10. PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

The educational context in which the MA theses were written is the School of English and American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. Numerous courses are offered for English major students in EAP, including common-core EAP courses (e.g., Academic Skills 1, Advanced Academic Skills), specific classes related to assignments (e.g., Academic Writing in the Writing Center, Grant Writing, Introduction to Argumentative Writing, Professional Writing, a BA Thesis-writing Workshop) and a writing club. Needless to say, students have ample opportunities to study the skills necessary for efficient thesis writing. Given the immense amount of knowledge accumulated in recent years about EAP that teachers of academic writing need to pass on to students in a short course, it is no wonder that cohesive reference sometimes tends to remain a neglected area. No doubt, students are expected to know the meaning and functions of reference items such as pronouns, or determiners; however, the current RCA has shown that while students may be aware of the role and functions of reference items at the sentence level, they may not know how reference affects the overall structure and accessibility of their writing. The results of this study allow for making very specific kinds of recommendations for both awareness raising and task design to enhance the discourse competence of EFL students. Therefore, the pedagogical implications formulated here for academic writing will center around both short tasks that may fill either a 10-minute time slot or just half an hour, with suggestions for longer home assignments. There is a checklist for self- or peer-assessment in Figure 26 in this chapter and an example of how RCA can be brought to courses focusing on written discourse analysis. First, however, here is a summary of why RCA as an analytical tool (or its simplified version) might be considered for in-class use as part of skills development in the teaching of EAP.