Making a Graduate English Course an Organic and Integrated Learning Process

This paper will report on the curriculum review conducted on an intermediate level Graduate English Course (GEC) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The review involved examining the feedback of slightly over 200 students in the previous semester on the course as it existed, materials and pedagogy. It also involved conducting in-depth interviews with students and tutors. The review revealed that the course, thus far, had in fact aimed to: 1) develop students’ general writing skills, 2) equip students with strategies for the development of productive vocabulary, and 3) develop students’ ability to produce texts with general characteristics of academic writing. However, the piecemeal nature of the course curriculum though useful in addressing students’ lack of grammar and vocabulary while also trying to introduce text-patterns and rhetorical moves associated with writing of a research paper, caused the teaching to be atomistic in nature. That is to say that at the end of the course students were able to appreciate the separate pieces of the puzzle without seeing the whole, big picture. This became obvious in the fact that while students responded well to the assessment of individual aspects of the curriculum, they still demonstrated difficulty when called upon to communicate their research in their disciplines, in English, which in fact was what this course was aimed to facilitate. This inability to engage in the discussion of their research on a deeper level both in writing and speaking was perceived by the researchers as an inability to connect the individual pieces to produce a whole picture. Therefore the aim was to design a more integrated curriculum through which students could see the purpose of every aspect that they were learning in class as a significant part of the whole and before we embarked on this process, we designed and administered a pre-course survey on 94 students in the incoming cohort of the new semester. This paper documents the re-designing of this course to one that facilitates a more organic and integrated learning process for the students.