A genre-based learner corpus-driven blended learning approach to scaffolding emergent academic writers : genre awareness, content development, and positive learner identity making

Abstract

With rising forces of globalisation, universities in Hong Kong are attracting increasing numbers of culturally and linguistically diverse students from Mainland China and Southeast Asian countries to pursue English Medium Instruction (EMI) higher education. However, there is a lack of sustainable EAP programmes linked to specific content courses to scaffold emergent writers’ academic enculturation. This study aimed at developing a genre-based learner corpus-driven blended learning approach to scaffolding emergent academic writers, and investigating its impact on students’ genre awareness, content development, and learner identity making in an EMI context. This was achieved by designing a linked EAP course adjunct to the Research Methods course to help postgraduate students to develop a feasible research proposal required to successfully complete their assignments in a university in Hong Kong. This was done partially by helping them to develop content and familiarity with the research proposal generic structure and genre-specific lexico-grammatical patterns, using authentic genre exemplars in a blended learning mode. This study adopted a design-based (teacher-researcher-curriculum designer) research methodology involving two tryouts of the linked course, which comprised needs analysis, intervention study and multiple case studies. To do this, the linked EAP curriculum first integrated with the ESP genre-based framework, the Sydney School genre-based Teaching Learning Cycle (TLC), the learner corpus-driven approach to pedagogical materials design, the content and language integrated learning (CLIL) approach, and the blended learning approach. Second, the study empirically examined the instructional impact of the curriculum on students’ performance in their proposal content development and writing. Third, the study selected three case study students (two from Mainland China, one from a Southeast Asian country) in each tryout to explore their development of content, genre awareness, use of lexico-grammatical patterns, and learner identity construction during the intervention. The findings showed a visible increase in genre awareness and lexico-grammatical resource use among the students who consistently attended the non-credit-bearing eight-session linked course. Most importantly, the in-depth descriptions of the three case study students of different starting levels in each tryout documented different learning trajectories and styles. The students’ skillful use of writing templates in their proposal (re)writing was related to their previous majors and IELTS writing scores. Moreover, emergent academic writers needed multi-level (i.e. socio-cognitive, content, genre, language) scaffolding for proposal development and writing. This was achieved by the specificity of the linked EAP course which was designed to be specific to the Research Methods content course, the research proposal genre, pedagogical materials and tasks, and individual student’s content and language integrated scaffolding in a face-to-face blended with timely online consultation mode. This significantly helped students’ proposal content development and writing development as well as their positive learner identity making. This theoretically and pedagogically new self-directed multi-level scaffolding design linked model may help to resolve real-world EAP issues, and inform genre-based pedagogies and content-based EAP teacher professional development. Also, the interactional ethnographic analysis of video-recorded classroom teaching offered a new lens to examine underexplored EAP classroom interaction dynamics from an emic perspective, which helps to enable EAP teachers’ self-reflective profession development. (500 words)