Exploring EAP:

Challenges and

Opportunities

Laura Sagert

CIDE laura.sagert@cide.edu

What is EAP?

ENGLISH for

ACADEMIC PURPOSES

Academic Purposes

Image credits:

Lecture hall By University of Pittsburgh

at Bradford (University of Pittsburgh at

Bradford) [Public domain], CC-BY via

Wikimedia Commons

Lab By Xbxg32000 (Own work by

uploader; the watermark is my own.)

[CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

Seminar "St. Mike's students at First

Year Seminar" by MikeDKnight - Own

work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

via Wikipedia

Student sleeping while studying> By

Psy3330 W10 (Own work) [CC BY-SA

3.0 Via Wikimedia Commons

(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by

-sa/3.0)

Key Aspects

• Critical thinking (critical literacy)

• Study skills

• Intertextuality and citation

• Information literacy

• Rhetorical functions

• Disciplinary discourse communities

• Positioning of oneself and one’s work; voice

• Interdisciplinary and intercultural communication

• Audience expectations (conventions)

• Genre (discourse structure and conventions)

• Academic prose style

• Time-bound objectives

What might people need to DO through

English?

• Study

• Conduct research

• Publish/promote/present

work

• Submit applications

• Communicate effectively

in interpersonal contexts

• Take standardized tests

• Read

• Write

• Listen

• Speak

Think critically

COMMUNICATE

Academese?

Or, a special sort of conversation

Immigration is commonly considered to be selective of more educated individuals. Previous US studies comparing the educational attainment of Mexican immigrants in the United States to that of the Mexican resident population support this characterization. Upward educational-attainment biases in both coverage and measurement, however, may be substantial in US data sources. Moreover, differences in educational attainment by place size are very large within Mexico, and US data sources provide no information on immigrants' places of origin within Mexico. To address these problems, we use multiple sources of nationally representative Mexican survey data to re-evaluate the educational selectivity of working-age Mexican migrants to the United States over the 1990s and 2000s…

Rendall, Michael S. and Susan W. Parker. "Two Decades of Negative Educational Selectivity of Mexican Migrants to the United States".

Population and Development Review. 40: 3, pp. 421-426. 2014.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2014.00692.x

Academic English?

It’s still English and academics do have “normal” conversations

too.

Common features of academic prose:

• Complex noun structures and nominalization

• Embedded forms

• “Simple” sentence patterns (SVO, SVC)

• Relatively formal register of language (technical terms + more

“long” words and fewer phrasal verbs)

• More limited range of verb tenses (present, past, present

perfect)

• Functional language (hedging, boosting, definition, stance,

exemplification, concession, classification, cause and effect…)

EGAP vs. ESAP

EGAP (General)

• Language, conventionsand genres used acrossdisciplines

• Communication acrossdisciplines

• Focus on both immediateand future needs

• More general materials(including commericaltexts)

ESAP (Specific)

• Languages and genres

most common in a specific

discipline

• Knowledge of one

discipline in-depth,

• Focus on immediate needs

• Highly-specialized, in-

house materials

Adapted from: de Chazal, Eduard. English for Academic Purposes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. (p.18)

CHALLENGESBut, it’s too much work….

But, I don’t know enough…

But, there’s so much too learn and so little time…

But, that’s boring...

Ourselves — Letting Go

• Conceptual shift

• Self-confidence

• Learning curve

• Teaching preferences, academic background and habits

Image credit: Illustration at page 201 in Europa's Fairy Book" by Joseph Jacobs John Dickson Batten - title: Europa's fairy book (1916) New York ; London : G. P. Putnam's sonsscan: copy held by New York Public Library, scanned by nicole deyo, obtained from IA.org: europasfairybook00jacoAdjustment: conversion to PNG, greyscale, sliders on approx. 3%/73% to B&W points, crop to content.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Our Teaching Contexts

• Time

• Students’ and adminstrators’ priorities

• Access to resources

• Support

Image credit: By KVDP, Shokunin, Aungkarns (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0

Focus

• Understanding and

communicating

MEANING vs. focus on

forms?

• “Rhetoric” and

“argument” are not bad

words.

Image credit: By Alvesgaspar (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Effective Texts: Characteristics

Clarity

Coherence Cohesion

(information and ideas) (linguistic devices)

*Creating textual cohesion requires much more than learning a list of

“connectors”.

Image credits: By AnonMoos (initial SVG conversion of PostScript source by AnonMoos was done by Indolences) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Discourse Conventions

• “Moves”, or playing the game

Audience

Message (information and purpose)

Medium (genre, rhetorical structure)

Image credits: By AnonMoos (initial SVG conversion of PostScript source by AnonMoos was done by Indolences) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

"Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition" by Cristiano Banti - http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/galileo/galileotrial.jpg. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons -

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Galileo_facing_the_Roman_Inquisition.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Galileo_facing_the_Roman_Inquisition.jpg

Selection

Key criteria for selecting texts, tasks and language:

• students’ needs and objectives

• utility (accessibility and frequency)

• relevance and authenticity

OPPORTUNITIES•Foster skill development and self-directed learning

•Make a difference

Wealth, Fame, Recognition …

Sorry. Not too likely, I’m afraid. Image Credits: 1) Thoout, Thoth Deux fois Grand, le Second Hermés, N372.2A" by Jean-François Champollion - Brooklyn Museum. Via Wikimedia Commons; 2) Hindu deity Sarasvati Saraswati on

ceramic tile in Munnar Kerala India March 2014" by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra - Flickr: Sarasvati (Munnar, Inde). Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons; 3) "Seshat" by Jeff Dahl - Own work.

Licensed under GFDL via Wikimedia Commons .

Help Others Make a Difference

How many of your students have strong critical thinking and communication skills?

If they don’t, what are the consequences?

Doing what little one can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue.

~Charles Darwin

Lifelong Learning

The day you top learning is the day you die.

—Anonymous

In teaching EAP, we need to be continuously learning not

only about language but also about a broad range of

underlying skills. Any “content knowledge” we pick up along

the way is a bonus, but our role as EAP teachers is not

teaching content; we can only do our best to teach

language and the broad range of language, learning, and

communication skills needed to comprehend, convey, and

generate new perpectives, information, and ideas.

HELPRecommended Resources

Draw on Work Done in Other Areas

• Study Skills or Study Competences

• Academic Literacies

• Logic and Argumentation (Rhetoric)

• Systemic Functional Lingusitics

• Corpora Analysis (See the Brigham Young University

collection)

• WID and WAC (Writing in the Disciplines and Writing

Across the Disciplines) (Check the IWCA Site and the WAC Clearinghouse)

For Teachers Only

• Alexander, Olwyn, Sue Argent and Jenifer Spencer. EAP Essentials: A Teacher’s Guide to Principles and Practice. Reading, UK: Garnet Education, 2008.

• BALEAP. “Can Do Framework for EAP Syllabus Design and Assessment”. UK: BALEAP, 2013. (http://www.baleap.org.uk/media/uploads/teap/Can_Do_Framework__with_sample_activities_April_2013.pdf)

• BALEAP. “Competency Framework for Teachers of English for Academic Purposes”. UK: BALEAP, 2008. (http://www.baleap.org.uk/media/uploads/pdfs/teap-competency-framework.pdf)

• de Chazal, Eduard. English for Academic Purposes. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2014.

• Hyland, Ken. English for Academic Purposes: An Advanced Resource Book. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.

Books for Students (and Teachers)

• EAP Series published by, Cambridge UP, GarnetEducation and Oxford UP.

• Caplan, Nigel. Grammar Choices for Graduate and Professional Writers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012.

• Feak, Christine and John Swales. English in Today’s Research World, Volumes 1-4. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Various.

• Graff, Gerald and Cathy Birkenstein. “They Say/ I Say”: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (3rd edition). New York: W.W. Norton Co, 2014.

Useful Web Sites (to start)

• Compleat Lexical Tutor

• HyperGrammar, University of Ottawa Writing Centre

• OneLook Dictionary Search

• Purdue OWL

• Journalist’s Resource (Shorenstein Center, Harvard)

• University of Manchester Academic Phrasebank

• University of Melbourne Study Guides: Achieve My Academic Goals,

Balance My Life, Plan My Future

• Using English for Academic Purposes. (UEfAP) by Andy Gillett

• Using the Academic Word List, University of Nottingham

• VocabGrabber, Visual Thesaurus

Choices and Balance

NYANSAPO

"wisdom knot“

“…this symbol conveys the idea that "a wise

person has the capacity to choose the

best means to attain a goal. Being wise

implies broad knowledge, learning and

experience, and the ability to apply such

faculties to practical ends.“

(Willis, "The Adinkra Dictionary")

Taken from: http://www.adinkra.org/htmls/adinkra/nyan.htm.

Last checked 12/02/2014

Thanks

Laura Sagert

CIDE laura.sagert@cide.edu

CC BY-SA 3.0