Online Course Design and Materials Development for Teaching Reading of Research Articles to Efl Undergraduate Students at a Greek Technical University

Abstract

Recent research findings suggest that reading research articles (RAs) enhances undergraduate engineering students’ technical knowledge and fosters their lifelong learning skills. Nevertheless, the RA genre inherently displays challenging features for novice readers, especially EFL readers. Previous works on developing materials for teaching the reading of RAs to undergraduate students are limited and mostly report on the effectiveness of interventions rather than on course design and materials development. This paper presents the design and development of online materials for a Moodle-based, English for Specific Academic Purposes course that aimed to help Greek undergraduate Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) students to learn how to read RAs within their field. The materials design was based on the theories of genre analysis, metacognition and cognitive apprenticeship. Initially, a small RA corpus consisting of thirty RAs from high-ranking ECE journals and conferences from IEEE, ACM, Elsevier and Springer was created in cooperation with the ECE faculty. Subsequently, a move analysis was performed based on a simplified coding scheme of rhetorical moves in the target genre adjusted to the needs of novice Greek EFL readers. The results from our corpus analysis were used as the foundation of the genre-based materials that aimed at fostering learners’ declarative, procedural and conditional genre knowledge and included various examples of move structures and patterns, terminology, grammar as well as weekly genre analysis reflective tasks. We then created materials that intended to provide further support so that students could convert their newly acquired genre knowledge into procedural knowledge and explicitly taught top-down RA expeditious reading strategies and conditional knowledge by including metacognitive strategy training that intended to raise their awareness of when and why they should use the taught strategies. In an attempt to further tailor the materials to the needs of our students we included audiovisual enhancements in both L1 and L2 for presentation and feedback purposes, metacognitive prompts, online dictionaries and concordancers.

The 2030 Challenge in the Quality of Higher Education: Metacognitive, Motivational and Structural Factors, Predictive of Written Argumentation, for the Dissemination of Sustainable Knowledge

“…This means that a common model cannot be identified when structuring the SAE, although the inclusion of the Introduction move is highlighted in the entire argumentative essay. These results coincide with other investigations where there is a lack of concordance in the rhetorical moves that are identified in the analysis of textual structures [23,24].…”

“…This interest in the structural analysis of the text, in university contexts, is corroborated in studies that investigate the moves and steps in various types of academic texts as varied as: practice diaries [20], letters of request for admission to masters' programs [21], case resolution proposals [22], introduction to research articles [23], and research articles [24].…”

First-Year Students’ EFL Reading Difficulties at a Greek Merchant Marine Academy: An Activity Theory Perspective

“…The main implication of this study, is that the Greek maritime educational system, similarly to universities should focus on readjusting current English courses and methodologies to fulfil the students' actual needs by using authentic materials and integrating reading strategy-based instruction that will eventually help students become independent and critical readers (Seiradakis & Spantidakis, 2018b). Additionally, maritime English teachers, much like the teachers in universities should work in collaboration with the "discipline insiders" which in the case of merchant marine engineering schools include chief engineers and other engineering professors.…”

EFL Engineering Students’ Research Article Genre Knowledge Development through Concept Mapping Tasks: A Qualitative Interview-based Study

“…Our experimental course was based on ESP school genre analysis (Swales, 1990), metacognition and cognitive apprenticeship (Seiradakis & Spantidakis, 2018a). Genre analysis was essentially used to promote students" ""writerly engagement with texts"" (Cheng, 2008), that is, their ability to read as a writer and study a text from the writer"s perspective.…”

“…These findings largely resemble the situation at the school of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), at the Technical University of Crete, Greece where the first researcher works as an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) practitioner for the past nine years. In investigating possible teaching technological tools for assisting students to overcome these challenges, we decided to employ concept maps as a genre instructional tool and integrate them into an experimental EAP course (Seiradakis & Spantidakis, 2018a) that aimed to teach second-year undergraduate ECE students how to read RAs in English in an effective manner.…”