
Helen BasturkmenUniversity of Auckland
Helen Basturkmen
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Publications (55)
Increased work connectivity and study mobility over national boundaries in recent decades has led to a shift in the kind of English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction implemented in many educational institutions. Instruction to develop learners’ general English language proficiency may appear as a time-consuming and abstract endeavour. Instead,...
This entry examines ways English for specific purposes (ESP) and English for academic purposes (EAP) support teachers in their endeavors to devise instruction to prepare English as a second language (ESL) learners for the demands of working or studying in English. EAP grew out of ESP and shares similar, pedagogical features with ESP. The entry desc...
This entry examines the teaching methods and materials typically used in ESP, English for work or study purposes. It discusses the needs‐related nature of ESP teaching and the reasons why ESP methods and materials are often distinct from those used in general English language teaching. Empirical research into ESP methods and materials is limited an...
This volume provides a concise overview of linguistic description in the field of English for Academic Purposes, charting its evolution and categorizing the various strands of research interest. Given the increasing use of English as a lingua franca, there has been a corresponding upsurge into research in EAP. The book synthesizes this research in...
English for specific purposes (ESP) refers to the field of language teaching that aims to support learners with the linguistic needs of their study or work area, and research into language use in work or study areas. ESP instruction does not aim to develop a general linguistic competence but rather to develop the particular set of linguistic compet...
English for academic purposes is the branch of English for Specific Purposes that is concerned with teaching and research to meet the language needs of those in study and research settings. There are two main areas of EAP. The first area is English for study purposes. This area aims to help students acquire the English they need to successfully par...
This paper presents findings from a study exploring the teacher education needs of experienced english for specific purposes (ESP) instructors. It discusses data from interviews with 19 experienced in-service teachers of ESP in two spanish universities. The interviews aimed to develop an understanding of the teachers' views of ESP teaching, the kin...
This paper reports a study conducted as part of an ESP/language specialist consultation for an Accounting Department in a tertiary education context. Observations were made of the interaction in first year accounting classrooms in order to provide an understanding of the extent to which and how the accounting lecturers addressed language incidental...
Coherence is a notoriously difficult construct to describe for the purposes of responding to student writing. Student writers can be admonished for failing to make their writing sufficiently coherent, yet their lecturers may struggle to understand or explain why it lacks coherence. This study aimed to contribute to understanding of coherence, a ter...
In recent years a number of comparative studies based on an established approach to genre analysis have been published in the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) literature. Studies in this emerging strand of research typically aim to identify how the rhetorical structure of a particular genre (a text type) or part of a genre may vary across differ...
The paper focuses on the three areas of ESP theory and research that were identified in the call for papers for the 34th GERAS Conference, namely, teaching, discourse and culture. It reviews some conventional foci of ESP-oriented enquiry in these areas. However, the main focus of the paper is on the borders between individual areas. Three of the au...
Outwardly the rhetorical organisation of sections of research reports in different disciplines can appear similar. Close examination, however, may reveal subtle differences. Numerous studies have drawn on the genre-based approach developed by Swales (1990, 2004) to investigate the schematic structure of sections of articles in a range of discipline...
The relationship between teachers' beliefs and practices is generally understood to be a complex one. In recent years the topic of language teachers' beliefs has attracted considerable research interest, mostly in the form of case studies of teachers in particular contexts. A number of such studies focus in part on the relationship between beliefs...
This article examines Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) in New Zealand and Australia (Australasia) and Europe in recent years, focusing on the creation and implementation of curricula in these contexts. The examination draws on themes distinguished by Grosse and Voght (1991) in their discussion of the emergence of LSP foreign language programs...
Many Western universities are experiencing considerable growth in the numbers of postgraduate research students, both local and international. This increase and diversification bring with them challenges for how to make these students’ research studies successful. In particular, what students may wish to receive by way of supervisor-student relatio...
Written feedback on drafts of a thesis or dissertation is arguably the most important source of input on what is required or expected of thesis-writing students by the academic community. Despite its importance, relatively little is known about what type of information supervisors focus on when giving feedback. This article presents the findings of...
Peer interaction may facilitate acquisition through fostering learner production, feedback, and noticing of form. This study examined learners’ awareness of form during peer interaction in role-play and discussion tasks over a three-week period of a tertiary intermediate-level French class. The data for the study comprised transcribed recordings of...
This study investigates the ways writers comment on the results of their research. Making claims in the form of Commenting on Results is a key move in discussion of results sections. Using data drawn from published journal articles and master dissertations in Language Teaching, the study investigates how published academics and students writing the...
The study looked at the effects of correction of learners’ errors on learning of grammatical features. In particular, the manner of correction (explicit vs. implicit correction) was investigated. The study also focussed on the effectiveness of explicit and implicit correction of developmental early vs. developmental late features.Fifty-six intermed...
This article is a response to Sheen and O'Neill's (2005) critique of our paper entitled ‘Teachers’ stated beliefs about incidental focus on form and their classroom practice’ (Basturkmen
et al., 2004). In addition, it seeks to clarify a number of common misunderstandings about focus on form (e.g. that ‘form’ refers exclusively
to grammar and that i...
In postgraduate study, students including L2 students are often required to write a thesis and, as a growing literature reveals, L2 students often experience difficulties in the writing of this genre. While most of this research has involved surveys (questionnaires and interviews) and case studies of supervisor perceptions, only a few studies have...
This paper discusses some approaches to the categorisation of cohesive devices with reference to spoken academic discourse, multi-word units, and strings of frequently co-occurring words (lexical bundles). It goes on to investigate the cohesive role of lexical bundles in a corpus of 160 university lectures (120 from the BASE corpus and 40 from MICA...
Instruction in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing classes often involves the use of group writing tasks in which small groups of students co-construct written texts. One purpose of using such tasks is for students to negotiate the meanings they wish to express and in so doing engage in language related episodes (discussion of language form...
This article reports a case study investigating the relationship between three teachers' stated beliefs about and practices of focus on form in intermediate level ESL communicative lessons. Focus on form was defined and studied in terms of incidental time-outs taken by students and teachers to deal with issues of linguistic form during communicativ...
Current theories of second language acquisition emphasise the importance of learners' attending consciously to form. Similarly, current discussions of communicative language pedagogy stress the need for classroom language learners to focus on form as well as meaning. The study reported in this article is intended to contribute to both theory and pr...
Learners often find the area of pragmatics (that is, using speech acts such as requesting, inviting, and complimenting) problematic. Teachers are urged to teach pragmatic aspects of language, and make use of authentic samples of spoken discourse to do so. However, information about the effectiveness of pragmatics-focused instruction of this nature...
A central concern in English for academic purposes is description of language use in target language events. In regard to spoken language use, research has aimed to describe the general features of talk across talking to learn events and to identify the speaking needs of ESL students in them. The study reported in this article takes a narrow-angled...
English for specific purposes (ESP) courses are often discussed in terms of a two-way distinction between 'wide-angled' and 'narrow-angled' designs. The term 'wide angled' is used to refer to courses for learners targeting a broad work place, professional or academic field. The term 'narrow angled' is used to refer to courses for learners targeting...
As a basis for course and materials design, EAP teachers need descriptions of discourse in academic events. This paper reports on a study exploring patterns of discourse organisation in seminar-type discussions. Analysis was made of patterns of sequential organisation in discussions between students in UK university seminars. It revealed two main p...
This article examines incidental and transitory focus on form. Learner uptake was studied in focus-on-form episodes occurring in 12 hours of communicative ESL teaching. Learner uptake was generally high and successful—to a much greater extent than has been reported for immersion classrooms. Uptake was higher and more successful in reactive focus on...
‘Focus-on-form’ refers to a particular type of form-focused instruction - the treatment of linguistic form in the context of performing a communicative task. This article considers the rationale for this approach to teaching form as opposed to the more traditional ‘focus-on-forms’ approach where linguistic features are treated sequentially. It desc...
In teaching academic writing to learners of English as a second language, success is generally understood to be a measure of the extent to which students have achieved course objectives and learned what was taught. Success is usually evaluated in terms of external and objective measures, such as grades. There is, however, a need to focus more on su...
It has been observed that participants take time out during communicative activities to give attention to linguistic items arising incidentally within these contexts. This has been termed ‘focus on form’ (Long, 1991) and studies of classroom discourse have identified ways classroom participants focus on form reactively (Lyster & Ranta, 1997) and pr...
In language teaching it is important to relate practice to fundamental ideas about the nature of language, learning, and teaching. The teaching of languages for specific purposes has been criticized for being all practice and no theory because there has been limited concern in the literature with fundamental ideas. This article identifies some gaps...
Discusses problems nonnative speakers of English may have in making their written texts cohesive and coherent and describes instructional activities designed to help students achieve greater cohesion and coherence in their writing. (Author/VWL)
This article contributes to the growing body of descriptive research investigating focus on form, defined as the incidental attention that teachers and L2 learners pay to form in the context of meaning-focussed instruction. Whereas previous research addressed reactive focus on form (i.e., corrective feedback), the study reported in this article inv...
English Language Teaching (ELT) has traditionally focused on the description and teaching of the written language, often to the neglect of the spoken language. Now developments in corpora of spoken language, and findings from discourse analysis of naturally occurring talk, enable English Language teachers to describe and present features of interac...
The subject of this paper is a data-driven description of student-led discussion in seminars on a MBA course. Qualitative description of the language of discussion is needed on which to base realistic pedagogical materials for EAP. Using evidence from a small corpus of academic seminars, data is presented to illustrate some language features in stu...
Two current interests in language teaching are learning outcomes and tasks. Our research project compared three groups' interpretations of the outcomes of tasks for adult learners of English. Results from task designers, teachers and students of English revealed differences both between and within these three groups. These differences indicate the...