The challenge that defies the modern ESP teacher is that of empowering university students to be self-sufficient, autonomous learners who can manage their own tailored, ongoing training outside the privileged environment of the classroom.
Learner autonomy is a characteristic of modern communicative language teaching which encourages the learners to be active participants and managers of their own learning (Ellis & Sinclair 1989; Broady & Kenning 1996). Little (1999 in Qinjuan Zhang 2011) defines autonomy “as the learner’s psychological relation to the content and process of learning, his or her capacity for critical reflection, detachment, decision making, and independent action.” This is particularly necessary for university students during the course of their studies and, very especially, when they become professionals who need to read research articles critically to keep abreast of the latest developments in their field; in our case in the field of the Agricultural Sciences.
In reading, this autonomy can be translated as the readers’ capacity to trust their ability to approach a text critically from a more productive view than the simple bottom up perspective. To rise above this partial approach to reading towards a more interactive paradigm, we have implemented a macrostructural approach to the text; namely, the study of logical patterns in the research article. Thus far, we have studied the impact of the Problem-Solution and the Hypothetical-Real Patterns on our students’ reading efficiency. The latter pattern, which is very frequently used in academic discourse, is a recurrent binary relation between what is known (Real component) and what is not known, is controversial or could be defined as hearsay or simply as reported (Hypothetical component). In this presentation we will refer to how this approach has enhanced our students’ capacity to read in a discerning mode. We will discuss the effect of our pedagogical intervention and how it has allowed students to discriminate between an assertion and a conjecture. We will also reflect upon their perception of this new strategy as shown by their responses to an ad-hoc survey.
