Can my Students Drive CARS? Teaching ESP to Spanish Students Using Swales’ Model for RA Introductions

Abstract

Spanish university students face a lot of difficulties when reading research articles in English. In particular, Librarianship students from the University of Murcia, Spain, encounter many problems when identifying and classifying those research articles. This paper aims to present a proposal to enable these students to relate language learning to the task of cataloguing research articles (RA) written in English, using Swales’ CARS model and inferring specific characteristics that papers from different subjects have in common. The results show a particular pattern of moves and steps that can be drawn for specific disciplines by means of the language used.