Group Project Work in English for Academic Purposes: Background Research and Investigations for a Blended Course in Tourism Using Web-As-Multimodal-Corpus Techniques

Within an approach to student-centred learning that supports the belief that students' participation in syllabus construction is an essential ingredient, this paper reports research into the development of a stage-by-stage training module for group project work in the area of multimodal genre analysis (MGA) and web-as-multimodal-corpus (WMC) investigations. in particular, it reports the construction of a questionnaire designed to explore student preferences in the field of tourism and compares some of the results of the survey in two universities; the paper suggests that a hands-on, peer-based approach using interoperable tools for Mga and WMC analysis such as MWS and LearnWeb2.0 helps students perceive the relevance of text theory to their studies and increases care and reflection when applying a theoretical model. With its exploration in particular of the notion of structured websearching as an emerging EAP activity, the paper concludes that the activities outlined: (1) questionnaire compilation; (2) structured websearches; (3) sharing websearch findings, are not the only possible options for group project work, but nevertheless are consistent with EAP principles − so much so that our research to date suggests the viability of group project work in EAP and, in particular, its contribution to ensuring that text theory is properly digested and applied by students.

Within an approach to student-centred learning that supports the belief that students’ participation in syllabus construction is an essential ingredient, this paper reports research into the development of a stage-by-stage training module for group project work in the area of multimodal genre analysis (MGA) and web-as-multimodal-corpus (WMC) investigations. In particular, it reports the construction of a questionnaire designed to explore student preferences in the fi eld of tourism and compares some of the results of the survey in two universities. The paper suggests that a hands-on, peer-based approach using interoperable tools for MGA and WMC analysis such as MWS and LearnWeb2.0 helps students perceive the relevance of text theory to their studies and increases care and reflection when applying a theoretical model. With its exploration in particular of the notion of structured websearching as an emerging English for Academic Purposes (EAP) activity, the paper concludes that the activities outlined: (1) questionnaire compilation; (2) structured websearches; (3) sharing websearch findings, are not the only possible options for group project work, but are, nevertheless, consistent with EAP principles − so much so that our research to date suggests the viability of group project work in EAP and, in particular, its contribution to ensuring that text theory is properly digested and applied by students.