EAP grammar – EAP Essentials

Evidence-based teaching and learning: core corpus skills for EAP

Workshop presentations on core corpus skills for EAP

Yesterday I attended an excellent BAAL Corpus Linguistics SIG event on Core Corpus Skills for Academic Purposes, hosted online from Coventry University. The aim of the day was to discuss the role corpora can play in EAP teaching and learning and to address a gap in the BALEAP TEAP Competency Framework and the Can Do Statements, which do not currently refer explicitly to data-driven learning and corpus approaches. This is a timely intervention as the TEAP Competency Framework is currently under review, informed by practitioner expertise.

The day was very well organized with brief presentations lasting between 10 and 30 minutes. The speakers kept to time and the audience could ask questions in the chat function as the talk proceeded for discussion at the end. The slides and talks are all available online. In the afternoon participants broke into groups to discuss specific modules in the TEAP competency framework and suggest how to include corpus approaches.

Should we teach grammar? No but yes but

Teach the grammar that adds the most value.

In my last post, I suggested that it was not an efficient use of EAP class time to teach grammar because it was almost impossible to meet all the needs of students with varying language proficiency and it was difficult for them to see how the grammar point could transfer to their writing. I was responding to a question about grammar from a course designer who gave me some examples of grammar: ‘active and passive voice, conditionals and modal verbs’, i.e., the structural, sentence-level, verb-focused grammar that underpins theories of Second Language Acquisition. While I certainly would not teach that type of grammar in an EAP class, I would teach functional grammar and, in particular, the writer-responsible grammar of sentences as they unfold in paragraphs and texts to meet the needs of a reader. Rather than a system of rules and constraints on what can be said, the orientation of functional grammar is towards language as a system of choices for meaning making (Halliday & Martin, 1993, p. 22). When I have taught a particular aspect of this functional grammar, students have often responded to say: ‘Why hasn’t anyone taught us this before?’ It is one of the key ways that students can become aware of their reader and make their writing more academic.

Should we teach grammar? Yes but no but!

Students need grammar but they don’t need grammar classes.

I was asked recently by a head of pathways programmes at an international college whether we should teach grammar in EAP. This manager was under pressure from some teachers to introduce a more structured approach to teaching and testing grammar. Some years previously, prompted by feedback from an external moderator, they had developed a bespoke grammar workbook, which was ‘aligned with the topics taught in the course, [covering] the language features which are considered to be salient in scholarly English [and targeting] areas where students show weaknesses when it comes to academic writing’. The workbook covers language patterns, such as noun phrases, active and passive voice, conditionals and modal verbs. However, teachers on the programmes have a number of issues with the resource:

There is little time to teach grammar in the course
It feels artificial to teach grammar this way (grammar rules and explanations, followed by practice)
It does not address all issues that students have when it comes to grammar
It’s dry and students do not engage with it