SCAFFOLDED WRITING TASKS IN ESP – INSIGHTS INTO SITUATED PRACTICE
SCAFFOLDED WRITING TASKS IN ESP – INSIGHTS INTO SITUATED PRACTICE

Summary/Abstract: Following developments into ESP research and practice that focus more and more on bringing closer together classroom activities and realworld professional activities students will perform after graduation, teachers and material designers show a growing commitment to making contextual relevance a central feature of teaching and learning ESP. In what concerns writing activities in ESP, contextual relevance refers to the nature of the task, that is, to what extent a pedagogical task approximates the communicative purpose and rhetorical demands of a real-world task; and to the role of writing tasks as academic literacy components by which students learn to handle what Bhatia (2008) identifies as ‘the discursive realities of the professional world’. In classroom practice these considerations should remain at the forefront of learning and teaching. Writing tasks, even when pedagogically engineered to suit the classroom context (such as the level of the students, the time available for completing it, the role of a particular task in a chain of learning activities, etc.) must remind students of the real-world tasks they are preparing themselves to perform outside the language classroom. But, successful completion of task should not be alone the final goal. In ESP classes, adult learners are able to reflect and analyze the learning situations they are presented with, and add the acquired experience to the awareness of how controlled classroom practice contributes to their practical autonomy when using the language in workrelated contexts. Therefore, the time teachers allow for discussing the learning process and inviting students to extend these considerations beyond the language classroom can contribute to understanding how writing functions within more general academic literacy components. The present paper discusses scaffolding in writing from the view-point of an ESP practitioner confronted with mixed ability student groups and a variety of ESP materials that, as such, rarely cater for the needs of all students.

• Details
• Contents