Submitted by Jennifer Walsh Marr, Lecturer, Vantage College, Faculty of Applied Science, School of Engineering, UBC Vancouver.
Material:
Attribution and Use:
This use case is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
Purpose
This task is to ‘set students up for success’ for an IMRD research-writing course. It is purposefully introduced as a “thinking document” and directly addresses typical student concerns with an FAQ introduction. Despite this being a writing course, students just need to “fill in the blanks” with their early thoughts. Nothing polished is expected; they just need to choose their focus and find relevant resources before we get too far into the course (and they get too far behind). If they don’t get a full score upon first submission, they can revise and resubmit.
Context
My students are exclusively multilingual international students who are developing their academic English skills within their first year of undergraduate engineering. I insist on an engineering topic to keep the focus on language relevant to their discipline, but I also encourage students to choose an engineering-related topic that’s of interest to them. The personal interest fosters a sense of belonging in the profession, reinforcing individual avenues of investigation. Frankly, I find it fascinating who is interested in what, reinforcing that engineering can be a very broad practice.
Instruction
Students’ studies compare two texts for a specific language feature, quantifying and explaining similarities and differences in its usage. This language feature contextualizes information and enhances specificity and technicality, which is particularly relevant for engineering. Students need to choose an academic and non-academic text to compare how that language feature is used in each; this attention to language supports students’ critical engagement with writing across contexts, and makes this implicit knowledge more transparent to students. It also helps them with audience awareness.
The sections on what they expect and hope to find represent their hypothesis and rationale, respectively; by the time they are writing up that section of their report, that information would otherwise be long-forgotten. The Project Preparation section is to foster metacognition and ultimately, their success.
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