Anticipation, summarized by Wodehouse

"Few things are so pleasant as the anticipation of them."

~ P. G. Wodehouse, The Adventures of Sally

Teaching Academic Reading: a method including the Academic Word List

  It was frustration and some level of despair with teaching Academic Reading that pushed me to do an MA in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) several years ago. Now, two years after completing that degree, my academic reading classes are still the ones most likely to frustrate me, but I've learned a lot over the last 6 years. I am now completing my thirteenth one-semester, EAP class focused on Academic Reading and Writing for first-year students. (EAP stands for English for Academic Purposes.)

 When I started, I was given a variety of material and a lot of freedom to design the classes however I wanted. These classes are specific to the students' department/field of study, and that first class was with the History department. I love studying history, so it was an ideal match! 

  The problem was my lack of experience and knowledge: 

How do you teach someone who already knows how to read, how to read better? 

  I mean, I know how to read, and so do they. Also, I know how to read academic material quite well, but that's a really personal skill, or at least it feels like it. So, there was a lot of trial and error, and I began accumulating experience, often of things that didn't work well.

 Eventually, I was transferred to teaching EAP classes for Political Science and International Relations (interesting!) and Economics (not so interesting!) departments. These classes (with my MA teachers' guidance) pointed me to a central principle for teaching EAP classes: 

I'm not the expert; the students are. 

  How can I teach economics students when I don't know economics? Well, the students get to be the experts, and I tell them so! Suddenly the class becomes more collaborative because this principles suggests certain corollaries. The students answer a survey in the first week of class each semester choosing which topics we will discuss that semester and also indicating which skill areas they feel the need to learn. That's the first step in the method.

   Of course, I also bring an expertise to the classroom: 

My job is to provide shortcuts and productive pathways that students can travel for streamlined learning.  

  What does this look like? Well, one key area of learning for university-level reading is field-specific vocabulary. Every field of study has its own specialized vocabulary; every student needs to learn these, but the stakes are raised for those who have spent fewer years using English regularly. 

  Years ago, the Academic Word List was researched and published; Oxford now has a similar list. However, these are somewhat blunt tools; they merely tell the reader what words they are likely to encounter throughout the ENTIRE university campus. While useful, these tools don't tell students what words to focus on and try using this week for this topic. However, they can!

  Before assigning each reading in class each week, I take the text from whatever article we are reading, and I pass it through this text analyzer. 

   Then, I copy and paste the list of words produced by that into Excel and copy just the list of single words. 

   Then, I paste that into this List Comparison tool. On the other side, I paste the AWL words (from the PDF at the above site.)

  This tells me, which AWL words are in the assigned text. I can then prioritize the ones that are most crucial to the reading, while I can also note which ones have cognates in the students' native languages. I keep a list of all these AWL words throughout the semester; and by again using the List Comparison tool, I know what AWL words have been shared before and which ones are new this week. In this way, we can avoid excessive repetition.

  One final benefit of this process is that by scanning the original text analysis, I can note any key collocations or expressions that may be important for this text as well. These may not be on the Academic Word List, but they can be really useful for the students. This is especially true for noun-preposition combinations.

 Where do I get my articles for the readings? Well, from a variety of sources. However, two of the best sources for appropriate-length, academic-level readings are JSTOR Daily and the Council on Foreign Relations. The particular example used above came from JSTOR Daily, "The Bold Future of the Outer Space Treaty." 

  Naturally, having learned the most relevant vocabulary for their (class-chosen) topic and having read an article on it, the students are prepared to share some of their own thoughts on the topic. Thus, there's usually a follow-up writing assignment. This process can help with one final principle that Dana Ferris mentions:

“Similarly, students should be encouraged to generate key vocabulary for a specific piece of writing.” Ferris (Supporting Multilingual Writers in EAP, 154)