Blending academic literacy and subject instruction: supporting international postgraduates through inclusive practices

With a rise in diversity in student populations in higher education, there is an emerging need for universities to address such diversity and promote inclusion. The aim of this research is to explore how to integrate academic literacy and subject instruction in the context of international postgraduate students at the University of Birmingham, in the Middle East. English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and Business teachers have decided to work on a curriculum-integrated approach drawing on and adapting the principles of Wingate's 2015 inclusive model for literacy academic instruction with students of mixed nationalities and backgrounds studying at Master's level in Business. We chose Wingate's model because it addresses three main principles: academic literacy, inclusive practice and student diversity. The action research method was adopted to address the aim of this research. Numerous sessions were run over a period of one month by both the subject and literacy experts, and six students were interviewed to measure their impact on student learning and performance. Our findings agree with Wingate that the integration of discipline-specific academic literacy and instruction has the potential to help students integrate better in their academic discourse communities by having insight into what is expected and required in order to achieve progress.