Collections of Professor Dr David Ngin Sian Pau

contribute to the formality or informality of a text; major influences include the degree to which academic words, academic structures and academic conventions are used.

3.4. Academic Reading

The ability to read academic texts is considered one of the most important skills to acquire in learning EAP and it should be noted that for the most part, reading instruction focuses on text processing and on the reader's understanding of the language of the text. To help students cope with texts they may encounter in an academic setting, reading skills and strategies are first taught on the basis of simple texts and then practiced on authentic reading material.

A central goal of academic purposes in EAP programs is to help students develop reading and thinking strategies i.e. needed to read academic texts in their content classes in order to learn new subject matter. Study reading, reading for in-depth comprehension and learning, is a special type of reading, demanding a different type of processing in terms of focusing of attention, information encoding and retrieval than reading for enjoyment or reading for general information. Studying is associated with the requirement to perform identifiable cognitive and/or procedural tasks…to meet the criteria on tasks such as taking a test, writing a paper, giving a speech, and conducting an experiment. Lessons for academic purposes (EAP) reading classes consist of a pre-reading phase that activates and builds background knowledge, guided reading of a text, and post reading exercises: comprehension checks, discussion and writing activities, exercises to develop reading skills.

3.5. Teaching Listening

It is essential for language teachers to help their students become effective listeners. In the communicative approach to language teaching means modeling listening strategies and providing listening practice in authentic situations: those that learners are likely to encounter when they use the language outside the classroom. By raising students' awareness of listening as a skill that requires active engagement, and by explicitly teaching listening strategies, instructors help their students develop both the ability and the confidence to handle communication situations they may encounter beyond the classroom. Contextualized listening activities approximate real-life tasks and give the listener an idea of the type of information to expect and what to do with it in advance of the actual listening.

Language learning depends on listening. Listening provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language acquisition and enables learners to interact in spoken communication. Effective language instructors show students how they can adjust their listening behavior to deal with a variety of situations, types of input, and listening purposes. They help students develop a set of listening strategies and match appropriate strategies to each listening situation.
Listening strategies can be classified by how the listener processes the input. Top-down strategies are listener based which includes listening for the main idea, predicting , drawing inferences, and summarizing. Bottom-up strategies are text based which includes listening for specific details, recognizing cognates, and recognizing word-order patterns.