Study skills or academic literacy?

Study skills or academic literacy?

1. EAP AND CHANGING CONTEXTS

   • These three conceptions, of study skills, socialization and academic literacy, have developed in succession, with later views incorporating earlier ones (Lea and Street, 2000).
     • We have gradually learned more about the different teaching contexts in which students find themselves and about the particular communicative demands placed on them by their studies.
       • There are growing numbers of students from ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds entering university. These students, from social groups traditionally excluded from higher education such as working-class, mature, ethnic minority and international students, mean that there is now a more culturally, socially and linguistically diverse student population in universities in many countries
         • Students now take a broader and more heterogeneous mix of academic subjects.

2. A STUDY SKILLS APPROACH TO EAP

   • Study skills can be understood narrowly as the more mechanical aspects of study such as referencing, using libraries, dissertation formatting, etc
     • Abilities, techniques and strategies which are used when reading, writing, or listening for study purposes.
       • The basis of the approach is that students need more than linguistic knowledge to be successful in their studies.
         • Interest in study skills, in fact, emerged from a perceived over-emphasis on linguistic forms in early register-based materials. Registers refer to broad areas of activity such as communication in technical, scientific and legal fields, and early ESP materials
   • The main idea of the study skills approach is that there are common reasoning and interpreting processes underlying communication which help us to understand discourse
     • s. These skills were mainly taught using general ‘carrier content’ which provides an academic topic to contextualize the language skills to be learnt. For example, the life cycle of plants might be used to teach biology students the language of process

3. DISCIPLINARY SOCIALIZATION

   • A simple study skills model therefore gave way to a more discipline-sensitive and discourse-based approach which saw learning as an induction or acculturation into a new culture rather than an extension of existing skills.
     • This approach draws attention to the homogeneity of disciplinary groups and practices. Each discipline might be seen as an academic tribe (Becher, 1989) with its particular norms and ways of doing things which comprise separate cultures.
       • Each subject discipline constitutes a way of making sense of human experience that has evolved over generations and each is dependent on its own particular practices: its instrumental procedures, its criteria for judging
         • This perspective also draws attention to the importance of discourse and its role in defining disciplinary groups.
           • The term ‘discourse’ is widely used in the social sciences and in a variety of ways. It is often employed in a general sense to refer to different ways of representing aspects of the world, evoking the ways of thinking and talking that recur across different speakers/writers and texts.

4. ACADEMIC LITERACIES

   • This perspective takes a ‘new literacies’ position which rejects: the ways language is treated as though it were a thing, distanced from both teacher and learner and imposing on them external rules and requirements as though they were but passive recipients
     • An academic literacies approach emphasizes that the ways we use language, referred to as ‘literacy practices’, are patterned by social institutions and power relationships
       • This means that some literacies, such as those concerned with legal, scientific and political domains, for example, become more dominant and important than others. The complexity and prestige of certain professional academic literacies work to exclude many individuals, preventing their access to academic success or membership of academic communities
       • Academic success means representing yourself in a way valued by your discipline, adopting the values, beliefs and identities which academic discourses embody. As a result, students often feel uncomfortable with the ‘me’ they portray in their academic writing, finding a conflict between the identities required to write successfully and those they bring with them.
         • This approach therefore builds on the socialization perspective to take a more critical view of the extent to which we can see disciplines as uncontested, homogeneous institutional practices and power as equally distributed