Poster Presentation

Syllabus Design for Oral Proficiencyof EGAP Students in the University
Classroom

Nicholas Marshall
Meiji University
This paper outlines and presents a template of the process of syllabus design for an EGAP
(English for general academic purposes) at a large, private university in Tokyo. The students
come from a variety of (non-English) ethno-linguistic backgrounds and the syllabus is a
response to anxieties from students who cannot 1) adequately participate in English inseminars, or 2) effectively present their research in English. The paper seeks to outline
and connect theoretical principles from applied linguistics with practical concerns insyllabus design. The oral proficiency that the syllabus is supposed to engender is modeledfrom the different but complementary perspectives of 1) interactional competence and2) psycholinguistics. Researchers tend to adopt one or other of these approaches but for
instructors working in language education, it is helpful to be aware of both. This can givea more global understanding of what benefits learners may gain from different activities.

Post-graduate students (including but not restricted to Japanese) for whom
English is a foreign or alternative language, studying at a large, private university
in Tokyo, need to interact with peers and professors in English in seminar groups.
They also need to present their research, and answer questions from dissertation
defense panels and more general academic audiences at conference presentations.
The students come from a range of backgrounds including: Japan, China,Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, and various African countries
and there is usually a wide range of English proficiency levels.
Needs analyses, both formal and informal, have shown that most of
the students have little experience in these domains of English use, even incases where they score highly on tests measuring declarative knowledge of136

Oral Proficiency of EGAP Students, OnCUE Journal, 9(2), pages 136-141

the language. As a result, they often feel nervous and ill-equipped to perform
effectively in academic English. The university has developed English courses
to address this problem and for practical purposes, students from a variety ofmajors including: governance, literature, history, business, linguistics, etc., havebeen gathered together. These backgrounds are varied but do not include scienceor engineering, so it is possible to find commonalities under the broad rubric ofEGAP (English for General Academic Purposes), which is usually considered tobe a sub-set of ESP ( Jordan, 1997:3).
Courses are designed to run for one semester with one 90-minute classmeeting over 15 weeks. So realistically, there is not much time to seriously lift
students’ generative competence in English and the goal is rather, to effect change
in their participatory practices, or interactional competence (Young: 2009). Ineffect, this means involving students in greater initiative in the co-constructionof talk with others – more signifying roles – than is usually associated with thespeech exchange systems of classrooms. In this approach, it is assumed that tasks
and activities in the EGAP classroom will foster transfer of competencies tosituations outside the class at later dates.
The following template shows the factors that feed into the syllabi written
for the EGAP oral proficiency courses described above. There are two sections:
theoretical concerns and practical concerns, and the practical section islogically embedded in the theoretical. When discussing oral proficiency, it is
helpful to take a dual perspective including 1) interactional competence and 2)
psycholinguistics. Researchers generally follow one or the other approach but for
language instructors, each gives a distinct but important window on cognitive
processes associated with language learning. Interactional competence (point 1),above) is underpinned by a dialogical epistemology of mind (Linell, 2009). Here,cognition is understood to be an inter-mental achievement between participantsin dialogue and this is the assumption taken in ‘conversation analysis’. However,psycholinguistics (point 2, above), rests on monological assumptions of mind inwhich cognition is modeled as intra-mental functioning, based on information
processing in computers. This is the more usual approach in applied linguistics.
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Syllabus Design: Theoretical Concerns
1. Interactional competence
Constructivist pedagogy• Thin syllabus, thick curriculum (van Lier, 1996). Few materials areprovided by instructors and instead, students collaboratively devise own
topics from broad guidelines, to discuss and present to whole class later.
Therefore, topics and materials arise from students’ own preferences andspecialist areas of knowledge and interest. The ‘space’ in the syllabus
makes it necessary for students to construct content themselves. Here,‘syllabus’ refers to course content and materials, while ‘curriculum’ refers
to specifications about roles of both learners and instructors.
• Peer negotiation of content. Learners work in small groups and negotiate
topic and material on which they will work. Negotiation and subsequentcollaborative decisions drive interaction between learners towards a
closed set of options. The key point is ‘negotiated’ outcomes.
2. Psycholinguistics
Need for extended speech to public audience (presentations)• Repeated experience of complex information processing in real time, for gains
in oral proficiency. In group work in class, learners may not be pushed
to speak in extended utterances: people may communicate effectively
using a large amount of ellipsis (terse, grammatically truncated speech)or strategic utterances, conveying meaning partly through non-linguisticmeans (gesture, body language). Presentations on the other hand, require
attention to accuracy (avoidance of grammatical and phonetic error) andcomplexity (avoiding simple sentences) in real time (fluency).
• In speech, simultaneous focus on 3 areas of: fluency, accuracy, complexity.
Oral proficiency is here modeled in these terms (Skehan: 1998).
• Restricted register: academic style with appropriate formality and absenceof conversational phrases.

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Oral Proficiency of EGAP Students, OnCUE Journal, 9(2), pages 136-141

Syllabus Design: Practical Concerns

1. Interactional competence
Project work: Area Studies as ‘carrier’ for themes and topics• Example: Africa: select country/area, and also theme: finance, economics,governance, linguistics, art, etc. (Naoumi: 2013). A broad theme isselected, in this case ‘Africa’, which provides a very open set of potential
topics for discussion and presentation. This allows students to researchand then discuss and present topics related to their own particularinterests or areas of expertise. Typically, the course moves from receptive
and teacher-centered activity (e.g. lecture about music from Africa, withstudents taking notes and re-constructing text in dictogloss activities)
at the start, to production skills and learner/learning centered activity,
such as negotiating topics and collaborative roles in small groups, in laterstages of the course. The receptive skills component of the course should
contain high frequency lexis and general themes.
• Collective negotiation of group projects. Within small groups, learners
collaboratively negotiate what they will study, plus individual roles formembers, concerning what they will each contribute to the group’sdivision of labor.
• Present to whole class at a later date. This provides a concrete end productfor research by learners and it is this teleology which creates purpose andthe necessity for earlier collaborative preparation. Ideally, presentations
can be both general, and done in small groups, and individual, following
on from this. Much will depend on class size as a large number of students
obviously limits time that each can take to individually present in classtime.
• Self-evaluation of performance and class work. This idea is often linked
with issues of motivation and this is undoubtedly useful. But in this case,self-evaluation can also provide an important speech role for learners,
when they have to discuss with the instructor what grade they feel theyshould receive, and justify this.
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2. Psycholinguistics
Group and Individual Presentations• Perform once and if time permits, repeat performance with stress onfluency and lexical density. Learners should present some aspect of theirresearch with minimal reading from scripts or notes so that they are close
to the limit of their individual oral proficiency. It is this that can drive
proficiency forward.
• Respond to audience questions after presentation. It is important practicefor students to gain experience of answering unscripted questions afterthey finish presentations. By the same token it is important for students
to watch others’ presentations to formulate and ask questions of thepresenter.

Conclusion

The items above serve as a guide for syllabus design in the case of one particular
EGAP course for oral proficiency. This was drawn up in the following way: firstitemizing desired competencies and linguistic registers. Then modeling theoreticaldimensions of perceived student needs. Next, expressing these theoreticaldimensions as design principles. Finally, instantiating these as tasks and activities.
The syllabus outline above is not a static construct but is continually revised
after monitoring student performance and receiving feedback from students andteachers. Revision of the syllabus is usually complex in that changing one element
often impacts on others. Hopefully, the scheme described here will be useful toothers involved in syllabus design.

References

Jordan, R. R. (1997). English for Academic Purposes. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking language, mind and world dialogically: Interactionaland contextual theories of human sense-making. Charlotte, NC: Information
Age Publishing.
Naoumi, E. J. (2013). Content-based pedagogy in postgraduate English academic140

Oral Proficiency of EGAP Students, OnCUE Journal, 9(2), pages 136-141

support courses. Paper presented at CELC Symposium, Singapore, May 2729, 2013.
Skehan, P. (1998). A cognitive approach to language learning. Oxford, England:
Oxford University Press.
van Lier, L. (1996). Interaction in the curriculum: Awareness, autonomy andauthenticity. London, England: Longman.
Young, R. F. (2009). Discursive practice in language learning and teaching.
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Author bio

Nicholas Marshall works as an EAP professor in the postgraduate division of Meiji
University. He received his PhD in applied linguistics in 2002, and his thesis was
an interdisciplinary account of communication/discourse from semiotic, systemic
functional and activity-based perspectives. He currently teaches communication andacademic writing. nsmarshall23@gmail.com
Received: November 16, 2014
Accepted: November 13, 2015141