Introduction

As teacher at a higher education institution, I am aware of the challenge that the writing of their final, extensive research paper or thesis presents to my students. As consultant and evaluator of such theses, I am also aware of the strengths and weaknesses exhibited, to a greater or lesser extent, by the end products. This paper will outline the main areas of research that have informed my teaching of language development courses to these students, and will present some of the lessons and activities through which the objectives of the course are targeted.
Structurally, the paper will present relevant theoretical elements followed by a presentation of a small segment of what happens in practice. This course is very much a work in progress. In my three years’ experience to date, many revisions have been undertaken, and there are plans for further development or improvement. The activity cycle introduced below is an element that I have had good experience with, and trust will be of interest to colleagues.

1. Placing the course in context

The compulsory language development component of the 8-semester undergraduate English teacher training programme runs over a total of 7 semesters. The final two coincide with the semester in which the students choose their thesis topics and begin to work on their topics, and the following semester in which they submit a preliminary outline and, some weeks later, one chapter of their thesis. /1/ The language development courses in these two semesters are therefore conceived of as English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses, specifically designed to provide the students with help in the writing of their theses. It is not, however, a research seminar as such.

2. General theoretical background

In this context, EAP has been conceptualised in two ways: as one form of Language for Specific Purposes and as an expression of the functional-notional approach to foreign language pedagogy.

2.1. Academic language functions

To begin with the latter, if we focus on the general communicative functions of language, we can identify a special case for academic language functions. Language exists for the purpose of communication; to allow people to do things with it. Communicative competence means that the internalised abstract linguistic rules (competence) that govern the form of language need to be used appropriately. Sociolinguist Dell Hymes (1974) developed the “ethnography of communication” approach, analysing the social, cultural and linguistic properties of speech acts and speech events embedded in a cultural context. He proposed that communicative competence be seen as knowing “when to speak, when not, and … what to talk about with whom, when where, in what manner” (Hymes, 1972:277). Seen in this light, communicative demands recur in similar situations and lead to structured expectations, which in turn lead to patterns for dealing with these standard situations.

In foreign language pedagogy, communicative language teaching emphasises the need for teaching everyday communicative functions, such as greeting, apologising, offering, dis/agreeing, advising, asking for information, amongst others. Functional-notional syllabi reflect the shift to focussing on the purposes to which languages is put. (See Van Ek and Alexander, 1980 for a seminal document operationalising such an approach).

Educational contexts, in our case formal, tertiary educational contexts, deal with knowledge and learning and are associated with typical language functions, such as defining, classifying, describing, explaining and many others. In fact, the verbs associated with Bloom’s well-known taxonomy of educational objectives (1956) provide us with a useful list of academic language functions. For example, if we engage in the highest level of the cognitive domain, evaluation, we use verbs like appraise, argue, assess, conclude, evaluate, judge, justify, predict, prove, rank, select, support.

Clearly, it would be difficult to compile a complete list; and just as clearly there is a considerable overlap with non-academic language, but items such as these would occur with greater frequency in academic settings and in educational textual genres, and would be central to the purpose of the communicative event. It makes sense to focus on these special functions within an overall communicative language teaching framework: what works in General English classes works just as well in EAP classes. The lexical items associated with these functions form an essential part of the vocabulary to be taught.

2.2. English for Academic Purposes

In fact, the emergence of EAP was facilitated by the trend towards communicative language teaching (CLT). A fundamental element of the classical humanist approach to education and the favoured Grammar-Translation Method had been to see the primary objective of language teaching as enabling the reading of literary texts of inherent value in the original language (Richter, 2005; Richards & Rogers, 2002:5). It was this approach that CLT rejected in favour of seeing language primarily as a means of communication with the practical consequence that language ability should be “developed thorough activities which actually simulate target performance” (Nunan, 1988:26).

CLT was influenced by the reception-based theory of language acquisition put forward by Stephen Krashen. In this view, learners need to be exposed to comprehensible input (that is, input in the FL that can be understood in a particular context but that is slightly beyond the learner’s existing level of ability) in order to facilitate language acquisition, which was held to develop automatically, just as is the case in L1 language acquisition. This process could be hindered by the learner’s negative emotions. An important point is that sequencing of optimal comprehensible input is focussed on meaning rather than on grammar (Krashen, 1995). Although Krashen’s views have been criticised, his influence is undeniable. In the context of EAP in a tertiary educational context, the focus on meaning is particularly relevant as regards the receptive skills of reading and listening. Nevertheless, students who have to produce academic writing of a high standard need help in formulating grammatically acceptable sentences that are also pragmatically appropriate. The language classroom allows for oral interaction. The negotiation of meaning and conversational adjustments, such as recasts or expansions in response to some form of clarification request, facilitates the production of comprehensible output which in turn functions as comprehensible input. Interactionists suggest that by recognising difficulties, such as misunderstanding or even communication breakdown, and learning to resolve their problems, learners are able to receive and produce more input that is more comprehensible (Gass, 1997). Swain, in her study of immersion courses in Canada, found that learners may need to be required to produce comprehensible output (Swain, 1985). It is in language production that learners are able to test their hypotheses about language.

For students preparing to write their theses, it is essential that the practice of reception and production should be relevant and meaningful to them. As young adults it is to be expected that they will “learn best when the content is personally relevant to past experience or present concerns and the learning process is relevant to life experiences” (Brundage and MacKeracher 1980, quoted in Nunan, 1988:23). Focus on specific, purposeful language use has from the outset been a major characteristic of Languages for Specific Purposes (of which EAP is one type). Just how specific LSP courses should be is a matter of judgement and need in particular educational contexts. It is easy to identify the specificity in the language used in the object of study (for example, a particular text, situation or discipline), but specificity can also be seen as lying in the needs of the students (Huckin, 2003:9). Meeting the specific needs of the students for proficiency in specific kinds of language usage should be the guiding principle.

EAP is often taught in second language situations and course participants may be students of widely differing disciplines, all with their own genres and conventions. Fortunately, in the case under discussion the students are all English majors studying in the same English as a Foreign Language context. So the fortuitous situation exists where the teacher is the content and the language teacher in one person. Academic writing is the content and the purpose of the course. The balance – or imbalance – between content and language is contentious point in Content and Language Integrated Learning. CLIL operates on the assumption that the focus on meaning can support the next logical step of learning subject content through the foreign language, whereby the foreign language is the indirect object of study. The opposite emphasis is represented by St John and Dudley-Evans (1998:11), who put forward a distinction between what they term ‘carrier content’ and ‘real content’, and see this distinction as essential to ESP. In this view, a text dealing with a topic from some discipline (carrier content) would be used to present certain language items (real content). This distinction is not applicable in our case, since both kinds of content can be targeted with the same text. The tension between CLIL and ESP is thus resolved by using both approaches, sometimes with the same text.

2.3 Application to the course in question

Applied to the current class, this means that the course is designed around, within the framework of the Bloom taxonomy, the objectives of and for the students can be delineated on the basis of what they will have to be able to do. In their theses, my students would be expected to demonstrate their ability in both the productive and reproductive skills associated with the lower three levels: knowledge, comprehension and application and the three higher levels: analysis, synthesis and evaluation. They have to devote at least a chapter to pedagogical implications/applications, and in this section they may be called upon to discuss these skills with regard to other, younger learners of English and also to demonstrate their ability to put these principles into practice in the interest of passing on what they have learnt. In their preparatory work, they would have to acquire knowledge, show their understanding of it, and apply it in new contexts; based on their analysis, synthesis and evaluation of what they have learnt and understood. The course therefore should be designed to help them to get closer to achieving all this. The objectives are therefore not defined in terms of achieved proficiency. They are rather to provide opportunities for the students to practice the crucial language and thinking skills, and to promote their ability to continue this process autonomously.

Specifically, a CLT approach is adopted to develop the students’ academic language skills, allowing them to engage in the functions associated with scholarly work, and modelling ways in which they can independently approach their subject material with the intention both of mastering the content and learning the language used to express it. This necessitates dealing with the ‘whole language’ although the activities may deal with mainly one of the four skills. The role of the teacher is seen as that of facilitator, it is the learners who are main actors.

3. Needs analysis

Having stated that the course is centred on the learner, the next step is to let the learners indicate what they need and want. It is important for the impetus to come from the students and for them to consider their own needs and formulate them explicitly. Allowing them to actively influence what they will do and relating this explicitly to their concrete task of thesis-writing increases their motivation. That the ‘wish-list’ thus compiled is in line with what can be expected on the basis of teaching experience means that the course rests on consensus in this regard. In fact, in the three years in which I have taught this course, there has been a remarkable similarity in the list. There is also a ‘hidden agenda’ – the teacher’s additional objectives for the course: to avoid excess prescription, to encourage the students to take charge of their own learning, to provide them with practical techniques, strategies and resources to facilitate their autonomous learning, and to stimulate the students’ thinking about their own topic, the topics of others and the issues pertinent to scholarly endeavour in general.
As to the needs expressed by the students, they can be classified under three main headings:
• To focus specifically on thesis-writing;
• To practise presenting orally, with a view to their formal defence of their thesis;
• To find additional sources.

Whilst there is time in the course to deal with all three, this paper will deal with only the first one, and will present two of the activities I designed to help the students. This is perhaps the right place to acknowledge the very real debt I owe to the students who - by articulating their frustrations and aspirations, and by reflecting on and subsequently spelling out their weaknesses - can be seen as co-developers of the tasks.
Within the broad category of needing help with how to write a thesis, the following areas were identified as requiring work:
– Vocabulary: finding the right word and using it in the right way;
– The typical, and often difficult, grammatical constructions required;
– Academic style;
– Referring to the thoughts and work of others and presenting their own.

4. The activity cycle

4.1. Content-based

All language teaching is content-based in some way but by integrating content and language learning objectives the exercise can serve a dual purpose, using the text to study relevant content and also to study the language used. Within the pedagogical framework outlined in the first part of this paper, in the case in point:
• the content should be directly related to the students’ own research topics and research processes, as well as their current and targeted language proficiency;
• the content should be related to writing a thesis;
• the content should be related to conventions of academic expression and scholarly practice in
general;
• the content should be ‘scaffolded’ to help bridge the gap between what the students already
know and what they need to learn in order to succeed at the particular learning task; and
• the approach and the activities should be geared to providing the students with a model for how
to deal with content on their own when reading for their theses.

4.2. Selection of the text

4.2.1. Features considered:

topic; style, length, level of difficulty of content and language
Stated as a complex and more specific objective: the authentic text should be about a topic relevant to the all the students’ present needs and overall interests, its genre should be ‘academic article’, it should be short enough to ‘fit’ into an 80-minute period (with some overlap into the previous and subsequent periods), it should be challenging for the students to read but not unusually difficult, both from the point of view of the language used and the issues addressed/information conveyed. To increase the likelihood of a lively discussion, an additional consideration was to find an article that was a good example of academic writing and yet could be criticised in terms of the criteria presented in the course.

One of the issues affecting these students is plagiarism: what it is and how to avoid it. In the lecture course on Academic Skills that all the students attend, the topic had already been discussed, along with conventions of citation. Here was an opportunity to discuss plagiarism a greater length, especially since previous experience indicated that students had doubts and objections to the standard academic attitude (see Richter, 2005)

4.2.2. The source of content is the following text:

Willen, M. S. (2004) Reflections on the Cultural Climate of Plagiarism, Liberal Education, Fall (on-line edition), AACU.
Retrievable from: http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-fa04myview.cfm

4.3. The cycle itself

4.3.1. Lesson One:

The topic of plagiarism is addressed and discussed with the students on the basis of an text entitled “Minimising Plagiarism” ( Excerpt from: James, R., McInnis, C. and Devlin, M. (2002) Assessing Learning in Australian Universities, available on-line at:
http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/assessing learning/docs/PlagMain.pdf). The article is written for academic teaching staff and discusses ‘students’ in the third person (as will the Willen text). Thus the students are expected to reflect on their own behaviour from ‘outside’. This parallels one of the challenges of thesis-writing: the move from learning and repeating what is right as a student to developing their own authorial voice and expressing critical agreement or disagreement as a novice academic. The Devlin article includes an exercise from Carroll, which is in turn based on an exercise in Swales and Feak, (1994) in which the readers are presented with 6 statements about the use of sources on a continuum and asked to decide where they would ‘draw the line’. The class completes this exercise and discusses the results. The role of visual elements, including paragraphing is discussed, as is the presence of metatext – which may be more than they expect and contributes to the reader-oriented attitude of the text .

After this, the Willen text is handed out. The sub-headings have been removed and their location is not made visible with an empty box. The students are asked to skim the text for the main ideas, which are then put up on the board. Based on this, the sub-headings are re-introduced, in the right place. This requires the students to scan the text, possibly several times, and to look at its overall coherence. The objectives for this preliminary reading is for the readers to understand the gist of the content, to recognise the author’s purpose and intended audience, and to look at rhetorical aspects of the text (especially those features discussed in connection with the Devlin text).

With the guidance of the teacher, the students put forward their ideas on what it means to critique an article (as opposed to ‘criticise’ in the sense of identifying what is bad about an article). In particular, it is expected that they come to recognise that critical reading implies more than summarising, being able to repeat the main points, accepting the information/opinions in the article, and expressing whether they like or dislike the article. In their theses they will be expected to use the ideas, data and conclusions of others to create new insights and to come to their own substantiated and well-argued conclusions by applying what they have learnt from their reading. In this sub-task, they develop a framework for critical analysis and also specific instruction and practice in reading strategies. (See: Carrwl and Carson (1997:48-49) for an overview of studies supporting the efficacy of teaching such strategies.) The students are requested to re-read the Willen article for the next lesson.

4.3.2. Lesson Two:

The second article used in the previous lesson will be used intensively.
The content is by now familiar to the students. Their background knowledge of the topic has been developed and contentious issues discussed in order to heighten their awareness. In line with the needs expressed by the students, this lesson will focus on vocabulary, grammar, academic style, referring to the thoughts and work of others, with the primary focus being on ‘vocabulary’.

4.3.2.1. Particular theoretical background

Krashen, in line with his overall ideas about language acquisition, believes “competence in spelling and vocabulary is most efficiently attained by comprehensible input in the form of reading” (Krashen, 1989:440) and is an example of incidental language acquisition. Cobb (2005) reports a study calling this into question, and Krashen’s response in which he stressed the inadequacy of testing instruments since they could not account for incremental learning. Cobb goes on to report on a study based on the vocabulary knowledge scale developed by Wesche and Paribakt in which word knowledge levels (from not knowing what a word means to definitely knowing) can be tracked over time (55-6). The procedure included numerous re-readings of the same text.

In the study by Horst (2000) it was found that “words were generally making progress over the course of several readings” (Cobb, 2005:57). The challenge for the teacher is how to encourage students to read and reread texts often enough for incremental learning to happen. Furthermore, for words to be learnt, they have to be encountered in the text (ibid). While high-frequency words can be expected to be readily encountered, Cobb finds that “after the most frequent 1000 words of English words thin out quite rapidly” (ibid.). The implication is that even with extensive reading in a particular text domain less frequently appearing words would not naturally occur often enough for learning to take place (Cobb, 2005:60). Explicit teaching of vocabulary is justified since encountering the right words is not automatic.

However, analysis of academic writing can help determine what words need to be learnt. The corpus-based Academic Word List (developed by Averil Coxhead at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) provides lists of 570 specifically academic word families, organised into sub-lists that move from high frequency downwards. Technical words specific to a specific discipline are not included. This means that the AWL deals with the general academic linguistic competence that is taught in what Huckin (2003) refers to as ‘wide-angle’ LSP and is therefore useful to all EFL students who wish to study and/or write in English. The AWL is available on the Internet: on her own web-site:
http://language.massey.ac.nz/staff/awl/awlinfo.shtml, or on
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/wordlists.htm).

Having determined what vocabulary is to be targeted for learning, the question arises: what does it mean to know a word? Clearly, it is not simply a matter of learning inter-language equivalents. In fact, that is a strategy that can lead the learner astray. Instead, spelling, pronunciation, nuances of meaning, details of usage, sociolinguistic attributes, including here the important feature of appropriate register, derivational behaviour, word formation, collocations and even connotations are all important elements of knowing a word. Nation (2001) also mentions the distinction between receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge, drawing attention to the difference between understanding and using words. Since students may in part be reading beyond their level of language proficiency – as indeed may happen to native speakers as well - practice in understanding globally, without understanding every single word or sentence is useful.

Furthermore, words do not come alone. Learning about ‘the company that words keep’, i.e. collocations, is essential for acceptable usage. Academic language use is very conventional, sometimes even ritualised, and the lexical approach to vocabulary teaching, based on chunks or formulaic language, can be most helpful, especially since these short stretches of ‘prefabricated’ language incorporate grammatical elements, and this kind of vocabulary learning facilitates the learning of the associated grammar.

The idea of incremental learning presupposes repeated encounters with a word, but what constitutes an ‘encounter’ with a word? Intuitively it is clear that words can easily be overlooked even though they are present in a text, or forgotten even within one text so that they appear to the reader as new words even though a close analysis would show that they have occurred previously. This is one reason why rules of thumb stating that a word has to be met so-and-so many times in order for it to be internalised are suspect. Cobb reports research that indicates that “the conditions for retention of words from reading are rather particular and may present themselves sonly occasionally” (Cobb, 2005:64). Two consequences for successful learning are therefore raising awareness of which words present themselves for learning, and keeping track of words students want to learn. The teacher’s awareness of the necessary words is the starting point for bringing these words to the students’ attention, whilst the latter is the rationale for the ever-popular personal vocabulary list, preferably noting co-text, meaning, explanations, synonyms or antonyms, and examples of own usage. Positive reinforcement for students who take the time to compile such lists supports their endeavours.

4.3.2.2. Procedure in Lesson Two

The students come to class having at least skimmed and scanned the article (in the previous class) or also re-read it for homework. The first part of the lesson is devoted to looking more closely at the content: first by going through the article and answering the questions the teacher poses. This recasts the article into a sort of interview, with the students responding in less formal, spoken language. The next set of questions do not deal only with content, but lead the students to examine critically the author’s purpose and strategy for achieving it, the overall structure of the text, format features, the assumptions the author makes, the characteristics the author attributes to his audience, and so on. Some of these questions require the students to scan the text repeatedly to identify segments that substantiate their analyses. The more implicit elements require the students to pay attention to nuances of meaning and to the selection of discourse markers.The classes take place in the interactive reading room of the college library. In the next phase, the teacher introduces the AWL and allows the students to browse the lists. If the students do not spontaneously comment that the words are listed individually and out of context, this has to be elicited. Depending on the time available, some dictionary work is now recommended. A previous class would have been devoted to using an electronic or on-line dictionary.

Thereafter, a predetermined portion of the Willen text is pasted into the AWL Highlighter
(http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/awlhighlighter.htm), the sub-list selected and the extract submitted for processing. In a short time, the text is returned with the words from the AWL in boldface. For example:

Yet incidents of plagiarism persist, and, as these numbers suggest,
they are probably on the rise. This persistence, in spite of efforts
to teach students what plagiarism is, why it is unethical, and how
to avoid it, makes clear that the circumstances which lead a student
to choose to plagiarize are considerably more complicated than
the omnipresence of the Internet or simply not knowing any better.
In fact, the high percentage of students who willingly admitted
to "cut and paste" plagiarism for McCabe's survey is evidence
enough that they do know what they are doing.

The next step is to make a banked, gapped text, using
AWL Gapmaker (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/awlgapmaker.htm).

Care needs to be taken that the first extract leads to highlighted items that can be used to illustrate points the teacher has decided to stress, and that the gapfilling exercise is feasible (as is the case above). A maximum of 2,400 characters can be processed at one time (the example above has only 480 characters), so quite a variety of items can be found. The points discussed always include features from “What does it mean to know a word?” and emphasis of how words work in combination. Students can also try to use words in the gaps that are not on the list of works extracted.

After this first extract, on which the class works together, each student can experiment with the technique. If they have already had a class in which they could search for sources on the Internet, they can profit from using texts that they will need for their theses and which are directly related to their field of research. The tasks set for homework should include creative use of selected words from the text/s. Depending on the needs of the class, the procedure, with modifications to add interest, can be repeated with other articles.

4.3.3. Lesson Three:

The class continues to work on the theme of plagiarism, albeit more indirectly. The topic is now focussed on the idea of ‘using your own words’. I usually begin by telling the students about the ‘stupid answer’ habits we had as students, when we would deliberately misunderstand pragmatic implications of utterances. For example, when pouring some-one a glass of orange juice, we would ask them to “Say when”, and the prompt response would be “When”. Similarly, when asked to “Use your own words”, we would try our teacher’s patience by using words truly of our own device, like, “Groof, tuggledy nam …”. Childish, yes, but also a good illustration of the point that we do not have “our own words”. Words are by their very nature arbitrary, and are social constructs, even though we can, and often do, coin new words which may make sense only in the context of a particular conversation. So using “the words of others” in itself cannot constitute plagiarism.

The issue of plagiarism is related to the expectations of the discourse community, which is in turn related to the genre of the text. In the genre-based approach to academic writing, students are taught to write academic texts by reading and examining how others do it (Swales, 1990). The trouble is that the temptation is there for the students to simply take a suitable stretch of text and substitute a few synonyms and consider that this suffices to make the text ‘ours’. Indeed, this is one of those grey areas where even academics will argue about whether, and when, this constitutes plagiarism. Novice writers may be uncertain of the language of academic writing even in their L1, and are unlikely to have developed their own authorial voice. For students composing text in a foreign language the problem is compounded. Two questions illustrate this: “Would they have been able to express the thought had it been their own?”; and “Would they have been able to express their own thought in their L1?” When working with the texts of more authoritative writers, they may be simply unable to “Talk about the source text in any language but its own” (Howard, 2004:3/9). Howard recalls coining the word patchwriting for this phenomenon, which may also include deletions, and some grammatical machinations. Sometimes the source may be given, indicating that the writers may even have been acting in good faith.

The exercise I have developed involves ‘undressing’ text and taking out the words related to the specific topic, to find useful patterns of discourse. The text selected should be an example of standard, appropriate academic discourse. Texts that depart from the norm, or that are oft-cited in academic texts (usually reflecting a particular aptness of expression) should be avoided. In the example below, I took an extract almost at random from a book dealing with plagiarism and the following skeleton of paragraph was the result:

XYZ (19xx), in an analysis of _____________________ and _________,
with reference to _______________,analyses _______________________
concepts of _________________, such as ___________. He focuses on
the ______________, citing what he calls _____________________.
I shall deal with only a few here.
(Adapted from Angélil-Carter, 2000:46)

The original text is a follows:

Scollon (1995), in an analysis of plagiarism and ideology, with reference
to intercultural discourse, analyses powerful taken-for-granted concept
of communication, such as the Sender-Message-Receiver formula. He
focuses on the person as communicator, citing what he calls ‘eight
problems in constructing the “author” (6). I shall deal with only a few
here.
(Angélil-Carter, 2000:46)

Together with the students, we construct a variety of such texts. Some flexibility is allowed and content accuracy is not a prerequisite, although the statements should try to be plausible. The following could be a text. Despite its similarity to the original model, it is not plagiarism, and does illustrate how “the words of others” can be used to express ourselves.

The author (1988, in an analysis of typical features of
‘Hunglish’ pronunciation and intonation, with reference
to the set of examples taken from his own corpus of
English spoken by beginner-level Hungarian learners of
English, analyses the phonological concepts of sentence
stress, such as the rising intonation associated with
questions in English. He focuses on the difference
from Hungarian patterns, citing what he calls the
“up-to-ask-but-fall-down-at-the-end”, or “rise-fall”,
pattern, and numerous other similar patterns. I shall
deal with only a few here.

The playful character of this exercise is usually well received and the students generate a variety of ‘new’ texts, learning also from their attempts to adapt grammatical aspects of the sentences to suit their new content. For the students who have had experience with structural drills, the basic idea of the activity is not unfamiliar. From our point of view, the complexity of the skeleton text and the students’ freedom to insert any content elements they wish (provided the end result makes sense and deals with a topic relevant to the English major course) ensure that they see recognise that this is a technique to help them recognise patterns of academic expression and not a recipe for a paragraph. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile stressing that this is a learning exercise, and that trying to write an even slightly longer text like this will hinder rather them help them express themselves. Should they try it, they will come to the same realisation.

I also give them more skeletons to work with, including this one taken from the by now well-known Willen text.

Surprisingly, _________________________ indicates
that this need is not an effect of the ____________;
nor are the ________________________ the primary issues.
Instead, this __________________________ reflects an
anxiety reinforced by their experiencing__________
____________________-- ___________________.

The point of this example is that I ask the students to tell me the original content from memory. So far, they have not been able to do this. Considering the number of times they read the article and that in the previous class a week before they looked at the words used, this underscores the degree to which such a skeleton is divorced from its content.

Of course, other manipulations of text can be used to teach academic style. The above two examples from lessons serve to illustrate how content and language can be learnt/taught in the same lesson cycle, for the benefit of the same students. It has been my intention in this paper to argue that English for Academic is a content field as well as an example of Language for Specific Purposes, and that by keeping a dual focus, multiple objectives can be realised at the same time. By using and re-using the same text, plus other texts on the same topic, the advantages of intensive reading are impressed on the student, while the variety of tasks and foci help to avert lassitude. The looming challenge of writing their theses adds impetus to the students’ efforts since at every point it becomes clear that they will be able to actively make use of what they have learnt. For those who would invest more of their out-of-class time in improving their academic reading and writing skills, the techniques demonstrated and experienced mean that they can do so whilst reading for content.

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Richter, B. M. 2006. In the words of others – conversations with students about plagiarism. In: Heltai P. (ed.) Nyelvi Modernizáció - szaknyelv, fordítás, terminológia, Gödöllő: MANYE.
Dudley-Evans T., St. John, M. J. 1998. Developments in English for Specific Purposes: A Multi-disciplinary Approach. Cambridge: CUP.
Swain, M. 1985. Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In: Gass, S. and Madden, C. (eds.) Input in second language acquisition. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Swales, J. M. 1990. Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: CUP.
Van Ek, J., Alexander, L. G. 1980. Threshold Level English. Oxford: Pergamon.

Internet sources:

http://language.massey.ac.nz/staff/awl/awlinfo.shtml
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/awlhighlighter.htm
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~alzsh3/acvocab/awlgapmaker.htm

Articles used with students:
Devlin, M. 2002. Minimising Plagiarism. In: James, R., McInnis, C. and Devlin, M. 2002. Assessing Learning in Australian Universities. Retrieved on 14 February 2006 from
http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/assessing learning/docs/PlagMain.pdf
Willen, M. S. 2004. Reflections on the Cultural Climate of Plagiarism, Liberal Education, Fall (on-line edition), Association of American Colleges and Universities. Retrieved on 14 February 2006 from Http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-fa04/le-fa04myview.cfm

/1/ What exactly constitutes a thesis at a teacher training college in Hungary is clearly a cultural construct. It bears many similarities to what is generally understood by the word in western English-speaking cultures but is generally shorter and the requirements less rigorous. Although rather fuzzy, this definition suffices for the purposes of this paper.