Curriculum design in practice: Improving the academic reading proficiency of first year university students

• Autores: Lieke Stoffelsma, Isaac N. Mwinlaaru, Gloria Otchere, Alfred L. Owusu Ansah, Joseph A. Adjei
• Localización: Ibérica: Revista de la Asociación Europea de Lenguas para Fines Específicos ( AELFE ), ISSN-e 2340-2784, ISSN 1139-7241, Nº. 33, 2017, págs. 97-124
• Idioma: inglés
• Títulos paralelos:
  • Un diseño curricular en la práctica: La mejora del nivel en lectura académica de los alumnos en su primer año en la universidad
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo (pdf)
• Resumen
  • español

    Este artículo describe y reflexiona sobre la tarea de desarrollar, diseñar y evaluar un proyecto educativo para mejorar la competencia de lectura académica en inglés de los alumnos de primer curso de universidad en Ghana. El estudio, realizado en el marco de la investigación de diseño educativo (EDR por sus siglas en inglés), describe el desarrollo de un proyecto en tres áreas de conocimiento diferentes: Literatura, Química y Lingüística. El estudio demuestra que encontrar soluciones para los problemas identificados es un proceso altamente complejo que se está fuertemente influenciado por factores contextuales como la motivación de estudiantes y docentes, las instalaciones en las aulas o la calidad de los materiales docentes. Tras varios ciclos de evaluación formativa, solo el diseño del curso de Lingüística fue totalmente efectivo en términos de diseño, evaluación y desarrollo experimental y produjo una mejora significativa de la competencia en lectura académica de los alumnos y un notable incremento del tiempo dedicado a la lectura para el aprendizaje. El estudio muestra cómo el desarrollo de la destreza lingüística puede integrarse con eficacia en el ámbito de una universidad no occidental. De esta manera, se amplía la investigación sobre el aprendizaje integrado de idioma y contenido

  • English

    This paper describes and reflects on endeavours to develop, design and assess an educational intervention to improve the academic English reading proficiency of first-year university students in Ghana. The study, conducted within the framework of educational design research (EDR), describes the development of an intervention in three different content areas: Literature, Chemistry and Linguistics. The study shows that moving from problem identification to solution is a highly complicated process that is strongly influenced by contextual factors such as staff and student motivation, classroom facilities, and quality of the learning materials. After various cycles of formative evaluation, only the Linguistics course design was fully successful in terms of design, evaluation and experimental set-up and resulted in a significant improvement of students’ academic reading proficiency and a significant increase of their time spent on reading for study purposes. The study shows how language skills development can be integrated successfully in content courses in a non-western university context. By doing so, it extends prior research in the area of content-based language instruction

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