraging speaking and reading. He showed a newspaper cutting reporting a plane crash;
“This visual would work as a bridge into reading. It comes from a lesson on Courage where students were asked to study the concept from a psychological point of view first and then make a short presentation about a heroic act. Again I would stress how useful it is to look at the topic through the lense of a end-user or reader rather than the expert in order to avoid overwhelming students with content and language work.”
Find out more about Academic English with Cambridge
You can watch the next webinar in the series; Strategies for teaching critical thinking more effectively with Chris Sowton.