Author Archives: Andy

The Future of EAP.

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I was discussing the future of EAP with someone at the ESP day at the IATEFL conference recently. It is a complicated question as it depends on international politics and economics. For example, in the UK, the present visa policies and cost of university education and how they change in the future will affect everything connected with HE and therefore EAP. As well as this we need to consider the role of English in the world in the future, including the prevalence of English medium HE and international student mobility – see, for example, Breeze (2012), Jenkins (2014).

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“EAP is a waste of time”?

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In several talks during the last few years, Stephen Krashen has stated that teaching EAP is a waste of time. I like Stephen Krashen and most of what he writes. So if he says that teaching EAP is a waste of time, the only conclusion that I can come to is that he must misunderstand what I think EAP is. As I do not think what I – and other people I know around the world – do is a waste of time! Continue reading →

“There really is no need for needs analysis”?

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Hugh Dellar – Twenty Things in Twenty Years

At the recent IATEFL conference in Harrogate, Hugh Dellar looked back on 20 years in the classroom and what he had learned. His broadly insightful presentation focused on “20 nuggets of hard-earned wisdom”. You can see it at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=755gblfOjks

This was a very interesting talk and many of the things he has learned in 20 years are similar to things I have realised – and written and talked about – after nearly 40 years in ELT.

Hugh’s 5th point, though “there really is no need for needs analysis” requires some comment as it is central to what I understand by ESP and EAP.
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IATEFL ESP SIG PCE

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I’ve just returned from the IATEFL English for Specific Purposes (ESP) Special Interest Group (SIG) Pre-Conference Event (PCE). I cannot handle – or afford – the whole conference!

ESP SIG

IATEFL ESP SIG PCE Participants

The theme of the PCE was ESP and Learning Technologies: What can we learn?

As usual it was a very interesting day with teachers from many parts of the world discussing how they go about trying to meet the academic and professional linguistic needs of their students, sometimes with limited resources.
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EAP and Student Motivation

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I have spent most of my life teaching ESP, especially EAP and in talks that I have given and courses that I have run, I’ve always given three strong reasons for teaching ESP or ESAP as opposed to general English or EGAP. The first is linguistic – different subjects use different language. There is a large amount of research evidence for this – see, for example, Hyland (2011, 2012).  The second is to do with knowledge transfer: the nearer you can get to the student’s ultimate reason for learning English, the more likely it will be that the student will be able to make use of what you are teaching in the new context (see, for example, Dias, Freedman, Medway & Paré, 1999; Willingham, 2007; James, 2014, Bharuthram & Clarence, 2015). The third is motivation. This is something that everyone seems to agree with (see, for example, Stevick, 1976; Krashen, 1982; Wenden, 1981). – that students will be more motivated when the English course is directly related to their main subject course or professional needs (intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 1985) or ideal self compared to ought-to self (Dornyei, 2009, 2010)  –  so I’ve never felt the need to justify it. Students do not see the learning of a subject separately from the learning of the language of that subject: Learning the content of a subject means learning the language of that subject. As Ushioda (1998) points out:

…the language learner, unlike the researcher, seems unlikely to perceive the motivation for language learning to be wholly independent of the motivation (or lack of motivation) for other areas of learning (p. 83).

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Authenticity in EAP

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I was asked recently by a well-know organisation to do some teacher development work with ESP teachers and I was asked to work on using authentic materials. After a little discussion about exactly what they thought authentic meant – any text produced by native speakers not intended for language teaching – and what they wanted me to do, I decided I was not interested in the work and that I needed to investigate the meaning of authenticity in ELT.  So in preparation for the BALEAP Professional Issues Meeting (PIM) at the University of Leeds in February next year, I have been thinking about the meaning of authenticity in EAP.  The concept has been around for a long time, particularly since the communicative 1970s. Indeed Dick Allwright (1981, p. 173) points out that when working on a pre-sessional course at the University of Lancaster in 1974, he was instructed to “use no materials, published or unpublished, actually conceived or designed as materials for language teaching”. More recently Helen Basturkmen (2010, p. 62) has reminded us of the importance of authenticity in ESP and EAP:  “One of the key characteristics of ESP is that teachers and course developers value the use of authentic texts and tasks.” Continue reading →

The Relationship between Academic Content and Language

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The Graduate Certificate in Business (GCIB) at Hertfordshire Business School (HBS)  is a 15 week  pre-master’s programme with the aim of preparing students for a range of Business related Masters courses. In order to achieve its aim, the programme attempts to present the language and content together as an integrated whole. For that reason, the teaching is organised around the subject lecturer and the English lecturer working together.

The idea is one of team teaching (Johns & Dudley-Evans, 1980; Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998). Of the several levels of subject-language integration mentioned by Dudley-Evans & St John (1998), team teaching is the final level, as it involves subject and language specialists working together for some of the time in the classroom. It however goes further than as the materials – written and spoken – drawn on by the language teacher are those used by the subject lecturer in teaching the subject. More importantly, the tasks carried out in the language classes are those that are required by the subject lecturer. Continue reading →

The Grammar of EAP

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EAP teachers often discuss whether or not grammar has a role in an EAP course. They often talk as if EAP is simply about vocabulary, texts, strategies, referencing etc, forgetting that without grammar, there is nothing to hold the vocabulary items together within the texts.

Grammar is an important part of ESP, especially EAP, as, ultimately, all that exists is words on the page or sounds in the air. These words are constructed from parts and inflect (morphology) and occur in sequences (syntax). Like all registers of English, ESP uses prepositions, articles, adverbs etc.  So it is obvious that grammar is an important component of any EAP course.

Many people have also said that ESP is for advanced learners and that learners should have learned most of the grammar before they start their ESP course, or that they cannot learn ESP without a good grammatical foundation.

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