Academic Literacy - it is more than CRAAP
This presentation introduces a new university English course with a high proficiency requirement (IELTS 7+). For this academic literacy skills course incorporating research using the university library’s electronic databases to find and evaluate sources for academic writing and speaking tasks, the course designers recognized that some high-proficiency students would have extensive experience with finding, citing, and referencing sources while other students would have little to no experience. The main content of this presentation will focus then on activities created to bridge the gaps in students’ experiences and to introduce current issues and problems encountered when researching topics online. In addition to traditional academic literacy skills like those covered in the CRAAP test, or evaluating an online source by evaluating its Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose, the course introduces skills like lateral reading in browsers across sources to verify information. In lessons evaluating sources, students view online examples of aggregators, churnalism, and predatory journals. Another area covered in the course is how to correctly cite sources in multimodal assessments (e.g., an e-magazine). The session ends with a discussion questioning what academic literacy skills are needed for our 21st-century learners conducting research online.