The importance of focusing on prewriting tasks for first year undergraduate students within an EAP course

Abstract

English for Academic Purpose (EAP) course materials tend to focus on a range of genre-based and linguistic-related tasks, which focus on helping students produce a final product - a written or spoken text. Often, prewriting stages are neglected. However, students often struggle with a range of prewriting tasks, such as searching for suitable academic texts to read, extracting information related to their assignments, comparing and contrasting views from different texts and integrating those views into their own view of the topic. Success in these prewriting tasks is crucial to the production of a good final product. This presentation will report on research that has been done into this prewriting stage with first-year undergraduate students, who were completing Common Core courses at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). Students were asked to complete a journal while they were writing an assessed essay or report. They were also interviewed three times. Results show that they do indeed struggle with many of these prewriting activities. This presentation will explain the problems that students are facing and explain how these needs will be addressed in a new EAP course from 2012 onwards at HKU.