Journal of English for Academic Purposes | 2019
Effect of an EAP unit on EFL student effective and appropriate source-use skills
Abstract
Abstract It is widely believed source-use skills are among the most important academic literacy skills that students need to develop throughout their college years. Although there has been extensive discussion of the difficulties experienced by ESL/EFL students developing these skills, few studies have focused on instructional interventions designed specifically to build source-use skills. To the best of our knowledge, no intervention recorded in the literature has focused on both essential aspects of source use — effective as well as appropriate source use at the same time. In this classroom-based study, we investigated whether a source-use oriented EAP unit can markedly improve student source-use skills. Results showed that the EAP unit led to significant improvement in three out of the four operations under source-use effectiveness, that is, using sources for giving support to an argument, establishing links among sources, and integrating source texts into one s own writing; the EAP unit led to significant improvement in all three operations under source-use appropriateness, namely, adequate attribution to source authors, accurate representation of source ideas, and substantial transformation of source language. A number of pedagogical implications were drawn from this study.