There are three keynote activities in addition to the EATAW board session.

Professors Chris Anson and Karen Head will be addressing and problematising the affordances of online technologies and sound pedagogical practice.

Professor Karen Head, Georgia Tech  (bio)

Professor Chris M. Anson, NCSU (bio)

“Technological Gains and Losses: A Heuristic Approach to Analyzing Affordances for Classroom Instruction and Support for Writing”
Description: Emerging technologies are often presented as utopian solutions to current educational challenges, promising to reduce instructors’ time, enhance students’ learning and engagement, streamline communication about course material, and reduce costs for students and for institutions. But several problems can militate against their success, such as the extent of educational expertise behind their design or the ways that they are put to use in specific instructional settings. This jointly-led session will provide a heuristic lens for analyzing the potential effectiveness of several technologies used instructionally worldwide, showing how such a lens can bring into focus both the possible gains and losses associated with the technologies. An interactive part of the session will encourage attendees to choose an additional technological application for analysis.

Professor Montserrat Castelló Badia will help us think along the intersection between the academic and professional writing that characterises research writing inside academia, especially when students need to deal with journal articles, scientific reports, or grants writing.

Professor Montserrat Castelló Badia Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona (bio)

Students’ research writing: Why, When and How

What is the role that research genres play in Higher Education? When, how and why to encourage and facilitate students’ research writing? Through this keynote I will discuss these issues looking at the contradictions underlying the intersection between the academic and professional writing that characterises research writing inside the academia and reflect on some answers and their associated consequences, according to recent empirical evidence. I will first address the situation of research-related writing genres in Higher Education. Then, I will focus on challenges that both students and teachers face when they deal with these genres, and finally, I will discuss some pedagogical proposals that proved useful to help students to develop their researcher voice and sense of authorship, as well as to dialogue with other voices of their disciplinary, cultural or social communities.

 

Dr Dafouz will address some of the different aspects of English medium instruction and how they intersect with academic writing.

“ROADMAPPING as a (re)framing tool for academic writing in English medium education in multilingual universities”

Dr Emma Dafouz, Complutense University of Madrid (bio)

Since the turn of the millennium, the internationalisation process that higher education institutions (HEIs) have engaged in worldwide has resulted in an unprecedented expansion of English-medium study programmes.  In this regard, the academic writing produced in such contexts reveals that an increasing number of student work, from classroom practices to dissertations and PhD theses, is written in English often as an L2/academic lingua franca. Against this background, the talk will present the ROAD-MAPPING framework (Dafouz and Smit 2016) as an analytical comprehensive tool which can help to (re)frame academic writing in multifaceted ways against English medium education (EME). Drawing on sociolinguistic and ecolinguistic theories of language, academic writing will be discussed as a social practice intersecting with other relevant dimensions at the core of EME realities. Questions such as how is English conceptualized in such settings, who are the agents engaged in the teaching of academic writing or how does internationalization impact on certain teaching practices will be raised and discussed using the ROAD-MAPPING framework.

Dafouz, E. and Smit, U. (2016) Towards a Dynamic Conceptual Framework for English-Medium Education in Multilingual University Settings, Applied Linguistics, Volume 37, Issue 3: 397–415.