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An Action Research Cycle in an Academic Skills CourseI. Academic Skills Course DevelopmentThe Academic Skills course described our ongoing action research project originated in a needs analysis by the English department at Aoyama Gakuin University. A curriculum review committee suggested that students needed more work on their listening and note-taking skills. An examination of the research literature on English for Academic Purposes revealed that this was a common problem for university students listening to lectures in a second language (Oxford, 1993; Powers, 1995). Ferris and Tagg (1996) summarize their survey of 234 professors at 4 different universities by recommending that students of English of a second language practice listening to real lectures by a variety of speakers. Chaudron et al. (1995) propose that good note-taking aids the memory, increases students' attention, and assists them in reviewing and reconstructing lecture material.In 1999, we outlined a semester-length EAP listening and note-taking course was outlined for sophomore students in our two-year intensive English program. The students in the program were at the upper intermediate level of ability. In addition to Academic Skills, each week they took two weekly 90-minute periods of instruction in speaking, listening, reading, and writing by native speakers and an additional two 90-minute periods of writing and listening, respectively. The goals for the new Academic Skills course included teaching the listening subskills of finding key words, main ideas, listening for discourse markers, taking dictation and making sentence-level predictions as well as showing students how to summarize and paraphrase lectures and providing them with an introduction to content within the subject areas of the department. A series of 20-minute videotaped lectures on aspects of British and American Literature, Linguistics, and Communications was produced, painstakingly transcribed, then a unit of questions and activities developed for each videotape. |
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