Examining Undergraduate Students’ Learning Transfer from English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) Courses to Discipline-Specific Courses

الموضوعات

تربية وتعليم

الملخص

The principal aim of this study is to explore university students’ learning transfer from two English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) courses into a variety of non-EGAP courses. The current study examines near and far transfer based on three dimensions of Barnett and Ceci’s (2002) transfer taxonomy. It investigates (a) the writing samples of undergraduate students from different majors, with a special focus on the transfer of five learning outcomes (LOs) namely: Sentence Structure, Essay Structure, Cohesion, Coherence, and Language Errors , (b) the impact of their majors on transfer, (c) their perceived transfer, and (d) their perceptions of the EGAP courses and writing performance. This study adopts a mixed method approach and utilizes two instruments, which are students’ EGAP and non-EGAP writing samples and a questionnaire, to answer the research questions. While a quantitative analysis is run on 41 questionnaire responses, a qualitative analysis is performed on 76 writing samples that are gathered from 38 students. Results reveal that successful transfer is found in the LOs of Sentence Structure, Cohesion, and Coherence while unsuccessful transfer is observed in the remaining LOs. On the contrary, when examining the same LOs across seven semesters, the successful transfer is mainly detected in far transfer contexts, specifically Cohesion in the 3rd semester and Sentence Structure in the 6th semester. As for the influence of majors on transfer, students could transfer more LOs in social science courses (near transfer) than in science courses (far transfer). Besides, there are some discrepancies between their perceived transfer, reported in the questionnaire, and their actual transfer, examined in writing samples. They think that their essay structure skills are better than their sentence structure strategies, yet the opposite is observed in their writing samples. Furthermore, they state that EGAP courses swing between helpful to somewhat helpful in sharpening their language skills. Finally, they believe their writing performance is very good in most of the examined LOs. These results imply that integrating more reviewing and proofreading sessions in the EGAP courses could improve students’ transfer. Also, raising EAP educators’ awareness of the influence of majors on learning transfer can lead to modifying their teaching strategies. Strengthening the collaboration between EGAP and discipline-specific instructors to enable students to draw associations between the two contexts is encouraged, as well.

روابط وملفات

التعريف والنوع

رقم الوثيقة

097fab09-a4e3-4121-a869-7b4d56ac210c

رقم العقد

0

نوع الوسائط

Crawler

نوع المحتوى

الرسائل العلمية

صيغة المصدر

رسائل ماجيستير

نوع الملف

pdf text

أسماء الملفات

844908_2.pdf

بيانات النشر

ألقاب المؤلفين

[{"name_ar":"Nihal Nagi","title_ar":"اشراف","title_en":"Supervision"},{"name_ar":"Sara Abdelkader ","title_ar":"اعداد","title_en":"Preparation"}]

اللغة

English

المصدر والدورية

اسم المصدر

Examining Undergraduate Students’ Learning Transfer from English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) Courses to Discipline-Specific Courses

المحتوى والصفحات

عدد الصفحات

0

إشراف وإعداد

الإشراف

Nihal Nagi

الإعداد

Sara Abdelkader

الاقتباسات الببليوغرافية