Does Engaging with Other Disciplines Work in EAP? Scaffolding L2 Reading Comprehension of Iranian Law Students through Team Teaching

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore commitment to the educational goals defined by students’ target needs in academic contexts. To satisfy such demanding goals and to provide a more effective learner support, EAP practitioners are recently taking advantages of collaboration opportunities involving subject-area faculty members in order to enhance learning by supplying further scaffolding in learning. Accordingly, the main objective of the present study was to investigate the contributory role of team teaching in enhancing the reading comprehension of Law students in an Iranian EAP context. For this purpose, from the population of sophomore students studying law at Islamic Azad university of Isfahan (Khorasgan), three intact classes, 35 each, were selected. The first class was only taught by a language teacher whereas the second class received instruction from a subject teacher. However, the students in third class were taught based on a two-pronged approach in which a balanced cooperation between the language and subject teachers was activated. At the end of the treatment, a reading comprehension test was administered to the participants in all groups. The analysis of data revealed that the group taught by the adjunct model outperformed other groups on the reading comprehension post-test. The findings may have significant implications for EAP/ESP practitioners.