In this section, I will present practical examples from my own experience through a narrative of my own reflective practice. I will attempt to show how authenticity becomes a bridge in the classroom between content and lan- guage, creating connections between members of the class, as well as connect- ing the classroom to the wider world. CLIL is not a prerequisite for this bridge; however, I argue that engaging content is essential as the bridge is built with the materials used in class and the way the teacher helps to create a cul- ture of authenticity which encourages students to authenticate content by investing in that process.
First, a brief explanation of my own teaching context. I work in a Japanese university in Tokyo where I teach undergraduate courses to English Literature majors. Most of the students I work with would be between B1 and A2 on the CEFR, B2 being a very rough average.
In order to cultivate a culture of authenticity in my classes, I utilise several motivational techniques aimed at helping the students to understand and validate their learning activities. They are mainly autonomy-facilitating and metacognitive strategies which involve reflection and critical thinking about the work we do in class (Ushioda, 2014), as well as personalising it around their own interests. To this end, I regularly negotiate content and syllabus with the students, make all assessments clear and make the purpose of the assessment equally clear; we also add a social dimension to the work we do in class, either by publishing our work or, at the very least, by making sure every- one in the class works together and sees one another’s work.
The Writing Workshop Class
In order to provide a contextual example, I will describe my Writing Workshop class, which aims to make students familiar with the conventions of academic essay writing in English, as well as helping them to understand how to find and cite academic sources in order to produce a research essay of 1500 words or so. This class is taught in the second year of the Batchelor of Arts in English
Literature. When students arrive in the class, they are usually quite capable of reading and writing in English. Several of the students may be CEFR C1 or C2 or balanced bilinguals in English and Japanese, but the majority of stu- dents will struggle to express advanced literary concepts clearly in English. As this is a year-long course, I have students work to produce one research paper in the first semester, then in the second semester they produce a second essay before choosing one of the two essays they have produced which they will then work into their final extended essay, which must be at least 2000 words long and contain in-text citations to at least five secondary sources (on top of primary sources, as many of the students are writing about literature which we have studied in the course).
It is often challenging to balance the teaching of academic conventions, the specifics of academic English and the necessary grammar and vocabulary that accompany it, and the actual content which is quite high-level as students are required to read literary criticism as well as primary sources which they discuss and analyse in both written and spoken discussions. On top of this, I invari- ably find that students, although they may be familiar with literature by now, are rarely familiar with academic sources and cannot tell a journal article from an edited book chapter, and they do not know how to gauge the sources they find and often they find PDF documents shared online by the authors but cannot trace the original source or how to cite it. Boiled down and simplified, the true aim of this class, as stipulated by the department, is to learn how to use citations correctly in MLA format (Modern Language Association) ready for their graduation thesis, so this is really one of the main aims I have as a teacher, so that the students will be able to complete other requirements within the department in order to finish their degrees.
Finding an Authentic Purpose for Using Citations
When I first started teaching this course, I would spend weeks and weeks hav- ing students read texts, use the MLA handbook to learn how to cite them, find their own texts, summarise them and then write an essay in which they cited these texts. In other words, I started with the citations and worked back- wards. The results were a constant string of incorrectly cited references, a seemingly endless queue of students asking the same questions year after year, and then making the same mistakes again and again. Before I began teaching this course, I felt that teaching writing was something of a specialty of mine, but this course quickly made me feel that actually I was not able to success- fully teach writing at all. At the same time, I was developing my own
academic writing by completing my doctoral studies and composing and publishing research articles. Citations were at the centre of my life. As such, I felt they were extremely important, but I realised that the students, for the most part, did not find them particularly important at all, and in fact they seemed to find the matter of citations dull.
To put all this in terms of this chapter, there was a gap between what I and my students felt was important, there was little congruence in what one group believed they should be doing and the actual reality of the actions in class.
Students repeatedly told me they needed help with academic register; in their essays their English seemed adequate to me, but what they continually got wrong was the citations. They cited poor sources, they cited them wrongly, and it felt like the film Groundhog Day every time I came to evaluate their essays as I kept seeing the same mistakes again and again, even though I taught how to cite from the very beginning of the class and walked the students through the process. I realised that what was lacking was a sense of authentic- ity of purpose. Students wanted to write an essay and express their ideas, but they did not realise that the main aim of the course was to learn how to use citations in accordance with the MLA style which was used in our depart- ment. This was despite the fact that I explicitly told students that the aim of the class was to learn how to use citations.
I realised that students were simply unfamiliar with the genre of an aca- demic essay. They did not know why citations mattered at all. They knew what they had to do, but not why, and thus there was an authenticity gap because beliefs and actions were not matching up. They did not know about the strange world of citations, the power relations, politics and even citation car- tels that exist in the world of academic publishing (Hyland, 2015). This was a world which was very much at the centre of my professional life, just as much as the teaching if not perhaps even more so, but to the students it was an alien landscape and they simply did not seem to understand why I cared so much about citations. They probably thought I was mad. What was lacking was any sense of authenticity of purpose.
Note that this was technically a CLIL class as the course is specifically about English language learning and content aims; students were expected to pro- duce a research essay on the topic of English literature in their L2, and few, if any of them had ever done so before. Despite the fact that this was CLIL, the authenticity of purpose was not a pre-existing condition necessarily, or if it was then the students did not seem aware of it and thus, I would call it merely a necessity of the curriculum. This is an important distinction, especially as I am framing authenticity as a sense of congruence between what we do and what we believe we should be doing. In other words, just because the content of the
class is needed and posted as requirements by the institution or the curricu- lum does not mean that students are automatically invested or motivated by that content, and the dual-focused nature of the aims may indeed be unclear to students, especially if one aspect (such as either the language learning aims or the subject content) is given priority in the actual delivery and teaching of the course. This is an observation based on my own experience, but rather than me generalising to other contexts, what I am actually trying to impress here is that we need to un-generalise this notion of authenticity of purpose, and to challenge the oversimplified assumption that we have authenticity of purpose built into CLIL and that this will then be magically motivating for students. More work needs to be done in order to achieve the desired chemis- try if we are seeking the authentic motivation assumption in CLIL.
Strategies, Metacognition and Negotiation
Returning to my Writing Workshop class, how did I bridge the gap between the content aims of the class and the actual teaching and learning through the creation of authenticity of purpose? As I have already stated, with a combina- tion of metacognitive strategies, autonomy raising practices, negotiations and reflections.
I began by telling the students about the world of academic publishing.
Rather than starting the course with the mechanics of citations and how to write a works cited list in MLA format, I began by telling them about writing itself, then the genre of academic writing. In order to help them understand the difference, I created a class blog, which was for informal writing on any topic the students chose to be published online, creating a social and mean- ingful outlet for students’ writing. Here they could express themselves in their wonderful English using their own voices without fear of me telling them that they did not sound “academic enough”. They also did not need to use cita- tions, but naturally they did research in order to compose articles about the topics they chose. This allowed me to say things like “that sounds like it should be in a blog” without it sounding derogatory and hurting the students’ feel- ings. They also found that they could enjoy writing (especially as most blog articles were composed in pairs about self-selected topics), which seemed to assuage their aversion to writing academic essays a little. Rather than the start- ing point being citations, I now started by eliciting from students the differ- ence between academic writing and other genres. I did this simply at first, by asking students to look at two words, one written in Calibri and the other in Comic Sans font. The students were easily able to choose which font was
“more academic”.
I then showed a sample of writing and asked them to choose the academic one. Both were on the same topic, but one contained facts and evidence and the other was merely about the authors’ preferences and opinions. After elicit- ing a brainstorm about the specific features of academic writing, I then pro- ceeded to further confuse them by giving them the following readings, many of which were academic texts which clearly flouted the rules and conventions they had just listed;
1. Healy (2017) 2. Schwartz (2008) 3. Campbell (2014) 4. Pinner (2014)
The first example, Healy’s paper entitled Fuck Nuance, often comes as a sur- prise to students because of the strong expletive used in the title and the tongue-in-cheek abstract which merely reads “seriously, fuck it”.1 Students have usually indicated the use of polite or formal language as a prerequisite for academic writing in the previous task. The second paper by Schwartz is all about the importance of stupidity in science, and starts with a personal anec- dote, the opening words being “I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years” (p. 1771). Students often arrive at my class believing they should not use the first person in academic writing. The third sample, by Campbell, starts with the delightful opening “On Saturday the twentieth of October 1660, the London diarist Samuel Pepys stepped into a pile of shit”
(p. 103). The fourth sample, my own article about a class I taught, is research based on narrative and reflective practice, and is sadly the least interesting of the samples, but I use it to show the students that I am also engaged in this activity of academic writing. Sharing my own personal information is part of the bridge-building process towards authenticity, and in addition it can be motivating for students to hear self-disclosures from teachers (Henry &
Thorsen, 2018).
From this activity, the students learn quickly that academic writing is not just about learning a whole new grammar and vocabulary set in order to express themselves. I had far fewer requests to teach academic language once I started doing this activity in the first class. My intention with this activity was first to show students that academic writing is not “boring” and indeed it should avoid being boring if possible (especially as I have to score their work!), and indeed it does not need to be impersonal or dispassionate. Going back to
1 This abstract has since been revised but fortunately I have a copy of the original version.
our genre analysis of what makes academic writing academic, I then begin to tell them about the importance of citations. I use the quote from Sir Isaac Newton that “If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants” to show that citations are about giving credit where credit is due, that it is part of being in a community and it helps people to continue their own work by providing a breadcrumb trail for evidence and ideas. This situating of citations and introduction to the reality of academic publishing helps the students to authenticate their own essay writing, which is certainly a prereq- uisite for CLIL’s authenticity of purpose.
I frequently did this genre-based comparison throughout the first semester, with students even turning their academic essay titles back into informal lan- guage so as to be click-bait for the blog, and I had them write informal sum- maries of their academic writing. This helped us with the language side of the course, but in a way that made it also part of the content whilst having a social aspect beyond the class as well.
This in itself was not enough to achieve authenticity of purpose, however, as the students still needed to learn about citations and invest in their own academic writing. Therefore, in order to facilitate a more meaningful engage- ment with their essay writing, I attempted several strategies. The first was simply to continue the previous work of contextualising the act academic writing itself within the students’ own lives, in particular with reference to skills they would need in order to write a graduation thesis but also, going beyond the institutional context, we examined things like Fake News and discussed the fact that readers need to be critical, to check their sources and to double check facts. We used some light techniques from critical discourse analysis to examine how even respected sources can often print misleading or bipartisan reports which have a big influence on the way certain information is perceived.
This process of providing the students with a pedagogic motive for activi- ties in the class, as well as asking them reflect on why these skills might be useful to them beyond the class, is a process of manually calibrating the way they authenticate the content of the class and personalise the learning goals.
This is further enhanced by the use of metacognitive reflective tools, such as self-assessments and reflection papers, as well as ad-hoc and group discus- sions. Wherever possible, I tried to elicit the reasons from students rather than putting words in their mouths. For example, when we conduct the self- assessments for their classroom participation, I do not tell them my reasons for believing that self-assessment is helpful in maintaining their motivation, but rather I simply ask them “why do you think we do this as a self- assessment?”
or “as a teacher, why do you think I want you to self-assess?”
Although it is hard to pinpoint when exactly these strategies I used became foregrounded in my teaching, looking back at my previous cohorts I can see an improvement in their essay writing, especially in terms of the number of citations (Table 1). In 2017 when I was just finishing my PhD and had not brought to consciousness through reflecting on my own practice the fact that students might not know why citations were important, the average number of citations in the final essay was 4.9 for their second essay in the second semester (the minimum to pass was always set at three). In 2018 this number decreased slightly to 4.4; perhaps this was at the height of my frustration when I felt that I was in Groundhog Day as mentioned earlier. In 2019, the students’ average citations leapt to 6.0 sources cited in their second essay, but I saw an improvement in the types of essays they produced as well. In addi- tion, the overall number of words had gone up too, although this is most likely to be as a result of the fact that the word count includes the works cited list.
Another strategy which was very successful in terms of teaching students to use citations was simply to stop teaching them. This may sound counterintui- tive, but I had become so frustrated with teaching students how to create a works cited list, learning how to make and format the list so that it complied with MLA conventions, and then finding students still making the simplest mistakes when they wrote their essays that I simply began telling students that
“correct MLA format is compulsory” and that if they did not do it they would get an “instant F” for their essays. Having such a strict policy communicated the importance of citations as an aim for the class, and also reflected another important reality, that students do indeed lose marks for incorrect citations in their graduation thesis, and a graduation thesis with no works cited would certainly not get a passing score.
What we then did was to work on a draft of the students’ essays, which was unmarked. At this point, once they had a works cited list that they had worked hard to create by themselves and read through their copies of the MLA hand- book in order to help them, I began teaching about citations. This way, stu- dents already had their own list to be working on, rather than learning how to cite and format before they even had an essay or a works cited list. Citations had become much more relevant to them as they already had their own list of references that they could work on as they learned in class, so they could
2017 2018 2019 Average words 1523 1369 1697 Average citations 4.9 4.4 6.0 Table 1 Words and
citations