{"id":353,"date":"2014-04-18T16:00:47","date_gmt":"2014-04-18T15:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.uefap.com\/blog\/?p=348"},"modified":"2014-04-18T16:00:47","modified_gmt":"2014-04-18T15:00:47","slug":"eap-is-a-waste-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uefap.org\/blog\/eap-is-a-waste-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"“EAP is a waste of time”?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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! He said this in a talk with the title “The Route To Academic Language” at Temple University, Japan in 2012: https:\/\/www.tuj.ac.jp\/tesol\/news-events\/20120704-form-video.html<\/a> He also said it in a talk to the\u00a0IATEFL Young Learners & Teenagers Special Interest Group earlier this year. This is available at: http:\/\/yltsigevo2014.wordpress.com\/stephen-krashen\/<\/a> Cheryl Zimmerman has responded to a question posed on the OUP blog: “How would you answer Krashen\u2019s assertion that teaching EAP is a waste of time\u201d? http:\/\/oupeltglobalblog.com\/2014\/03\/04\/qskills-how-would-you-answer-krashens-assertion-that-teaching-eap-is-a-waste-of-time<\/a>\/ While her contribution is interesting, she does not really address what Krashen is saying in his talks. All she refers to is Krashen’s input hypothesis and that other people have suggested that receiving comprehensible input is not enough. For example Merrill Swain modified Krashen’s hypothesis with her output hypothesis, Michael Long puts forward his interaction hypothesis and Richard Schmidt emphasises the importance of paying attention to form through noticing.\u00a0So I think we can do better than Cheryl Zimmerman, though, \u00a0and discuss what he actually says. I like Krashen, I always have done, I follow him on Twitter, I retweet him a lot, and what he says before he talks about EAP makes a lot of sense: reading is important. In the IATEFL talk, Krashen emphasises that he learned to write academically through reading articles he was interested in. He did not read on order to learn to write but because he was interested on what he was reading:<\/p>\n

\u201cI found out that there was one person who had done the core research in the area. Doreen Kimura from Ontario, Canada. I read all her stuff. It started in 1957, all her journal papers. From her, I learned academic style and how to do experiments, how to write up experiments, how to apply statistics. I wasn’t aware I was doing that. I was reading it because I wanted to know what was going to happen next, and to help us prepare for our own studies. But a by-product was getting academic style and getting all this knowledge and information.”<\/p>\n

and he argues that this is the only way we can learn academic language:<\/p>\n

“This is how we get academic language. My claim is that you can’t do it any other way. No-one has ever done it through studying. It can’t be done. I\u2019m going to make the claim today that English for academic purposes is a waste of time. No-one – it has never worked. Not a single sentient being on this planet has ever developed significant amounts of academic language competence through study of academic language. It can’t be done. First of all, the system’s much too complicated. There’s too much grammar, too much vocabulary. It can’t be done one at a time.”<\/p>\n

He supports this by research carried out by himself and Christy Lau, a while ago. I assume this is\u00a0Lao & Krashen (2000). In this study translation students doing an English course that emphasised reading for content and pleasure did better on tests of vocabulary and reading rate than social science students who had taken a traditional academic skills class. The results are significant, but although we are given a large amount of information about the reading course, we are not given much information about the academic skills class apart from the fact that it covered oral skills (e.g. an oral presentation), writing (essay organisation, editing and proof-reading), listening (note-taking during lectures), and reading (taking notes from academic texts). The students did a research project which was graded on content, organisation, and the quality of the abstract and bibliography. It seems very general and there is no evidence that the course interested the students or that the content was relevant to them. We also do not have much information about the test used: it measured reading speed and the number of words known. It is not clear what reading speed was measured and how it was measured or exactly which words were counted in the vocabulary test. The translation students were also at a higher level than the social science students. In both his talks, after he says that EAP is a waste of time, he talks about sheltered subject classes, content-based classes and CLIL \u2013 which most\u00a0EAP courses make use\u00a0of to some extent. He also talks a lot about free voluntary reading, self-selection, interest etc, none of which is unusual in EAP. As well as this, he says that \u201cteaching must be compelling\u2019\u201d. I agree and I think that EAP, especially ESAP – \u00a0when the students are working with the language of a subject they are interested in, on tasks that they see as relevant to their future lives \u2013 can be. So I think he misunderstands much of what I\u00a0think of as EAP. He is thinking of out of context language instruction and skills classes and that is not what I think of when I talk about EAP – content-based classes, sheltered classes, students choice of reading texts, relevance, integration with academic subjects, self-chosen relevant written projects, etc. The EAP teaching that I know about is context driven, purposeful, interesting and therefore seems quite in line with most of his ideas. We also need to remember that much of the research he refers to is with young children. He gives a nice example of how he learned academic writing, through comic books, Robert Heinlein, Chomsky, Kimura etc, but it took him 10 years or more, from teenager to graduate school. As is the case with most ESP & EAP courses, our students do not have that amount of time. And I think that our knowledge of how academic writing works – based on writers such as Hyland & Swales (which Krashen seems to find irrelevant to education) can be valuable to speed up the natural processes that Krashen writes about.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you read the stuff our colleagues do – like Hyland and Swales – I’ve read all this stuff, where they analyse academic texts and I find their work is brilliant linguistics. It’s not applicable to teaching, to pedagogy.”<\/p>\n

So, overall, I would say that the EAP teaching that I am interested in\u00a0and have experience with is context driven, purposeful, interesting and therefore seems quite in line with most of Krashen’s\u00a0ideas.<\/p>\n

References<\/h1>\n

Lau, C. Y. & Krashen, S. (2000). The impact of popular literature study on literacy development in EFL: More evidence for the power of reading. System, 28, <\/em>261-270.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,6,7,10],"tags":[18,19,20,22,23,28,31,37],"class_list":["post-353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eap-general","category-egap","category-esap","category-esp","category-research","tag-eap","tag-egap","tag-elt","tag-esap","tag-esp","tag-higher-education","tag-in-sessional","tag-pre-sessional"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uefap.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uefap.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uefap.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uefap.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uefap.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uefap.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uefap.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uefap.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uefap.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}