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EAP student perspectives on using real-world activities within their courses


a small-scale research study to investigate student opinions about the integration of authentic and experiential learning tasks into their pre-degree studies. To address this, a mixed methods research study was carried out by asking two distinct groups of students about their preferences with regard to teaching and learning. This was designed as a set of ten questions given to students in printed form in their lectures and seminars, with a focus on finding out about their attitudes to real- world interaction and real-world learning. For the purposes of helping them to do this, a definition of real-world learning was also provided in advance of completing the survey and a clear focus was outlined on the cover sheet. This was stated as being ‘on understanding if you feel that you are a part of the academic community and whether you can see a relationship between your studies, your discipline and the real world.’ The two groups of students who were given the questions detailed in Appendix 1 were very different cohorts taught by the same group of EAP teachers.


The first group was formed of 237 Foundation Pathway students of both home and international backgrounds, whilst the second group was strictly limited to around 100 international students taking pre-sessional and in-sessional Academic English classes. Ideally, at some point in the future, the findings from across the two cohorts could be mapped together as part of one study, but for the purposes of this short paper, the goal is simply to report what students feel about the incorporation of real-world learning into their studies and then to think about how this might work out in practice. The goal is not to shift the emphasis within EAP away from the understanding and production of text


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emphasised in such work as Gimenez and Thomas (2015), but to explore ways in which experiential learning and interaction with the world outside of the classroom might enhance an EAP curriculum and support existing academic literacies approaches. As such, academic literacy was used as the theoretical approach guiding the formulation of questions and the subsequent data analysis when all responses had been gathered. Obviously, there were some limitations to the study that should also be highlighted in order to strengthen the trustworthiness of the findings that follow. These include not only the possibility of language limitations on the part of some respondents, but also the concern of terms such as ‘real-world learning’ being seen as open to various forms of interpretation. However, these issues were addressed by having lecturers on hand to offer assistance where needed, without influencing the responses of the students in any way in terms of content. It should also be noted that, in advance of this survey, students had encountered the notion of discipline-specific studies and a focus on increasing their disciplinary awareness as a key objective of the courses that they were studying.


BASIC FINDINGS OF THE STUDY Although a greater number of responses would have been desirable, it was possible to get a satisfactory snapshot of students’ perspectives on real-world learning from those questionnaires which were completed and analysed. Significantly, students strongly appeared to see the benefit of tutors and lecturers using real-world examples to help with learning (Question 7). This seems to have been particularly beneficial for those students from East Asian cultures who


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