We have always been advocates of making students aware of the skills they are learning. Why? If hey know they have skills, they are more likely to apply them on their own in the future. If you are slogging through some listening activity, for example, once all is understood, it make sense to point out that they just practiced note-taking skills or understanding asides or whatever the case may be. In too many EAP textbooks in particular, students are made to wade through lectures that are extremely dense and difficult and the goal ends up just getting through it. In the end, who cares if a student understood the listening in their EAP textbook? The value of the lesson is learning skills that they can apply when they are sitting in lecture halls themselves.
So, we are in favour of overtly teaching skills and making sure students know it. That is why we are fond of Garnet Education’s English for Academic Study Series, the Transferable Academic Skills Kit and Macmillan Education’s Skillful series.
Well, we got a boost for our argument recently fron an article in Inside Higher Education. In his article, From Retention to Persistence, author Vincent Tinto argues that educators have the wrong end of the stick when they talk about how to retain students. He says that using the term “retain” shows that the perspective is that of the school, not of the students. He says that we should be concerned that students have the persistence they need to complete their education. There are three major factors to student persistence, he argues: self-efficacy, a sense of belonging and the perceived value of the curriculum. We here at English Central can’t really influence the second two factors (well, good books might be part of the curriculum equation), but we can definitely influence self-efficacy, so let’s take a closer look at it.
Self-efficacy, he argues, is a person’s belief in their ability to succeed at a particular task or in a specific situation. This quality is learned and is malleable. Imagine how confusing and demoralizing it would be to be told that you need to show better critical thinking skills while getting what seems like mixed messages on what that actually means (stop regugitating facts and think for yourself; distinguish facts from opinions). What if students were clearly taught how to distinguish fact from opinion, how to identify parts of arguments, how to recognize when language, rathan reason, is used to persuade and so on? If such critical thinking skills were taught in a systematic way, is it not reasonable to expect that when they go on to their studies, they would believe in their critical thinking skills and their ability to analyze whatever it is they are asked to analyze?
For EAP students – or all and any students that are university-bound – it seems that an important key to their success is learning skills like critical thinking, researching, referencing, making presentations, participating in group work and so on. For EAP students specifically, textbooks with interesting topics and pretty pictures should not be the main concern. Instead, these students need to learn specific listening, reading, speaking and listening skills that they can apply once they are out of the “safe” environment of the EAP classroom in order to survive. It is for this reason that we are so wound up about the Transferable Academic Skills Kit, as well as the English for Academic Study and Skillful series. These textbooks helf students become autonomous and this is one of the most important qualities they will need to reach their academic goals.
Read the article on Inside Higher Education.