Guidelines for EAP tutors


discipline specialist tutors of PGT students, and 18 international PGT master’s students (Appendix 1 and Appendix 2). The research was conducted at an institute of education, an institute of sport and a business school at the University of Edinburgh. The findings are based on a three-stage analysis of the interview transcriptions based on ‘pre- coding’, ‘first cycle’ and ‘second cycle’ stages (Saldaña, 2009) in answer to one main question: How do you think students can demonstrate critical thinking in their academic writing in your discipline? Both groups of participants agreed on the importance of reading critically and of presenting a supported argument in academic writing. However, there was a greater emphasis by the students on the importance of the extensive and in-depth reading of literature as part of the process of becoming a more accomplished critical writer within their discipline. The tutors, on the other hand, focused more on the clarity and quality of the written argument as embedded in a written product, such as in an assessed essay or master’s dissertation. This appeared to reflect the differing experiences, roles and positions of the master’s student and discipline tutor within the academy (in this context, the student as a ‘producer’ and the tutor as an ‘assessor’ of academic writing).


Students had more to say about reading


critically, but, together with tutors, they identified four sub-themes of critical reading- to-writing skills. The first highlighted the importance of approaching literature with a critical and sceptical disposition which involved ‘not taking things for granted’ (Dag, Business Administration (MBA) tutor). The second sub-theme highlighted the importance of reading in order to acquire a deeper understanding of disciplinary


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knowledge. For instance, Marco (Strength and Conditioning student) highlighted this when he stated, ‘you really need to be able to, not just read[ing] … the first point … [and] the second point. After that you really need to be able to understand that’. A third sub-theme emphasized how reading academic texts in specific ways could help students write more critically. This included analytical note-taking techniques that involved separating important from less important information (Anderson et al., 2014). For example, Ying emphasized the importance of note-taking as part of the reading-to-writing process: Since after you scan [a text] you must … keep some important information. And especially when you are doing the dissertation or maybe writing some essay, when the reading you’ve done is a lot you must take some notes after you read it … otherwise you can’t … find out which one you … really want when you are writing.


(Ying, Education student) A final sub-theme involved the need to


evaluate literature. Wei (Language Education student) highlighted this when he said, ‘First, from the literature review, or literature resources, of course we’ve got to evaluate from the good side and short-comings’. The clarity of the written argument was a feature of critical academic writing emphasized mostly by tutors. Tutors also expected students to support their arguments with different types of evidence and ultimately to make some kind of informed judgement. Some students also mentioned the importance of ‘making judgements’. Yang highlighted the importance of argumentation when she said: If students can demonstrate that they have presented a good argument, including a chain of


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