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FREELY DOWNLOADABLE AND CONNECTED EAP* MATERIALS

*English for Academic Purposes at the college/university level

Congratulations on your EAP course assignment!

I hope the resources on this page can help you get off to a good start.

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Most of them are PowerPoint presentations of things that I believe are essential for EAP students to know, but course readings, assignments, peer response activities, etc. are still at the discretion of the teacher.

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That said, there is still connectedness to these materials, in the sense that students ideally will pass through 3 stages: (1) doing top-down argumentative writing (i.e., having a thesis statement at the outset and "mining" secondary sources to prove it), (2) learning to do a response to and deconstruction of a text, and (3) doing bottom-up argumentative writing (i.e., having a research question, reading around the research question, coming to a conclusion based on the readings, having that conclusion tested and challenged during peer review, and basically going back and forth between the texts, feedback from peers/teacher, and one's own thoughts to finally come up with an argument that emerges from intertextuality and interaction).

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There are also additional resources, as the above process only speaks to developing fluency in writing, not grammatical accuracy or increased complexity of sentence structures. The resources on "How to proofread a paper" can teach students how to improve the grammatical accuracy of their papers, and the resources for one-on-one teacher-student conferencing (titled "The Magic of 7 & 13") will help teachers give feedback that will improve sentence complexity as appropriate to, and in the context of, the sentences within the specific writing assignments students are working on.

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How to use the resources: Start the semester by giving students the "Survey of Previous Writing Experiences," and read the materials for "The Magic of 7 & 13" to prepare yourself to conference with students. Take students through the 3 stages of writing development using the materials provided (the later the stage, the more the materials and the longer you'll have to spend on that stage), and have individual conferences for each paper. Give students the lesson on how to proofread a paper while they are working on the draft for the first paper, and comment on the quality of their proofreading when you have the individual conferences for each paper. 

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Also, show the PowerPoint "Understanding Assignment Guidelines" early on in the semester, as well as the PowerPoint "Linguistic Aspects of Academic Writing." Whenever you use models for writing in class (e.g., readings, student work that's being shown as an example), refer to the constructs in these PowerPoints, such as summary vs. evaluation, response vs. synthesis, nominalizations, Latinate verbs, etc.

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