What impact, if any, might the idea of intended learning outcomes (Biggs and Tang, 2011) have on the assessment of academic writing? The biggest impact may well be the specification of aligned learning activities that help students achieve the intended learning outcomes. But that begs the question, what learning activities will help students write better assignments? The question is deceptively simple, yet the response gets at the heart of what teachers think they are teaching and assessing in academic writing.
The response to the question about learning activities to some extent depends on whether academic writing can be learned with a surface approach. Many teachers seem to implicitly (or explicitly in some cases) hold the view that this is possible. Teachers who exclusively use classroom activities that deal with stance, hedging, topic sentences and paragraphing in de-contextualized tasks and exercises for example, implicitly feel that when these tasks are added together, they should leave students capable of writing academic text that persuades their already knowledgeable audience that they have something to say. Most teachers seem to acknowledge, however, that the results of student writing when following these learning activities are pretty disappointing.
So what would it mean to learn academic writing with a deep approach? For starters, it would probably mean moving away from the idea of EAP classes as training and making them more educative. Learning activities would need to revolve around not just the acquisition of information on aspects of academic writing, but rather conceptual change of what it means to write effectively in the academy and other real-world settings. This would be no easy task in an already crowded curriculum, as time (and probably lots of it) would need to be set aside for students to effect conceptual change through working collaboratively with their peers and the teacher. As Biggs and Tang (2011, pg. 23) point out, “good dialogue elicits those activities that shape, elaborate and deepen understanding”. For EAP classes therefore, time set aside to focus on study and discussion of exemplar texts, assessment criteria, collaborative writing, and peer critique of students’ own writing might be worthwhile learning activities that are likely to encourage conceptual change of what it means to be a successful writer.
Apart from taking an active role in suitable learning activities, students would also need to know what was expected of them, hence the need for a clear and unambiguous learning outcome that encourages the deep learning of academic writing. Clearly, an intended learning outcome that merely states students will be able to produce acceptable academic text is very unlikely to lead to suitable learning activities no matter how inspiring the teacher is. An outcome that specifies awareness of audience, purpose or register could lead to more defined learning tasks, but without meaningful dialogue it is unlikely that the learning activities will help in achieving the desired outcome.
The ideas of a deep approach to learning and the need for conceptual change in order to achieve deeper learning suggest a need for a rethink of how EAP classes deal with academic writing. Clearly some of what is implied above is a focus on how we can encourage more collaboration, more interest and motivation in the area of writing, and how we can design our courses and curricula to foster the kind of learning that we would like to see as teachers.
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