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A blended English as
a Foreign Language

academic writing course

Natalya Eydelman

Introduction
I would like to describe an academic writing course I am teaching for the second-
year students majoring in Teaching, Translation and Interpretation or Intercultural
Communication at the Department of Foreign Languages at Novosibirsk State
University in Russia, discuss how it is blended and address some of the issues that
have emerged in the process of designing and teaching it.

Learner characteristics
My learners are undergraduate students at the Department of Foreign Languages,
majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Translation and Interpretation
and Intercultural Communication.

Assumed knowledge and skills
The level of my students’ English language proficiency ranges from B1/B2
(intermediate/upper-intermediate) to C1 (advanced) according to the Common
European Framework of Reference for Languages (2002).

The course of academic writing the students take is a four-semester course which
aims to develop the students’ writing skills to help them improve their language
proficiency and prepare them for writing academic papers in a number of subjects
they are taught at the university, and for writing their term and graduation papers.
During the first two semesters students learn how to write one-paragraph essays of
several types, such as descriptive, narrative and argumentative, with the focus on
such elements of their organisation as the topic sentence, supporting examples and
conclusions. It is taught in face-to-face mode only. One of the reasons for this is the
level of ICT competence of the first-year course instructor and, to a certain extent,
that of some of the students. During the second year of instruction the students
learn how to write five-paragraph discursive essays that should be fluent and clear
and meet the standard requirements for essay content, organisation, language
use, the mechanics and style. The course puts an emphasis on letting the students
understand different stages of the writing process, recognise their own strengths
and weaknesses and use this information to their advantage when composing
their essays.

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