Use of Research Articles in the EAP Classroom

Abstract

The central idea of genre-based EAP teaching is assisting students to become more competent users of genres identified as key to their disciplines. As reading research articles in English is a substantial component of target courses syllabi in university settings in Croatia, a student assignment was designed to implement research articles in the EAP classroom. The assignment presented in this paper aimed to raise students' awareness of the rhetorical, metadiscoursal, and lexical features of a research article. Students were first required to identify rhetorical moves throughout four main research article sections. The next task was to find a section in a research article containing at least two different hedging expressions and to translate the section into Croatian. Finally, a lexical analysis focused on the identification of academic collocations across the research article sections. The overall results, which in most cases indicated students’ increased awareness of the aspects analyzed, suggest the effectiveness of genre-based teaching in the EAP classroom. The assignment presented here may have wider pedagogical implications, in that it could serve as a generic model for analyzing the same or other academic genres across a range of EAP contexts.