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Article published In:
Emerging Assessment Needs and Solutions in EMI in Higher Education
Edited by Slobodanka Dimova and Joyce Kling
[Journal of English-Medium Instruction 1:2] 2022
► pp. 232–254

An EMI lecturer’s assessment practices with engineering laboratory reports

ORCID logo | University of Lleida
ORCID logo | University of Vic
ORCID logo | Polytechnic University of Catalonia

EMI assessment research designed to compare academic achievement in EMI and L1-medium courses aims to examine language and content learning outcomes (Dafouz & Camacho-Miñano, 2016; Hernández-Nanclares & Jiménez-Munoz, 2015; Yang, 2015). However, these studies provide little insight into learning processes. A genre analysis perspective, in contrast, can offer a deeper understanding of the development of student disciplinary literacy. Based on genre analysis studies on student writing (Nesi & Gardner, 2012; Parkinson, 2017; Swales, 1990), we aim to describe the written genre in student laboratory reports from an EMI course on a Mechanical Engineering degree programme. Seven students’ laboratory reports as well as the lecturer’s instructions, the assessment rubric, and written feedback were examined using genre analysis. This case study contributes to the emerging literature on assessment in EMI by foregrounding the advantages of genre analysis as an analytical methodology and shedding light on students’ development of literacy in disciplinary writing.

Keywords: genre analysis, laboratory report, disciplinary literacy, EMI assessment
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Background
    • Studies in EMI assessment
    • Disciplinary literacy and genre
  • Methodology
    • The context and data collection process
    • Data analysis
  • Findings
    • The educational purpose of the laboratory practical
    • Analysis of the IMRD macro-structure
    • Analysis of moves and steps
    • Analysis of verb tense
    • Analysis of written feedback
  • Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 25 August 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jemi.21008.man
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