Critical EAP for Brazilian Computer Science graduated students: contributing to learners' academic literacy in two genres

Abstract

Critical English for Academic Purposes (CEAP) (BENESCH, 2001) aims at contributing to the formation of critical learners who are aware of their roles in the discourse community (SWALES, 1998) they are part of. Based on the results of a MA´s research, whose goal was to raise the needs related to the use of the English language in academic context of Computer Science graduated students from nine Brazilian public universities, the objective of the present research is to design and teach an online CEAP course to the target group, in order to develop learners academic literacy. A critical needs analysis will be taken with other members of the discourse community in order to understand its cultural context, which implies the genres they make use of and their specificities. Afterwards, the textual characteristics of the genres will be raised, based on rhetoric models (SWALES, 1990; GIL, 2011), and they will be interpreted in light of the cultural context features. The course will be designed on genre-based tasks, and, at the end of it, its efficiency to contribute to learner´s academic literacy will be assessed through diachronic analysis of the students´ performance during the process.