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Radboud Internationalisation day Griet Coupé and Caro Struijke What do students need to become proficient language users? The case of academic writing in English Radboud Internationalisation day Griet Coupé and Caro Struijke

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Discuss with your neighbour What do you expect from students w.r.t. writing in English? In your experience, do students generally meet these expectations?

So… If this is what we expect from students, how can we help them? (if this is the destination, what are the directions?)

What students need Examples -> make them read and evaluate academic texts Practice -> clear assignments, criteria, scaffolding Guidance -> product: genre (IMRAD), text structure, style, grammar process: effective writing strategies person: motivation, time management

What is out there? Workshops for teachers (e.g. lecturing in English) For students: courses on academic writing most powerful: parallel with content course (= CLIL) Online resources on grammar, vocabulary, style, etc. Writing centre: peer tutoring and workshops on specific themes

Specifically for international students and staff Workshops intercultural communication, e.g.: avoiding misunderstandings academic life speaking up in class explaining things working in teams writing conventions (e.g. plagiarism)

Text sample The phenomenon of information overload happens if people experience that there is too much information available by means of different sources and by numerous channels with a quick completion time. This can result in stress and/or depression. The people receive too much of information than their mental model can handle. Also a lack of motivation, physical and emotional exhaustion is outcomes of this phenomenon (Chen & Lee, 2013). Another fact which results in decrease of well-being is the fact that Social Media leads to a diminishing of direct contacts. Every human would like to have direct contact moments with others and lead to a better feeling over time (Kross et all., 2013). The third negative issue about Social Media is the possibility for users to share their own ideas, enabling them to influence other users. This can be realized very quickly. So, users can interact with each other and are using their own content. This is called user-generated-content (UGC) (Kim & Johnson, 2015). In response to this way of communication, the publishers can show their ideal-self instead of the actual-self. This leads to perfect and polished pictures on Social Media platforms. This phenomenon could be lead to a negative self-esteem for the receiver, which is related to a negative body image (Michikyan, Dennis, & Subrahmanyam, 2015). The theory of self-discrepancy is very often related to eating disorders. taken from a master’s thesis

Online tools grammar and (academic) style Grammarly Marking mate Schrijfhulp ILT Compare to MS word! Essential: be aware of possibilities and limitations Username: iltschrijfhulp23 paswoord: eK87gxCc

Online resources Vocabulary and collocations: Manchester academic phrasebank Oxford Collocation dictionary Academic writing in general: Purdue Online Writing Lab The writing Center at UNC Chapel Hill Username: iltschrijfhulp23 paswoord: eK87gxCc

To be developed: online tool In’to/Novolanguage Flipping the classroom – students read about theory, are taken to tasks Special areas for group work (doing and/or discussing tasks), peer feedback and input on any problem areas Bank of instructions (e.g. knowledge clips) on grammar, academic vocab, plagiarism, etc. Feedback tool for teachers (comparable to TUrnitin) Will be extended to popular science writing, writing proposals, etc. Ready: spring 2018 field specific, now available for linguistics/communication, psychology, medicine/biomedical sciences – we are building a general bank of tasks taken from fields across campus, but accessible to all

To be developed: online tool In’to/Novolanguage (2) Will be extended to spoken skills Training in conversations, e.g. small talk. Interactive system where a person reacts to what you say (based on speech recognition) Training of pronunciation (system can judge it through speech recognition). Presentation skills comparable to traintool (can invite peers to give feedback on uploaded presentation), but with extras field specific, now available for linguistics/communication, psychology, medicine/biomedical sciences – we are building a general bank of tasks taken from fields across campus, but accessible to all

Discussion What do you need? - for yourself? - for your students? How can we help? Username: iltschrijfhulp23 paswoord: eK87gxCc

Thank you for your attention! g.coupe@let.ru.nl c.struijke@let.ru.nl Username: iltschrijfhulp23 paswoord: eK87gxCc