Writing with a persuasive ‘Punch’: Students' perceptions of a computer-assisted SFL-informed EAP intervention for undergraduate social sciences students

Conventional EAP instruction in many ESL/EFL contexts still emphasises grammar-translation, formulaic language tips and decontextualised rules, which limits the connections between linguistic forms and disciplinary meaning, and potentially teacher's choice of pedagogical approaches. This case study examines an SFL-informed redesign of an advanced EAP course for social sciences undergraduates in Hong Kong that emphasises meaning-making aside from academic conventions. The course integrated genre-based pedagogy with corpus-based language pedagogy, in that it explicitly modelled evaluative and interpersonal resources using accessible terminology and authentic corpus evidence. Data included lecturer-designed materials, classroom interactions, student essays, surveys, interviews, learning management system analytics, and cohort grade distributions. These data were analysed mainly by qualitative content analysis. Findings demonstrate how the course redesign highlights structures and evaluative lexis choices for writing the argumentative genre. They also show students' engagement in the interactive, discovery-oriented activities and immediate use of the target patterns in the rewriting task. The students' performance was also improved compared with the previous cohorts, despite mixed perspectives on the overall usefulness of corpus tools and motivation for non-classroom uses. The study underscores the importance of theoretically informed EAP materials and calls for institutional support and professional development to scale SFL-informed practices across programs.