Teaching poster by using genre approach to science and technology students of A Japanese university

Science and technology students require the specialized skill of making poster and the explicit teaching of which is lacking in the curricula of general Japanese English tertiary education. This paper considers posters as an expanded form of abstracts and reports teaching of posters to 20 third-year students of an undergraduate ESP course at a Japanese university of science and engineering. First, students were taught to write an abstract using genre theory which required teaching of the generic moves of an abstract of a research article (RA). Teaching of the abstract involved the explicit teaching of the basic moves of background, purpose, methods, results and summary that are needed to construct RA abstract. Following that, students deconstructed abstracts taken from authentic research articles selected by both the teacher and the student themselves into moves. Having understood the moves, a democratic choice of several topics from the experiments done as part of the subject curriculum was chosen for constructing abstracts. The abstract drafts were peer evaluated with checklists, followed by teacher's comments based on which the students submitted a final draft. Next, with the final draft, the students expanded the abstract to construct a poster. This task involved writing the contents of each of the moves in the abstract to detailed content expanding each of the sections, Introduction, Methods, Results and Summary. Contents of all the sections except for the Results were prepared in groups of three or four with each member being responsible for each section. Although group members constructed the contents through discussion, poster making and presentation were done individually. Though there were some overlaps in the contents, the current project was found to empower the students with the required poster making and presentation skills which was also shown from the post survey.