Traditional university courses typically teach discipline content only, while the academic skills needed to navigate that content are taught in generic ‘Academic English’ courses, delivered through standalone workshops, or left to the students to figure out for themselves. The need for a more embedded, or mainstreamed, approach to the teaching of such skills is well-documented in the literature (McWilliams & Allan, 2014; Purser et al, 2008; Thies, 2012; Wingate, 2006, 2015; Wingate et al, 2011), due to the discipline-specific nature of the texts, discourses, and ‘ways of knowing’ that students need to master. However, two obstacles are frequently reported: Firstly, academics are often reluctant to engage with academic skills, feeling that such matters fall outside both their job descriptions and their expertise. Secondly, there is a perception that time spent dealing with such skills will eat into the time that is usually spent covering the content syllabus, thus reducing what can be taught.

References

McWilliams, R., & Allan, Q. (2014). Embedding academic literacy skills: Towards a best practice model. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 11(3), 1-20.

Purser, E., Skillen, J., Deane, M., Donohue, J., & Peake, K. (2008). Developing academic literacy in context. Zeitschrift Schreiben: Schreiben in schule, hochschule und beruf, 1-7.

Thies, L. (2012). Increasing student participation and success: Collaborating to embed academic literacies into the curriculum. Journal of Academic Language and Learning, 6(1), 15-31.

Wingate, U. (2006). Doing away with study skills. Teaching in Higher Education, 11(4), 457-465.

Wingate, U. (2015). Academic literacy across the curriculum: towards a collaborative instructional approach. Paper presented at the International Conference on English Across the Curriculum, Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Wingate, U., Andon, N., & Cogo, A. (2011). Embedding academic writing instruction into subject teaching: A case study. Active Learning in Higher Education, 12, 69-81.

The course focuses on content outcomes relating to the field of linguistics (Knowledge about language). However, two other types of learning outcome are embedded into the learning design: Skills for linguistics and Communication. By hosting the majority of resources and activities on Moodle, it is possible to supplement the core content with the additional skills and communication components, rather than reducing what is covered.

Content outcomes
Above all, this is a Linguistics course. Its content outcomes therefore relate to appreciation of the linguistic diversity of the Pacific region and to understanding of the real-life instances in which languages matter, from education to inclusive communication, to language technology. To achieve the content outcomes, students listen to authentic mini lectures (5-12 minutes in length), read authentic texts (ranging from blog posts to academic articles), explore resources of relevance to linguists (ranging from non-specialist resources to linguistic databases and archives to library catalogues), and complete tutorial activities that help them engage with this content.

Academic literacy support for listening

• The online lectures are content-driven and cover the concepts expected of a typical 100-level intro linguistics course.
• Pre-listening activities are added that focus on the authentic language used in the week’s lectures, rather than on the type of idealised phrases that are commonly covered in academic listening courses.
• The lectures were prepared first, and the pre-listening activities then tailored to match. ‘Academic listening’ is therefore supported in context, rather than taught as a generic skill.
• By embedding the pre-listening activities within the teaching units, the same content flows across the lectures and the activities, providing additional input on the topic.
• It is recognised that different disciplines use lectures for different purposes. The pre-listening activities in this course attempt to socialise students into the types of lecture they will encounter on their linguistics programme.

Academic literacy support for reading

• Each week, students are asked to read one or more texts that relate to the week’s topic.
• Having listened to the lectures, they should have some foundational knowledge of the content already.
• The purpose of the reading component is not so much to acquire new factual information but to learn how to navigate the different types of written text that they will encounter in their linguistics programme.
• Support is therefore provided in the form of online ‘As you read …’ notes, followed by a series of activities (from Week 4 onwards) that the campus students complete in a face-to-face tutorial, while the online students work independently using the same material with answer keys.
• The activities are intended to ease students into reading a range of texts that are generally very challenging for them.

Academic literacy support for research skills

• Each week, students are asked to complete a mini research task online, before posting on the week’s discussion forum to explain what they have found out.
• The task relates directly to the weekly topics, thereby providing additional content knowledge and the opportunity to explore ideas in more depth.
• Provided that they post before the deadline, they are given the credit for the task (0.5% per week), and the quality of contributions is not assessed. The assumption is that students will complete the activities in order to acquire the credit, thereby having to visit the required sources, and therefore hopefully gaining something from the activity even with minimal investment.
• The primary purpose of this component each week is to instil an understanding of why we search for ideas, but there are a number of other practical objectives: keeping students on track with the course schedule, discovering some specific sites and sources that linguists use for research, and consolidating their knowledge of the weekly topic.
• The types of source that students are directed to move from populist sources about language … to technical sites that house primary linguistic data … to academic databases that contain secondary sources about language. The progression from one type of source to another is heavily scaffolded by the weekly activities, constantly reinforcing the idea that RESEARCH is primarily about looking for things that are of interest of relevance to the task at hand.

Support for communicating effectively through English

• An ‘effective communication’ component is built into each week, comprising online notes and quiz activities that deal mainly with sentence-level grammar.
• The grammatical elements are chosen to be particularly relevant to the week’s topics. For example, verb tenses are covered during the week in which the content topic is ‘language change’. However, the elements are broadly common to all subject areas, making the notes and activities easily adaptable to other courses.
• Extracts from the weekly reading (or texts on similar topics) are used to provide the examples and quiz items. In this way, the grammatical focus is always done in context, and the topic is also covered in more, rather than less, depth.
• All quiz activities are marked automatically, meaning that there is no burden placed on the course lecturers, either in time or in expertise (once the activities have been developed).
• Students are given up to 0.5% towards their coursework for completing each week’s quiz activities. The first time the course was offered, they could retake the quizzes as many times as they liked in the hope that they would use the notes to improve their scores. They could also check their scores as they went along, reviewing their answers to each activity before submitting their final answers. This has since been reduced to two chances to take each quiz, without the option to check their scores throughout.

We presented ‘Moving into the mainstream: Embedding research skills within a core academic course’ at the Pacific People’s Research Skills Symposium, Suva, 29-30 August 2018. You can access the slides here (and can see and hear some examples of what our students thought of the course if you select presentation mode).

​The preliminary report on the project can be accessed here.

We then presented some preliminary findings on student engagement with the learning design at the 2nd international conference on English Across the Curriculum, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 3-5 December 2018.

Willans, F. & R. Prasad (2025). Multilingual, multimodal insights into the online learning experience: Getting in the zone. In B. Goodman & B. Seilstad (Eds.). Researching multilingually: Conceptual and methodological failures, struggles, and successes. Multilingual Matters.

Willans, F. (2024). Evaluating an embedded model of academic literacy support: A can-do approach. In B. Morrison, C. MacDiarmid, I.Haghi, & A. Williams (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2021 BALEAP conference: Exploring pedagogical approaches in EAP teaching. Garnet.

Willans, F. (2022). The scramble for EMI: Lessons from postcolonial ‘old EMI’ universities. Teaching in Higher Education, 27(4), 546-557.

Willans, F., R. Buadromo, T. Bryce, R. Prasad & A. Fonolahi (2020). Supporting the transition to tertiary level: How students engage with academic literacy materials embedded into a mainstream course. In S. Naidu & S. Narayan (Eds.). Teaching and Learning with Technology: Pushing boundaries and breaking down walls (pp.137-163). University of the South Pacific Press.

Willans, F., A. Fonolahi, R. Buadromo, T. Bryce, R. Prasad & S. Kumari (2019). Fostering and evaluating learner engagement with academic literacy support: Making the most of Moodle. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice 16(4).