Assessing and reporting performances on pre-sessional EAP courses

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Table 1 Final report 2001—the types of comments recorded in the section for writing Related to writing Interesting, but are they related to writing? GENERAL Confident Excellent writing Has improved Thoughtful writing (3) Feels has improved Transmits ideas clearly Will improve Cohesive (4) No improvement in first 3 weeks, then sudden improvement Coherent (6) Raised self-awareness Fluent Has become aware of the need to write well CONTENT Related to reading: Aware of difficulties <strong>and</strong> trying to overcome (2) Reveals she’s understood reading Has taken note of principles (3) Can analyse data Puts in effort (2) Can respond critically to data (10) Has applied self Argumentation: Good argumentation (11) Responds to feedback (9) Does not hesitate to give own views Found module helpful (2) Needs to read widely <strong>and</strong> critically Has enjoyed this module Style: Reader-friendly (9) Settled down quickly Academic I have no worries Concise expression Should be able to cope with dem<strong>and</strong>s (2) Verbose I hope she will continue to improve Conventions: Has explored conventions of academic writing Weaknesses likely to disappear soon Can convey message in own words Weak in xxx but once that improves I hope Editing: Developing editing skills Will benefit from continued academic support Less than rigorous when checking drafts (2) ORGANISATION (31) J. Banerjee, D. Wall / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 5 (2006) 50–69 53 LANGUAGE General comment about language (13) Grammatical problems (5) Good word choice 2. Research into EAP assessment One obvious option when restructuring the EAP exit assessment was to require the students to re-take an external EAP test such as IELTS or TOEFL. However, there are a number of drawbacks in this approach. The first is practical in that there is a time delay between the taking of the test <strong>and</strong> the release of the official results. The pre-sessional EAP courses finish just before the academic year begins so this means that students would need to take the external test before the pre-sessional course ended. Since, the shortest (<strong>and</strong> largest) of Lancaster University’s pre-
54 J. Banerjee, D. Wall / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 5 (2006) 50–69 sessional EAP courses is only four weeks, the students would probably have to take the external test mid-way through the programme, possibly before they were able to make measurable advances in their language proficiency. The second, <strong>and</strong> stronger, argument is made by research that has analysed the dem<strong>and</strong>s of university writing tasks, particularly research that has compared these dem<strong>and</strong>s to those on external EAP tests. Horowitz (1986) <strong>and</strong> Canseco <strong>and</strong> Byrd (1989), the latter looking specifically at the writing dem<strong>and</strong>s in postgraduate degree programmes, report that university students need to be able to select relevant data from sources, reorganise the data to answer the question set, <strong>and</strong> also need to write their text using academic register. Other important writing skills include the ability to present information in tables <strong>and</strong> graphs, <strong>and</strong> to revise <strong>and</strong> edit drafts. Students are rarely required to refer to personal experience. This, as Moore <strong>and</strong> Morton (2005) point out, marks an important difference between the dem<strong>and</strong>s of the target language situation <strong>and</strong> the writing dem<strong>and</strong>ed by at least one major external test—the IELTS. IELTS Task 2 typically requires students to draw upon their personal experience for examples to support claims that they make rather than to draw on reading sources or primary data. Other differences documented by Moore & Morton (2005) include: (i) IELTS Task 2 falls within a restricted genre of a written argument or case whereas university writing tasks cover reviews, case study reports, research reports, research proposals, summaries, exercises <strong>and</strong> short answer tasks. (ii) The predominant rhetorical functions in IELTS Task 2 are evaluation <strong>and</strong> hortation. Though evaluation is the predominant rhetorical function of university writing tasks, other rhetorical functions such as description, summarisation <strong>and</strong> comparison are also common <strong>and</strong> hortation is relatively rare. Consequently, Moore & Morton argue that it is not possible to combine preparation for the IELTS test with preparation for university study. Another possible reason for lack of fit between EAP tests <strong>and</strong> the language dem<strong>and</strong>s students face at university may lie in the criteria used for assessment in EAP contexts. If the assessment criteria used in EAP tests do not reflect the criteria against which the students’ performance will be judged in academic contexts, then the scores achieved are less easily interpretable with reference to the students’ ability to perform tasks in those contexts. For instance, Thorp <strong>and</strong> Kennedy (2003) have reported that ‘idiomaticity’ rather than the ability to write within the academic genre is rewarded on the IELTS writing test. Jacoby <strong>and</strong> McNamara (1999) comment that the assessment criteria in specific purposes tests usually employ only language-focused categories whereas <strong>performances</strong> in a specific purposes context are not wholly language based. This last point is problematic because the main purpose of a pre-sessional EAP course is to boost students’ ability to perform in English in an academic environment so it can be argued that the focus should therefore be upon language. However, this would be to ignore the complexity of language for specific purposes contexts. It appears, therefore, that external EAP tests such as IELTS <strong>and</strong> TOEFL (in their current forms) [2005], while suitable as a pre-entry measure, are insufficiently representative of the construct of EAP (particularly EAP writing) to be used as an exit measure for pre-sessional EAP courses. With some notable exceptions (e.g., Cho, 2003), there is little published on EAP-course finalassessment procedures. However, the construct of EAP assessment has been addressed from a number of other perspectives (see Blue, Milton, & Saville, 2000 for a compendium of recent
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