For the last year, I have been working with Hilary Nesi and Sheena Gardner at Coventry University and Adam Kightley from the British Council to develop some EAP materials for the LearnEnglish website. Continue reading
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
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.
Assessment Criteria
I ran a workshop at a BALEAP conference several years ago about assessment criteria. I was particularly interested in the difficulty of marking assignments, especially when the English course is part of a degree course and the marks contribute to the student’s degree classification.
The purpose of the workshop was to look at ways of using profile forms to assess such writing assignments. I was not satisfied that we came to a satisfactory solution at that time, and I’m still not happy with it. Continue reading
Richard Smith, University of Warwick
John M. Swales, University of Michigan
Meriel Bloor, formerly University of Warwick
Andy Gillett, formerly University of Hertfordshire Continue reading
The title refers back to David Wilkins’s (1976) distinction between analytic and synthetic syllabuses. He argued that a synthetic language teaching strategy was one in which the different parts of the language were taught separately and step-by-step so that acquisition was a process of gradual accumulation of the parts until the whole structure of the language has been built up. The learner’s task was then, therefore, to re-synthesize the language that has been broken down into smaller pieces with the aim of making his or her learning easier. Continue reading
It is often said that, as EAP teachers, we teach more than just language. I’d like to know what other things we do teach, that are not taught by everyone in education.
EAP refers to the language and associated practices that people need in order to undertake study or work in English medium higher education. The objective of an EAP course, then, is to help these people learn some of the linguistic and cultural – mainly institutional and disciplinary – practices involved in studying or working through the medium of English. Continue reading
I’ve heard people say that they do not want to teach ESP/EAP because that they are communicative language teachers, and that ESP/EAP goes against these principles.
I think this is a misunderstanding of CLT and EAP. Continue reading
It is often believed that EAP can only be taught at advanced levels and that lower level students need a course in general English before they start their EAP course.
Before we can discuss this, however, it is important to understand what we mean by general English. General English means different things to different people. To some people it is survival English; to others it is conversational English. However, in the context of EAP, it is often used to mean the core of grammar and vocabulary that is common to all registers. It is often believed that this common core must be mastered before more specific aspects of the language can be learned. Continue reading
Several years ago, when I was more involved with BALEAP, someone on the executive committee suggested that BALEAP needed a good definition of EAP. As I had written similar things before when I was chair, I wrote the following and sent it to the committee. Nobody responded or commented at all! A while later, the request was repeated and I circulated my article again. Again no response at all! I wondered why, but I think I know now. Anyway, this is what I wrote.