Exploring critical appraisal through teacher research with ESL postgraduate engineers

During 2002-2003 as a lecturer in the Centre for Communication Skills and English as a Second Language (CCS&ESL) at the University of Melbourne, I taught a semester-long discipline-specific ESL course for newly enrolled postgraduate international engineering students. The English for academic purposes (EAP) engineering course responded to a specific faculty need to introduce these students to academic literacy practices and improve their language skills and also to prepare students to be able to interact socially in academic settings. The engineering faculty wanted a program that met the language and academic. skills needs of their international postgraduate students, who entered the program with borderline International English Language Testing System (IELTS) language scores. The EAP course outcome was important to students, particularly those in master's programs for whom an aggregate mark of 70% in their first semester was essential for them to proceed. The EAP engineering course, Presenting Academic Discourse, was one of their four subjects. In discussions with CCS&ESL colleagues, engineering faculty, and students, it emerged that some students and engineering faculty viewed language as separate from content, an approach that has been called autonomous literacy (Lillis & Turner, 2001). My view was that the literacies of university students were discipline-specific and that the language-content divide was artificial. I wanted students to engage with academic literacies through engineering texts. After one semester of teaching, the capacity to read engineering sources and evaluate the claims in such texts while stating one's own position-critical appraisal-emerged as the curriculum domain I should focus on. My view of the need to focus on critical appraisal and the integration of content and language was shared by members of the Research and Graduate Studies Committee for the Faculty of Engineering, which I attended. This emphasis took the subject in an innovative direction, and the need for ongoing evaluation of curriculum change provided a natural environment for a teacher research investigation. I structured course assessment into three written assignments and a spoken one, presenting an increasingly demanding academic literacy challenge. In all assignments, I encouraged students to demonstrate their ability to summarise the literature sources they were reading and also evaluate their claims. The balance of summary and evaluation in critical appraisal is neither obvious nor simple for students to achieve linguistically (Woodward-Kron, 2002). As a result, I had to spend time in individual tutorials on writing drafts, clarifying where the balance lay. In addition to summarising the texts analysed, students had to address the strengths and weaknesses of the studies in terms of methods employed, theories advanced, practical applications, and other dimensions that students felt they could bring to the analysis