Metaphor – EAP Essentials

BALEAP2021 conference selections

A personal selection of presentations from the BALEAP 2021 conference hosted online by the University of Glasgow.

I’ve been attending the BALEAP biennial conference, hosted online this year by the University of Glasgow: Exploring pedagogical approaches in EAP teaching. While I was still teaching, I would have been looking for presentations that helped me to reflect on my materials development and classroom practice. Now I’m retired I have the luxury of sitting back to take a wider view so I have been more interested in talks that stimulate reflection back over my 27 years as a teacher, materials writer and scholarly explorer of underlying principles for my practice.

Metaphors we learn by

Understanding the metaphorical nature of teaching.

During this Covid-19 lockdown, I’ve been managing the migration of our Pre-sessional English (PSE) programmes online. I’ve been extremely busy – busier than a one-armed paper hanger with the itch. In order to make you understand just how busy I’ve been, I have to link this general adjective to a contextualised image that I expect you to recognise as an example of exceptional busyness. In other words, I’m using a metaphor to link a general concept to a real world instance. In their seminal work, Lakoff & Johnson (1980). pointed out that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, in language, thought and action. Our conceptual system, i.e. how we make sense of the world and relate to other people in it, is fundamentally metaphorical. The key to becoming aware of the system is through language.

A sense of research-mindedness

Introducing research philosophy for low proficiency EAP students

The BALEAP Competency Framework asks EAP professionals to ‘recognize the importance of applying to their practice the standards expected of students and other academic staff’. One of the fundamental standards concerns the role of research in building new knowledge and underpinning teaching at university. ELT teachers moving to EAP contexts often have only a rudimentary understanding of academic research and scholarship. They tend to conceptualise research as finding out what they don’t know rather than exploring what a discipline doesn’t know and wants to discover. The former is the kind of research done by journalists or by undergraduate students, who often ‘rediscover’ some of the key research outcomes in their discipline by repeating the seminal studies. This kind of research – also done through a literature review – is important at the outset of a research project to uncover gaps in disciplinary knowledge, which can justify research aims. However, the research that is most valued at university attempts to achieve greater understanding of the world in order to make better predictions about the future.