Teaching and Assessing Academic Writing for Tourism Studies: An Example of Reflective Practice from the Field

This chapter describes the process of developing an English for tourism studies course at a trilingual university across five academic years. The process involved four phases. During the 2011-2012 academic year, I gained a grounded understanding of the needs of the learners from the standpoint of a reflective practitioner (see Farrell, 2007). This initial experience teaching the course served as the basis for a formal needs analysis which informed the writing and implementation of a customized course book during the 2012-13 academic year based on the concepts of English for specific academic purposes (ESAP) and task-based language teaching (TBLT). In response to the observed effectiveness of the course and student reactions, in particular their continued sporadic attendance and reluctance to complete ungraded collaborative writing assignments, I conducted two classroom experiments during the 2014-15 and 2015-16 academic years, respectively, in order to test the effects of two interventions involving the use

of extra credit pop quizzes. The extra credit scheme utilized in 2014-15 relied upon multiple choice pop quizzes to incentivize attendance and participation, but resulted in less class time for collaborative writing tasks and less individualized instructor feedback for the students. The modified extra credit scheme in 2015-16 greatly increased the submission of collaborative writing tasks by awarding extra credit for satisfactory completion. [Publisher's Text]

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Michael Joseph Ennis, ORCID 0000-0002-8724-5523.