Assessing and reporting performances on pre-sessional EAP courses

J. Banerjee, D. Wall / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 5 (2006) 50–69 55
Table 2
Key factors in successful academic performance, taken from Ginther <strong>and</strong> Grant (1996)
Reading Writing
Underst<strong>and</strong>ing the main idea of their reading Organisation
Reaching valid conclusions Summarisation
Making critical evaluations of content Well-formed sentences
Comprehending significant detail Vocabulary
Underst<strong>and</strong>ing explicitly stated information Usage
Detecting inferences between the lines Research skills
Economy
Clarity
Providing sufficient evidence
Grammatical
Correctly punctuated
Ability to use ‘st<strong>and</strong>ard’ academic discourse
Knowing what your tutor–examiner values
(<strong>and</strong> giving that to him/her)
work). Studies like Horowitz (1986), Canseco <strong>and</strong> Byrd (1989) <strong>and</strong> Moore <strong>and</strong> Morton (2005)
have analysed the writing dem<strong>and</strong>s placed upon university students. Others have looked
more broadly at the language <strong>and</strong> academic needs of university students. Weir’s (1983)
groundbreaking work focused upon the needs of overseas students. More recently, as part of
the development programme for the TOEFL internet-based test (TOEFL iBT), the
Educational Testing Service has published a series of commissioned papers covering
the reading, writing, speaking <strong>and</strong> listening dem<strong>and</strong>s on university students (see Bejar,
Douglas, Jamieson, Nissan, & Turner, 2000; Butler, Eignor, Jones, McNamara, & Suomi, 2000;
Cumming, Kantor, Powers, Santos, & Taylor, 2000; Enright, Grabe, Koda, Mosenthal,
Mulcahy-Ernt, & Schedl, 2000; Hamp-Lyons & Kroll, 1997; Jamieson, Jones, Kirsch,
Mosenthal, & Taylor, 2000; Waters, 1996). Though the primary purpose of these papers was
to define the initial construct of the revised TOEFL test, they also form an excellent resource for
the EAP construct in all four-language skills.
Another useful resource is Ginther <strong>and</strong> Grant’s (1996) meta-analysis of research into the
academic needs of native English-speaking university students in the US. This provides
information about the language dem<strong>and</strong>s placed on all students (not only international students).
They note that speaking <strong>and</strong> listening needs have not been investigated (possibly because these
skills are taken for granted among native speakers or because they are rarely formally assessed in
an academic context) <strong>and</strong> that reading is often commented on in relation to writing. Their metaanalysis
suggests a number of reading <strong>and</strong> writing features that are key factors in good academic
performance. These are listed in Table 2.
Yet other researchers have explored the criteria applied by subject tutors to university students’
<strong>performances</strong>. For instance, as part of a study to design suitable writing tasks for post-graduate
students Wall (1981) analysed the criteria that Economics tutors applied to the students’ written
work. She found that the tutors applied some or all of the following criteria when assessing students’
finished work: knowledge of subject matter, critical ability, structuring of the essay, answering the
question, <strong>and</strong> the use of sources. Tutors responded negatively to verbosity/irrelevance <strong>and</strong>
carelessness/lack of rewriting. They made relatively few comments about specific language
features. Wall, Nickson, Jordan, Allwright <strong>and</strong> Houghton (1988) arrived at a similar finding when
they compared the reactions of an academic tutor to a student essay with those of three EAP tutors.