Blog:She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge. So should you.

Introduction
This wiki is generally supposed to be about language learning, but I don’t know if the blog has any clear purpose. The notion just arose to have a blog for the sake of having a blog (in the early 21st century, you’re no one if you’re not blogging). Everyone should have the opportunity to say what’s on their mind, don’t you think? If it’s about language learning, or language teaching, or language generally, then why not say it here? I wouldn’t imagine this blog to be highly academic so don’t feel under pressure. I’ll set the bar low.

The importance of engaging in the subject/content when you teach or learn language
So, kicking off the first blog (implying optimistically there will be others), I’d like to talk about teachers and learners engaging with subject matter/content. I would say this generally comes under the principle that language is meaning making in context [1]. Making meaning can be functional, such as getting a drink when you’re thirsty, more functionally complex, such as writing an essay arguing for the legalisation of drugs, and can be about self-expression. I know I’ve always felt frustrated communicating in a foreign language because I can’t express myself fully; in my variable level of Russian I find there’s quite a difference talking about my weekend and discussing the merits of using wing-backs when you don’t have a target-man striker. I became friends with a Syrian academic through a programme designed to support refugees, originally with the intention of helping him with this English, but I’m not sure I’ve ever taught him anything. I’m fairly sure his language development is purely based on our similar interests and our mutual engagement in those i.e. his desire that we share ideas on topics like football, law, and politics.

By contrast to meaning making, my French lessons at school (in the 1980s I must stress) were predominantly language form focussed, with some attempt to tie that in with functions (e.g. imperatives – pass me the X in the context of being a removal man/woman; in fact I always smile thinking back to a trip to France in my early 20s with a school mate who could only remember the phrase “passe moi le frigo”). I come to the present subject of subject matter from the perspective of an EAP (English for Academic Purposes) teacher. One reason for this post is that I conducted a survey of 81 EAP teachers in 2019 and although many of the data appeared in an article I wrote last year [2], there were data left over that seemed worth sharing. EAP, although nominally about teaching English, is largely about teaching academic communication in English. A typical example would be an English teacher delivering courses for upper-intermediate English level students (let’s say CEFR B2+) who are on Masters’ programmes on how to write parts of a dissertation. If my sample of 81 EAP teachers is representative (I’m not sure what the population would be but it must be thousands across the world) then EAP teachers view themselves primarily as EAP specialists, not as specialists in many of the contexts they end up working in e.g. working with Business students (see figure 1).



General EAP, based on what has been called common-core [3] (a core of language skills and system knowledge common to all academic communication or at least transferrable to many), is part of a language - subject/content spectrum that increases in subject specificity as it moves towards ESP and ESAP (English for Specific Purposes and English for Specific Academic Purposes), CBI (Content Based Instruction) and then CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) (CBI and CLIL are essentially contexts and approaches to teaching language and content at the same time, possibly with equal emphasis and possibly with most focus on the subject/content rather than language, although there are a variety of definitions and fine distinctions between CBI and CLIL so this is a very simplified statement). English for Specific Academic Purposes could be anywhere depending on the extent to which the teacher and materials support a student’s abilities to communicate in their field e.g. they could range from a focus on language to a focus on understanding and thinking e.g. supporting their understanding of the subject’s epistemology.

There is …limited discussion in the literature about the objectives of ESP teaching. In the early years of ESP, the objective was seen in terms of imparting linguistic knowledge with ESP functioning to reveal the facts about the linguistic features of subject-specific language (Swales, 1985). Later it was seen in terms of training students in communicative repertoires characteristic of target situations (Munby, 1978). More recently, proposals include the notion that ESP should teach students concepts from their discipline, as well as language, in order to develop their ‘underlying competences’ (Hutchison & Waters, 1985). [4]

The above quote is useful because it incorporates Swales, whose “discourse communities” is highly influential in the linguist’s approach to analysing any language within its genre, while also highlighting the development towards “teach[ing] students concepts from their disciplines, as well as language” – not quite epistemology but probably touching on ontology.

My survey overall gave an impression that EAP teachers tended towards language interests and common-core influences, but there were nuanced results (which could be connected to some weaknesses in the survey I designed). A particularly odd finding from the survey was that almost half of respondents selected CBI/CLIL as influences in their approaches to teaching (see figure 2). Odd when compared to findings from the same survey that I published in my article about attitudes to subject specific reading strategies (see figure 3).





That data that fed into figure 3 appeared to indicate that across the 80 teachers who responded to these questions, there was overall scepticism on the importance in how we read in different subjects – responses were clustered around the slightly disagree – neutral – slightly agree range (scores 3 to 5).

My personal jumping off point from general EAP is best expressed by a metaphor that creeps into my head periodically when I’m teaching, specifically when I’m focussing mostly on the system of language and generic skills (or common-core knowledge) such as comparing and contrasting or reading a journal article for gist, and even more so when a course designer tells me that the students will bring the subject knowledge and we, the teachers, are there as facilitators. The metaphor is one of a Hollywood film set where there are only cardboard facades with nothing behind them. I feel this particularly when social-constructivism has clearly influenced course design (again see figure 2) i.e. highly student-centred lessons where students construct knowledge collectively while I stand outside having a cigarette.

The academic literature that provides the necessary theoretical perspective tends to come from journals in education, linguistics, and EAP specifically, rather than discipline-specific teaching journals such as business education or legal education etc., at least as far as I can tell. In those journals we increasingly see references to literacy in preference to the term skills. What is the difference? Skills, or cognitive skills as we’re mostly thinking about, suggest you can train someone to improve and automate actions and behaviour e.g. by applying knowledge to a particular task, while literacy suggests social practices and the tools necessary to unpick those e.g. to go much more deeply into meaning making in context. Lea and Street are well-known expounders of the latter [5]. Somewhere between the two might be academic socialisation, with knowledge and skills being focussed within different genres (again, think of Swales).

What do 81 EAP teachers think?
I already showed above that 50% of my survey respondents indicated that CBI/CLIL influences their teaching, while a little less than 50% of the respondents believe in the existence of disciplinary or subject specific reading approaches. Do the CBI/CLIL teachers overlap pretty closely? Using my limited stats skills, the correlation was 0.16 i.e. pretty much no correlation. In addition I looked at whether those who said they teach ESAP (a total of 37 teachers) correlate with a belief in subject specific reading approaches; no correlation (p = -0.01).

Is the explanation here that EAP teachers have very wide interpretations of what CBI and CLIL are or perhaps what subject specific reading means? It would be understandable because the definitions in literature vary (there’s quite a nice accessible introduction to the terms for CBI and CLIL in this article [6]. In terms of how I define strategies, you might like to look at my article but in the questionnaire, the prompt was: “There are specific strategies useful for reading in some subjects, fields, or disciplines i.e. they are not generic strategies”

Another thing I thought it would be interesting to understand more about EAP teachers was their disciplinary backgrounds to understand more about their possible influences. There are numerous references in articles to teachers being influenced by their own experiences in how they approach pedagogy and how they believe students learn (e.g. the “common sense filter” [7], or how it is often difficult for teachers to change “underlying beliefs” [8]). Figure 4 shows respondents’ undergraduate backgrounds. Teachers had free text responses to this so I’ve attempted to group their responses, partly based on the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_academic_disciplines.



Is there anything remarkable? Perhaps not surprising but remarkable (worthy of remark) is that 51 % studied languages. Question: is it reasonable to imagine that this is what interests them in their teaching i.e. language?

Also remarkable is how few come from subject backgrounds that many of their students may be studying. Taking my own context, I work with a lot of professional science students such as law, management, economics; my background is law; I enjoy engaging with law (although that wouldn’t be a given, by the way – you could study something at undergrad and hate it). Question: does someone who studied English literature enjoy teaching law?

I did in fact seek EAP teachers’ views on whether they felt their undergraduate degrees influenced them. Here are the results (figure 5).



You’ll see that they considered that their post-grad studies were a bigger influence. Sadly, an oversight I realised afterwards, I didn’t ask what their post-grad studies were. I’m going to hazard a guess that many of them are English teaching or linguistics related, so a similar question as the previous paragraph. Does a holder of an MSc in TESOL enjoy engaging with law (or Chemistry, or whatever)?

Something else I’d like to throw in before moving on from EAP teachers relates to findings by Becher in his interest in disciplinary identity (e.g. see [9]). A couple of things I remember him saying (though I over simplify for literary effect):

a. people don’t trust those who’ve left their own discipline to move into another;

b. people from one discipline have many negative (and also positive) stereotypes about those from other disciplines.

Question: are EAP teachers open to learning about other disciplines? Are people already in those disciplines, whose help the EAP teacher might need to inform themselves, open to working with them or are they treated with suspicion (or some other negative perception e.g. irritation)?

A quick final remark on the data about belief in disciplinary specific reading approaches. There was no correlation between those who are undergrads in language and those from other subjects and their belief in subject specific reading strategies. I had a hypothesis that people’s undergraduate or post-graduate studies might influence their attitude to how differently we read in different disciplines (perhaps based on my own experience studying law at undergraduate and post-graduate, then information science, and finally education at post-graduate, and perhaps from notions I had picked up such as from Kolb that seemed to me to suggest a level of socialisation/institutionalisation once you’re in a particular mindset for a while). However, my survey wasn’t well-enough designed, and sample number not high enough, to say much about this.

What do students expect about subject teaching?
My final data, briefly. I surveyed students in a variety of contexts over a few months in 2019 with a major focus being about reading comprehension and reading skills and strategies. Of particular interest might be to compare what the 81 EAP teachers thought about who should teach disciplinary specific reading approaches and what students thought. 48% of EAP teachers to some extent agreed EAP teachers should teach subject specific reading approaches. The question for my students was a little different so may not compare exactly but they were asked about whether they felt their EAP teacher should help them understand the subject matter of texts. I got responses from 54 students and 43 agreed i.e. almost 80%.

Conclusion
If there’s an argument in this blog post, it’s that language teachers should be interested in the subject matter/content of lessons, not just language. At least they need a thirst for knowledge. If there’s a point to the blog post, it’s to hopefully provoke a response or thoughts for readers to go away and learn more about: about literacy, about reading in different subjects, and perhaps gather data themselves on people’s attitudes to subjects and disciplines. If you’re a student, to what extent do you think the teacher should engage with you on the subject content of your lessons? Finally, in keeping with the aim of this wiki as a resource of links for students to learn and improve, I thought this was an interesting starting point in answering the question: Yes, I want to know more about the subject I’m dealing with but how? https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/subject-matter-expert/. For something more academic, this might be interesting - Morgan, B. (2009). Fostering transformative practitioners for critical EAP: Possibilities and challenges. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 8(2), 86-99. doi:10.1016/j.jeap.2008.09.001