Megan M. Siczek, George Washington University, Washington DC, USA

Critical Language Awareness Applications in Graduate EAP Contexts

Critical language awareness (CLA) is a topic that is generating significant interest in the field of second language writing, as evidenced in recent publications such as Cultivating Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom (Shapiro, 2022) and the forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Second Language Writing edited by Rebecca Lorimer Leonard and Shawna Shapiro. Though CLA is not new, it is being rearticulated and applied to various L2 teaching contexts in large part because it promotes not only awareness-building but also agency and choice in our teaching of diverse multilingual students. At the core, CLA considers issues of language, power, and identity along with the pragmatic concerns of L2 students in educational settings, thus allowing teachers to balance progressive ideals such as social and linguistic justice with students’ practical needs and goals. Shapiro (2022) considers this a “both/and” pedagogy that has transformative potential for L2 writers. In this short article, I argue that CLA approaches have particular value in graduate-level EAP contexts as students are required to orient themselves to established ways of knowing and communicating within their fields while at the same time developing their own disciplinary and professional identities.

A growing interest in supporting graduate students is reflected in the scholarly work of our field (Simpson, et al., 2016; see also Consortium on Graduate Communication) as well as in how we develop curricula and support resources at our institutions. When we teach graduate students in EAP contexts, we try to ensure that they understand the expectations for graduate-level writing and develop language and academic literacy skills that support their success as communicators. At the same time, we may have limited knowledge of their fields or of the highly complex elements of disciplinary socialization they are navigating. Applying a CLA pedagogy in graduate-level EAP contexts creates an opportunity for us to balance their pragmatic needs as communicators with their more nuanced entry into a new academic discourse community; we can do this by having our graduate students co-construct knowledge through their own explorations of the new communicative environment they inhabit, what I call a “pedagogy of discovery” (Siczek, 2023).

This pedagogy of discovery involves three overlapping dimensions: (1) discovery of self and peers through intentional reflection and interaction; (2) discovery of current socioacademic environment; (3) discovery of discipline and field. These elements align with a CLA pedagogy in several key ways. First, this approach values diverse graduate students’ linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary assets. Second, investigating the conventional practices of their discourse communities helps develop students’ power to make their own choices about how they engage with these norms. Similarly, in communicating their own ideas and disciplinary knowledge to their peers, students develop authority and voice. Finally, the habits of reflection and metacognition developed through this pedagogy promote self-directed learning that will serve graduate students well through their degree programs and in their eventual professional careers. Though elements of this pedagogy can be embedded in any graduate-level teaching environment, there is particular benefit in applying this approach in courses for newly matriculated graduate students who are entering a discourse community for the first time.

Below are some examples of what a CLA-inspired pedagogy of discovery might look like in graduate EAP contexts:

• Reflective writing prompts (e.g., focusing on students’ backgrounds, expectations, concerns, aspirations, disciplinary interests, curricular and professional pathways). These assignments could be discussion board posts through a course learning management system or even posted on a shared document with opportunities for peer-level commenting and engagement. Such writing is a low-stakes way for students to communicate their experiences, perceptions, and ideas as they figure out their place within the new discourse community.
  
  
• Multimodal exploratory assignments (e.g., sharing what they learned regarding campus resources, department or field-specific events, or interviews with experts). These types of assignments could take the form of a written report, but multimodal forms can work particularly well, for example using a platform such as Voice Thread that is embedded into a learning management system or even using free software such as Adobe Express. Using these technologies has the added benefit of encouraging creativity and developing students’ digital literacy.
  
  
• Formal writing assignments that investigate one’s field (e.g., research-based papers or reports on key issues/research areas of the field). The genre of a research paper or research report is commonly taught in graduate EAP courses, which creates an opportunity for students to apply a critical lens to sources of knowledge in their field and consider how the work of their field is applied across contexts.
  
  
• Collaborative assignments creating links across disciplines (e.g., surveying peers for an IMRD paper, linking the work of multiple fields to a shared topic/issue). Not only do team-based assignments build community but they also prepare students for collaboratively oriented professional environments. Working across disciplines has the added benefit of allowing graduate students to articulate—or translate—the work of their fields authoritatively to peers from different backgrounds.

The above examples represent my conceptualization of a pedagogy of discovery in graduate-level EAP and build on principles of critical language awareness. Through this approach, students can gain experience with writing and communication while learning about and articulating the work of their own fields with a sense of authority and rhetorical agency.

References

Shapiro, S. (2022). Cultivating critical language awareness in the writing classroom. Routledge.

Siczek, M. M. (2023). Promoting critical language awareness at the graduate-level: A discovery-oriented approach. Journal of Second Language Writing, 60.

Simpson, S., Caplan, N. A., Cox, M., & Philips, T. (Eds.). (2016). Supporting graduate student writers: Research, curriculum, and program design. University of Michigan Press.