BALEAP Award Winners

Abstract: Starting with the belief that the Creative Writing (CW) education I received at a UK HE institution has had a significant effect on my ability to produce Academic Writing (AW), along with a desire to improve English for Academic Purposes (EAP) practices, this study employs autoethnography to discover and reflect upon how exactly this was the case, how CW might fit within six of the main EAP pedagogies identified by Tibbetts & Chapman (2023), and how it might be used in the EAP classroom. Making use of my extensive experience of CW, AW and EAP teaching, both evocative and analytical approaches to ethnography are used in a split-page format (Rogers-Shaw, 2002), the former taking the form of free verse. My data consists of self-generated field notes reflecting on my experiences of CW and AW triangulated with personal memory data and previously written reflections, notes and interview transcripts. It reveals that Academic Literacies and Critical EAP are the most relevant pedagogies followed by Genre Analysis and Systemic Functional Linguistics, and finally Corpus Linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory. On the basis of this, a wide variety of different possible classroom activities are proposed that aim to bridge the gap to EAP, raise awareness of genre, develop writer confidence and provide potentially transformative student experiences. In keeping with autoethnography, the findings of this study are not deemed to be widely generalizable; however, it is hoped that they may provide food for thought to other creative EAP practitioners wishing to develop engaging new methods of teaching and learning.

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Xie Huiling: Contrasting Code Gloss Usage in High and Low-Rated Postgraduate Student Essays: A Corpus-Based Study in Applied Linguistics

Rebecca Funabashi: Generative AI in Academic Writing: English for Academic Purposes Practitioners’ Perceptions and Teaching Practice

Thi Thuy Dung Lee: A corpus-based study to establish high-frequency technical vocabulary word lists in the Obstetrics and Gynecology (OB&GYN) field

Digital competence (DC), the ability to confidently use technology, is increasingly regarded as critical to effectively participate in 21st-century society and especially education. At many higher education institutions, technology mediates learning and assessments (Ahmed & Roche, 2021), and high levels of DC have been linked to positive academic achievement (Martzoukou et al., 2020). However, it is not always clear what is expected of students or what skills they possess. This qualitative study, based around the EU’s DigComp 2.2 Framework (Vuorikari et al., 2022), employs semi-structured interviews and document analysis to explore the perceptions of staff and students at an English-Medium International Foundation Year programme. In particular, it focuses on which competencies are considered most relevant, levels of perceived student competence, to what extent an Academic English Skills (AES) course addresses DC and implications for course design.
The results indicate that both students and staff regard ‘information and data literacy’, ‘communication and collaboration’ and ‘problem solving’ as the most relevant and valuable competencies for higher education. These are also the areas that students were considered most competent and that the AES course was perceived as addressing. Students rated themselves as relatively competent in these three areas, however, staff noted varying levels of student DC and in general considered students slightly less competent than they viewed themselves. ‘Safety’ and ‘digital content creation’ were valued to a lesser degree and students were considered somewhat competent in these areas. The AES course was regarded as explicitly addressing ‘information and data literacy’ and developing ‘problem solving’ indirectly. ‘Communication and collaboration’, however, was seen as developing primarily through a locally-implemented collaborative project. These findings suggest several recommendations to improve provision including more explicitly addressing ‘communication and collaboration’ and ‘problem solving’, implementing an interdisciplinary approach to curriculum design to prevent gaps in provision and incorporating diagnostic testing of DC.

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Critical listening is a key component of international student study success in Higher Education (Field, 2011). Going somewhat against their remit to help students ‘…to understand their disciplines, to establish their careers or to successfully navigate their learning’ (Hyland, 2018, p. 383), the use of discreet-item listening comprehension tests on PSE courses has been found to fall short on many counts (Buck, 2001; Pearson, 2020). Critical listening assessment alternatives were sought in extant literature and professional guidance documentation (BALEAP, 2013; QAA, 2014) but no solace was found. This dissertation aspired to address these incongruences by elaborating an alternative assessment instrument, and so, the development of a critical listening assessment checklist prototype began.

Building on the wisdom-of-(expert)-crowds (Surowiecki, 2005), an exploratory international Delphi method was used as a means of idea building, expert opinion aggregation, and consensus consolidation on potential assessment criteria and analytical descriptors for the assessment checklist. This novel application of the mixed-methods approach in EAP combined three iterative Delphi questionnaire rounds and two interjacent online focus group sessions with a panel of five international experts. Numerical and narrative data were gathered and analysed using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis, respectively.

The Critical Listening Competency Assessment Checklist was the outcome of this process and achieved expert consensus (100%) on all counts. This prototype, and the ensuing elaboration of the original tentative practice-informed theoretical definition of applied doctoral critical listening competency, are further novel contributions which take a step towards addressing the ambiguities and gaps in both critical listening assessment extant literature and praxis.

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The upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique period of instructional experimentation for educators, and served as a catalyst for the increased integration of digital tools into traditional teaching practices. As we return to the ‘post-pandemic classroom’, the present study focuses on one such digital tool, Shared Documents (SDs), and explores their perceived pedagogical value across the online/on-campus teaching dichotomy. It investigates the beliefs and experiences of a representative group of early SD adopters at a UK Higher Education institution to determine where and how they can best be utilised as a learning technology. Where similar investigations into SD-technology were largely dependent on tutor perceptions, the present study, which employs a semantic approach to Thematic Analysis, provides student perceptions an equal platform, believing that it is only by involving all members of the community of practice to which SDs are introduced that we can determine the factors affecting their effective utilisation. The results indicate three key areas where SDs provide value as a learning technology: gauging student understanding, encouraging communication, and collaborative learning. However, these findings also reveal the legacy of COVID-19 on student working practices, with clear implications for the design and management of SD-mediated activities. Practical recommendations in these areas are offered, as well as implications for research into SD use in the ‘new normal’ of teaching.

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Abstract: The role of qualifications in UK EAP is an area that, to date, has received only minimal attention, with EAP having no universally recognised qualifications of its own, instead drawing on the qualifications of its sister field, EGP. Following recent analyses which downplay the significance of (T)EAP-specific qualifications, this study presents an altogether more auspicious account of their worth to both (T)EAP practitioners and the industry as a whole. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with twelve veteran EAP recruiters representing different UK universities. The findings cast doubt on the efficacy of General ELT qualifications for (T)EAP and suggest a greatly enlarged role for (T)EAP-specific qualifications going forward; further, and somewhat surprisingly, they indicate that BALEAP is perhaps not best placed to lead this charge. Based on the findings, the study recommends an industry-benchmarked, employment-based Master’s programme as the best way forward for (T)EAP practitioners and the industry’s overall symbolic capital.

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