Emerging Voices from the EAP Semester Show

At the English for Academic Purposes’ End-of-Semester Show, a busied room of posters, video projects, questionnaires and business pitches showcased the many creative ways NYU Shanghai students academically express themselves in English.

“Just like writing, speaking has many different genres. Our students are engaging with many different cultural forms and genres,” said Associate Director, English for Academic Purposes and Lecturer Brandon Conlon.

Beyond standard solo presentations and essays, EAP students were challenged to up the ante on their critical thinking skills and explore new platforms to express academic ideas. While students from Lecturer Glen Cotten’s seminar interviewed entrepreneurs about consumerism and inequality, others distributed food preference questionnaires via social media--(most students would recommend the cafeteria’s Halal or Western food options to friends outside of NYU Shanghai).

EAP Lecturer Genevieve Leone led students in pitching business ideas to passersby (who, if persuaded, could ‘invest’ with Post-it note sums of RMB). One group even came up with a homestay solution that might benefit the lives of migrant workers.

Student work echoed themes of intercultural communication, cultural identity, and cultural dimensions demonstrating the importance of addressing and respecting the complex differences that exist in the world.

Working this semester with a class from Nanjing University, students from EAP Lecturer Anjuli Pandavar’s Cities and Urban Consciousness class had the chance to team up over a distance and create, by virtual collaboration, twelve distinctive video projects that explored stories about ancient city walls of Nanjing and Xi'an.

“We will continue collaborating. Both sides are very keen to keep this going. We learned a lot more than we expected, and it was a very rewarding experience. Our next step is to go to Japan and present our work at a conference in Tokyo,” said Pandavar.

“I think what’s special is that every single project has so many different elements in it, that students are thinking in multiple ways, speaking in multiple ways and being exposed to the language in multiple ways. It stops being a language course and it starts being a ‘thinking-in-English’ course. They get a real spectrum of ways of thinking in this language,” EAP Lecturer Natalie Palkovich said.