Communicative activity – EAP Essentials

Play in EAP

Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?

According to WordPress, it’s bloganuary, when bloggers are provided with little prompts to get their creative juices flowing. Oddly enough the one above really did make me think about aspects of EAP that are often neglected – play and humour. It’s not something most teachers beginning their EAP career associate with the field and more often you hear teachers describe the content of EAP as boring and dull – hardly a jokey affair.

How is EAP teaching different from ELT?

Communicative activities have to be purposeful and efficient timewise.

At a recent seminar on EAP teacher competencies, one of the delegates asked how teaching EAP is different from teaching general English. My immediate response was to refer to the constructive alignment between learning aims, content and assessment (Biggs, n.d.) because I assume that EAP teaching has to be driven by a deep understanding of students’ needs in their target context (Gillett, 2011). However, in clarifying his meaning, the questioner referred to activities and techniques that a teacher can use in the classroom. Are the kinds of communicative activities used in an ELT classroom now redundant? I wrote a previous blog related to this issue but in this one I wanted to focus on the assumptions about communicative classroom practice in EAP and ELT that underlie this question.