2. Two groups of international students on a one-year Pre-Masters English for Academic Purposes course, each comprising 50 students were taught academic writing by different methods and compared. In each group there were 50 students from five different academic departments - computer science, business, engineering, life sciences and law. The subjects were selected from the second semester - Semester B - of the University of Hertfordshire International Bridging Programme in the 2004-2005 academic year. This programme accepts only students from a narrow English Language Proficiency band (IELTS 5.00 - 5.5). Thus, comparable language level among the test subjects was insured.
The subjects were selected from the 250 students on the International Bridging Programme on the basis of performance at a satisfactory level in the Semester A examination. Students who had performed below the minimum level on the semester A examination were excluded. This criterion was employed to ensure competent understanding of the tasks and adequate motivation.
One group - Group A - studied English writing in the traditional way in a class with a teacher. This class met for 2 hours each week in a classroom for 12 weeks and was supplemented with written homework assignments given by the teacher each week. The second group - Group B - met together in a class with a teacher for one hour per week for 12 weeks and was assigned a homework task of spending one hour per week doing exercises from the UEfAP web-site (Gillett, 2005). …