A reading/writing course design and materials for tertiary-level EAP learners will be shared. Student outcomes will demonstrate how the course’s scaffolded activities enabled students to recycle reading language in their own writing, advancing their critical and logical thinking skills as well as their EAP vocabulary and mastery of complex structures.
Tertiary-level EAP learners must draw on linguistic knowledge and communication skills in order to interact with challenging academic content. In required reading/writing classes at Japanese universities, however, there is generally a gap between students’ EFL backgrounds and their potential as EAP learners and users (Collins & Suzuki, 2018). The current study aims to demonstrate how recycling language contextualized in reading texts supports learner engagement in reading-writing activities by building logical and critical thinking skills as well as EAP vocabulary and mastery of complex sentence structures. The participants were students in required reading/writing courses, most of whom confirmed in pre-learning surveys that the English language learning activities they had experienced at secondary school had been limited to the “remembering level” of the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (Anderson, et al., 2001). The target course design provided the scaffolding necessary for them to successfully engage in activities at the reconstructing, analyzing, applying, and evaluating levels of the Taxonomy. Contextualized, scaffolded activities led them through four phases: 1. understanding reading passages’ target language, content, and messages 2. reconstructing the passages by organizing the key information visually and summarizing it, 3. clarifying reading purposes in order to participate in relevant communication activities, and 4. communicate a precise, situated, and purposeful message to an identified audience with the aid of keywords and expressions recycled from the reading texts. Protocol analysis of the students’ written output, as well as their post-learning survey results, indicated that the target course encouraged awareness of the importance of relevant background knowledge and of recycling language skills developed through the reading texts. The students did recognize how their own linguistic deficiencies tended to undermine their efforts to express complex academic content (Suzuki, 2016), a fact that will inform future EAP course design in terms of the timing of vocabulary and structure instruction.
