I started this blog at the end of 2019, thinking it would make a good retirement project. Now three years on from retirement, with no active involvement in EAP teaching or research, I no longer have much to contribute to the development of the field. However, I was recently asked to write an introduction to EAP Essentials, the teacher handbook I wrote in 2008 with Sue Argent and Jenifer Spencer. This was an opportunity to reflect on the principles that underpinned the book and which seemed worth sharing here.
This book grew out of conversations we had with over 200 experienced ELT teachers who attended our EAP Teacher Development course between 2002 and 2009. The participants on our course told us what they found challenging about making the transition from teaching General English to teaching Academic English. They were anxious about working with complex texts in a variety of different disciplines and wondered whether they would need to change their communicative teaching style.
Making the transition from teaching General English to teaching Academic English is not straightforward and teachers need a thorough induction and ongoing support if they are going to teach effectively in university contexts. Our aim for this book was to provide the kind of support teachers might expect from working alongside an experienced, encouraging and well-read EAP teacher. We show readers what can happen in EAP classrooms using case studies of real EAP teaching. We provide tasks for reflection to tease out and develop the reader’s thoughts. These tasks encourage teachers to critically examine their practice in the light of available theory, asking themselves not only Why am I teaching this? But also Why am I teaching it this way? Further, we provide classroom materials that have worked in our classrooms for teachers to try alongside descriptions of their rationale and underpinning theory.
EAPE starts with the context to explain what it is like to work in a university and what expectations both students and academic staff have about academic purposes. The main activity at university involves research, which is carried out in order to uncover new knowledge that can help to address problems in the world. Academics critically evaluate this research and argue about the implications of findings. They do this through publication so for them the most important communicative activities are writing and reading, followed by speaking and listening, for example at conferences. Academics pass on this newly discovered knowledge to students through lectures and reading. They support students to understand it through a variety of practical activities such as tutorial discussions, field trips, laboratory practicals and reflective assignments. The emphasis is on the relation between evidence-based practice and theory.
EAP Essentials adopts a similar orientation by introducing theories in an accessible form and showing how these underpin EAP practice. Two key theories that underpin the practices in the book are Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Corpus Linguistics. SFL provides a rationale and process for analysing texts beyond the level of the sentence, working at paragraph and whole text level. Chapter two of the book provides a step-by-step tutorial for text analysis and develops a framework that can be applied to any text. Corpus linguistics enables the analysis of vocabulary in use to understand what people really say and write in any given context. It is particularly useful for EAP teachers who are preparing students for study in different disciplines. These theories inform the remaining chapters in the book, in which real academic texts are analysed or adapted to illustrate each learning point.
It’s worth asking yourself to what extent these principles play out in your own teaching.
EAP Essentials 