Language as academic purpose

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front matter # 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Journal of English for Academic Purposes 3 (2004) 95–109
www.elsevier.com/locate/jeap
Language as academic purpose

Joan Turner �

University of London, Language Unit, Goldsmiths College, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, UK

Abstract

In this article, I argue for an understanding of EAP to be mobilised more around lan-guage, its materiality, especially in written form, and the intellectual challenge of learning it.Concomitantly, I argue against the increasing technicisation of language, as it is embodied inthe regulatory framework of institutions and its emaciation as an intellectual challenge,partly as a result of the language/content dichotomy which positions language in the subor-dinate role, and partly because of the self-understanding of EAP practice itself. I argue for ashift in conceptualisation from language as instrument to language as constitutive, and thatlanguage proficiency in the academic context is as important as content. With such a re-con-ceptualisation comes a need for EAP to re-think its practices and to seek to enhance thevalue of language work in the market of intellectual labour.# 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Language/content dichotomy; Technicisation of language; Language as constitutive; Fore-

grounding language proficiency; Language proficiency and time

1. The contemporary economy of EAP

The raison d’etre for EAP is the fact that mother tongue speakers of languages

other than English wish to undertake their undergraduate or postgraduate edu-

cation in an English speaking country or at a university in their own country which

teaches in English. However, the social and economic conditions of and for EAP

have changed substantially since its beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s. Then EAP

was seen as a necessary adjunct to the academic success of individual students,

whose success was in turn necessary to the development of technology in their

countries of origin, frequently former British colonies. Projects were funded by

J. Turner / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 3 (2004) 95–10996

British government agencies, such as the Overseas Development Agency, and as aresult, as both Benesch (2001) and Swales (1985) acknowledge, EST, English forScience and Technology (predominantly what EAP was initially) was where themoney was.

The history of ESP projects since their beginnings in the 1960s and 1970s hasbeen frequently documented and overviews can be found in Strevens (1988),Robinson (1980), Coffey (1984), Swales (1988), Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998),and Benesch (2001).

While English language teaching, and more frequently teacher training, remainsto some extent a British-funded export, especially in areas with emerging econom-ies, such as Eastern Europe, the specifically EAP ‘business’ in Britain has growndramatically in recent years due to the necessary ‘importing’ of overseas students,in order to boost the incomes of universities whose state funding has decreased.The contemporary socio-political and economic context for EAP in Britain then isnot so much international ‘aid’ and ‘development’ as the global economy of highereducation. The financial viability of British universities is increasingly dependenton their marketability to what are known as ‘overseas’ or ‘international’ students.This categorisation has its primary significance in relation to fee status. ‘ Overseas’students’ fees are considerably higher than ‘home’ and European Union students.As might be expected, these students often do not have English as their first lan-guage. Without attempting to quantify the ratio of demand to supply, there isembodied in this situation an about-turn in the politico-economic situation interms of who is fuelling demand and who is supplying. We (that is, university insti-tutions in Britain) need them as much as they (the high-fee paying) students needus.1

Within this broad re-conceptualisation of education as a market economy, onething remains constant, and that is the low economic and intellectual exchangevalue of language work. From its outset, EAP was the poor relation of the aid anddevelopment project. It remains the poor relation in the international educationmarket. The topic of status is of course one that recurs not only in the EAP litera-ture, but in any context where language teaching, study skills or literacy teaching isseen as a service. I am with Johns (1997: 157) when she says that we should not‘wring our hands and bemoan our marginality’, but I want to suggest that, throughits own self-understanding, EAP has to a certain extent colluded in its own margin-alisation. This is because from its outset, it has accepted a role as an economic andintellectual short-cut.

2. EAP as economic and intellectual short-cut

The short-cut mentality endemic to EAP is encapsulated well in Dhaif’s (1985)critique of Swales’s (1985) suggestion that language centres should extend their

1 This situation may not be unique to Britain among the English L1 countries, but this paper limits in

focus and claims to Britain.

97J. Turner / Journal of English for Academic Purposes 3 (2004) 95–109

repertoire to teaching research English. Swales was addressing the status issue andwarned of the ‘dangerously inhibited view’(1985: 213) of language centres whichfocussed only on undergraduates and materials development for their courses.Dhaif (1985: 225) adduced the ‘financial short cut’ criterion which was crucial to‘the evaluation of ESP projects in developing countries’ against the ‘research Eng-lish’ proposal, arguing that teaching ‘research English’ would only meet the needsof an ‘elite group of specialists’ rather than large numbers of students, thereby fail-ing the ‘financial short cut’ criterion. It seems therefore that maximum throughputof students with minimum attainment levels in the language in the shortest possibletime was the conceptual framework within which EAP was conceived.

Such a framework is indeed present in Coffey’s (1984) definition of EAP inwhich he stresses the importance of speed and thereby the shortage of time forEAP. He stated (1984: 3):

the student’s needs may be the quick and economical use of the English lan-guage to pursue a course of academic study, in which case we have English forAcademic Purposes.

While this quote also illustrates the needs analysis basis of EAP pedagogy, I sug-gest that the restricted time frame and limited financial outlay that was acceptedfor EAP, implanted also an intellectual short-cut mentality. Time is money, buttime is also intellectual investment. The continuing short-cut mentality under-estimates the time it takes to really get to grips with the language, and undervaluesthe role of language in academic performance. Students seem not to want to spendtime, effort, and money on getting to grips with the language, but to proceed asquickly as possible to the ‘real’ thing. My contention is that language proficiency isan important part of the ‘real’ thing, and that EAP work has an important role toplay, but needs to re-think its own self-understanding.

3. The technicisation of language

The assumption that language proficiency can be gained quickly, as well as eas-ily, has been helped by the success of global screening tests, such as IELTS orTOEFL. Such tests have become part of the regulatory framework of universities,where at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, a language test score is aprerequisite to registration on the programme of study. Students’ scores thereforeslot comfortably into a checklist of easily ticked off registration requirements.

The combined effects of a demand for easily measurable and easily processeduniversity entrance criteria and the successful marketing of global language testsconstitute a technicisation of language which is reducing the teaching of EAP totraining for such tests, in Britain, predominantly for IELTS. My argument is notagainst the testing process per se, nor does it deny the need for some guidance onminimum thresholds of language proficiency, but it is a critique of how the testshave infiltrated institutional discourse and what is perhaps worse, how they distortstudents’ perceptions of the role of language use in academic performance.


Students seem to want to ‘train’ to reach the appropriate entrance level score orband rather than to engage with the language as an essential, and integral, part oftheir engaging with their subject of study. On the one hand, it seems that Brumfit’s(1985: 156) warning note on what teaching language as communication might leadto: ‘that once we have identified the hurdles to be leapt over, language is simply amatter of training in appropriate techniques’, is sounding only too loudly. On theother hand, what the IELTS test or the TOEFL test delivers underspecifies thecomplexity of language issues in the academic context. These tests do not, forexample, even begin to give a sense of what Johns (1997) calls a ‘socio-literate’ per-spective, a perspective that emphasises the social purposes of texts, writer andreader roles, and contexts. Nor do they challenge to any great degree the varietyand range of vocabulary circulating in the greater spread of disciplines which L2students now want to study.

The market for international education has opened up and students at all levels,undergraduate, postgraduate,2 and research are coming to Britain to study the per-forming and visual arts, business studies, and the newer interdisciplinary fieldsclustering around cultural and critical-theoretical studies in the humanities andsocial sciences, as well as the more traditional science and technology subjects.Many of these subjects demand longer periods of EAP study, not to mention amore in-depth focus on language. Felicity of style and the creative use of languagemay also be part and parcel of academic performance in some of the newer disci-plinary and interdisciplinary fields. These include fields such as ‘visual culture’,which may draw on contemporary critical approaches to art history, anthropology,and sociology.

In this new and burgeoning international education market, different coursetypes are emerging. Some institutions offer year-long foundation or bridging cour-ses, usually done in conjunction with other departments, while others have simplylengthened their pre-sessionals,3 so that the somewhat paradoxical notion of ayear-long pre-sessional also exists. This not only demonstrates a rather conserva-tive nomenclature, but also a logic which serves to preserve both the in-built short-termism discussed above, and the marginalised structure of EAP delivery. Theover-weighting of EAP delivery in terms of summer pre-sessionals has a furtherdeleterious effect, in that the majority of staff are employed only for short periodsof time and therefore opportunities for building up links with receiving depart-ments, and a greater understanding of the tasks, theories, and discourses that pre-sessional students will be going on to work with, is lost. At the same time, anopportunity to consolidate EAP as a professional and academic practice is alsolost, if posts for full-time staff are restricted. While the constitution of EAP as adiscipline is underway, not least through the existence of this journal, as well as inrecent publications, such as Flowerdew and Peacock (2001), whose series editors,in their preface, specifically talk of EAP as a ‘discipline’ (p. xiii), it would be a pity

2 In Britain, ‘postgraduates’ refers to students on coursework degrees, e.g. MA/MSc.3 A ‘pre-sessional’ course is one occurring before the student begins academic studies.


if its implementation in practice were restricted by assumptions of its pre-sessionalonly nature.

The positioning of language proficiency as a bureaucratic pre-requisite alsoimplies a finality. It ignores the developmental nature of language use. There is noassumption that the student’s facility with English will improve, along with thefamiliarisation with the specific genres of interaction and performance that isrequired as s/he goes through a programme of study. This failure to see that lan-guage grows with content leads to the insidious perception that measured languageproficiency is all there is to the role of language on a degree course. Furthermore,it has the deleterious knock-on effect that any continuing in-sessional EAP pro-gramme may be seen as only catering for students in ‘deficit’. This leads to situa-tions where staff respond to problems they encounter with students’ language levelsby raising the entrance score on IELTS. On the other hand, it can also lead to stu-dents hiding in the dark as it were, not attending in-sessional classes for fear ofremedial status infliction. Such unhelpful scenarios are an effect of the institutionalmaintenance of what Swales (1990: 6) felicitously calls the ‘ivory ghetto of remedia-tion’, denying academic respect to EAP practitioners as well as to their students.What they also show, of course, is a gross misunderstanding of the nature of lan-guage, its constitutive importance in academic performance, and the intellectualchallenge of learning its uses and using it well.

4. The underestimation of language work

It is somewhat paradoxical that the materiality of language only becomes visiblewhen there is something wrong (cf. Turner, 1999a, 1999b). When language is vis-ible, it is marked, the effect of poor writing or cognitive deficiency or both. Thisexplains why ‘language’ is often the catch-all term for problems with unmet stan-dards, and the need for remediation. By contrast, academic success is rarely attrib-uted to good language use. In other words, good language use is unmarked. Yet, itis clear that language use matters and is part of the assessment process. Christo-fides (2002) for example, in her study of two students’ progress at two different uni-versities, found that tutors would often comment on language in the interests ofimproving a student’s work, and by implication, their marks. She gives the follow-ing example of a tutor’s comment:

Your conclusion flowed very clearly from your discussion. I have identified anumber of small syntax and spelling mistakes which spoil the otherwise highstandard of presentation—you need to do some work in this area to make goodwork even better. (Christofides, 2002:18)

While the attitude of pedagogical encouragement cannot be faulted, the implicitdiminution (both quantitatively and qualitatively) of the work necessary toimprove ‘small syntax’ errors can be. This comment was received towards the endof an MA course and it must be doubted whether the student has in fact time toimprove their language proficiency, not to mention the underestimation of the


intellectual labour involved in learning to use the syntax of another language cor-rectly.

A degree of confusion over how to treat language issues in assessing students’work was evidenced in Hartill’s (1997) study where she focussed particularly ontolerance of language errors. She found that some departments glossed overlinguistic inaccuracies, while others were setting up their own proof-reading sys-tems, paying post-graduate students to read international students’ work. This lat-ter course of action seems to me to be an underacknowledged threat to EAP work,as well as harbouring a number of rather invidious conceptual inconsistencies. Onecrucial question is: what exactly does proof-reading consist of? Is it perhaps notpredominantly a euphemism? Would not a degree of re-writing be involved? Doessuch re-writing then raise issues of plagiarism? These inter-related issues are lan-guage-based, but their complexity is not acknowledged when they are packaged as‘proofreading’ and delegated to post-graduate students. Such institutional-politicallanguage issues need to be more widely foregrounded in EAP discourse.

I would suggest also that EAP practitioners become less tolerant of languageerrors and seek to promote attention to the materiality of written language at alllevels, from spelling through to textual organisation. There is a tendency in EAPwriting pedagogy to focus more on the macro- or structural levels of organisation,but accuracy at word or phrase level is also important. I do not want to re-hashthe fluency/accuracy debate (Brumfit, 1984), but suggest that because fluency haslargely won in EAP, we are over-lenient of our students’ mistakes. Such leniencymay be partly an effect of our awareness, possibly greater than that of our collea-gues in other departments, of the extent to which students have to adjust to a newlearning and teaching environment. As a result of this awareness, we are reluctantto overburden students, nor do we want to give them a sense of inadequacy andrisk their loss of confidence. We prefer to ease them in gently. However, we shouldnot confuse caring for students’ well-being with leniency over their language use.At the risk of sounding a bit ruthless, I would argue that we should be less caringand more critical.

5. Language is critical in critical analysis

In the following extract from a PhD student’s work, I hope to show the com-plexity of language issues involved and the extent to which language proficiency isat their core. It is clear to me, working with the student as a language supporttutor, that there is no problem with her understanding of the theoretical discoursesshe is working with, predominantly psychoanalysis and post-colonial theory. Mydiscussions with her on her work and my requests for clarification show this. Shehas no problem in conveying things to me in spoken language. Her problem ismanifestly with written English.

The repressed and victimised ‘others’ in Asian formation of modernity has beentotally abandoned from social consciousness for long whose life has been dis-


regarded in the hypocritic concept of the ‘ humanities’ conflicted with the desig-

nated sense of ‘progress’ through the march of economic development in the

modern era.

If the first sentence had ended with consciousness, it would have made a power-

ful beginning. It works without the definite article which should strictly speaking

go in front of ‘Asian’, and even the misaligned grammar of the plural ‘others’ and

the singular verb might go unnoticed in the general flow of meaning. However, this

is exactly the kind of thing that a PhD supervisor might recommend a student to

‘tidy up’ before the final submission. If the student has not had such things pointed

out before, how will she recognise them? I would therefore argue that such sen-

tence level grammatical features should be pointed out to the student along with

everything else. They are as essential a part of the academic rigour that is expected

of a PhD student, or indeed any student, as, for example, getting the date of a

particular publication right.Looking further at the example, it can be seen that at the level of word choice,

the word ‘abandoned’ needs to be substituted by a semantically similar, but more

appropriate verb in the context of the grammatical construction used. The word

‘excluded’ would work. In terms of the flow of meaning, the subordination ‘whose

life has been disregarded’ seems an unnecessary tautology, while the phrase ‘in the

hypocritic concept of the ‘‘humanities’’’ is another source of confusion for the

reader. The preposition ‘in’ works as the beginning of an adverbial phrase, whether

of space or time, following ‘has been disregarded’, but it is difficult to identify ‘the

hypocritic concept of the humanities’ as a location. The student was able to explain

this reference to me. She wanted to make the point that the so-called ‘humanities’

were ill-named because they were concerned not with human progress, but with

economic progress. Here, she is therefore situating her specific argument in a wider

discourse already circulating in the theoretical contexts of her work. This brings

into play the well recognised textual management issue of acknowledging what

would be shared information with the reader, without having to spell it out.In this case, the student attempts to signal her scepticism of the term ‘humani-

ties’ by putting it in inverted commas, but the conceptual conflict with economics

and ‘progress’ is obscured by the overwrought wording and referencing all running

together in the three consecutive adverbial phrases: ‘conflicted with the designated

sense of ‘‘progress’’’, ‘through the march of economic development’ and ‘in the

modern era’. Apart from the stylistic awkwardness of this strategy in English, the

semantic compass of the areas referred to is also rather large. The student needs to

make choices as to what she is foregrounding and what she is modifying, and these

have to be located within clause structures rather than in adverbial phrases. This

may be an issue of grammatical transfer as the student is Korean, and the syntacti-

cal structures of Korean are very different from English. There is no parallel for

relative clauses, for example, and no prepositions as such (cf. Thompson, 1987).

Susceptibility to such transfer is compounded by the fact that the student is work-

ing with data in her own language. In terms of implications for teaching, these


contrastive syntax issues make a case for more focussed awareness and discussionof them than is the norm in EAP practice.

This student does not need an induction into critical thinking. She is quite intenton making an argument, and quite a powerful argument at that. This is evident inthe use of words such as ‘repressed’ and ‘victimised’ in the first clause and theintensifier ‘totally’ and ‘abandoned’ in the next, whose semantic determination isinherently critical. However, her ability to achieve the critical force of her argu-ments and how they relate to her own original work, is marred by her inflexibilityin using English. In order to make the kind of powerful statements that she wantsto make, she needs to focus on her language proficiency more than the content. Infact, the falsity of this dichotomy is clear. Her use of language is a necessary partof the power of her arguments.

The rhetorical organisation of the extract is also an issue. I suggest, in my re-written paragraph below, a version whereby the wider conceptual context comesfirst in a short, punchy, albeit also hedged, sentence. The issues which flow fromthat are developed and illustrated in subsequent sentences. The extensive changesin syntax and explicit logical relationship marking, as well as word choice and col-location, are shown in capitals.

The concept of the humanities IS SOMEWHAT HYPOCRITICAL. DESPITEITS ASSOCIATION WITH progress, MODERNITY HAS BEEN CON-CERNED MORE WITH ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT THAN WITH THEQUALITY OF HUMAN LIFE. IN THE CASE OF the repressed and victi-mised ‘others’ OF THE Asian formation of modernity, THEY HAVE LONGbeen EXCLUDED FROM social consciousness.

The language work necessary to get to the above paragraph is substantial, andcannot routinely be done, as I have just done, in a language support capacity. Itcannot be taught in training for the IELTS test, nor is it tested. It is not a questionof technical adjustment, nor is it a question of ‘tidying up’ the language (to quote aeuphemism beloved of PhD supervisors). The extract above is symptomatic of thekinds of theoretical discourses in the humanities and some parts of the social sci-ences that contemporary EAP practitioners have to deal with. These discoursesdemand high levels of proficiency in the manipulation of words and phrases and awide range of both general academic and specialist vocabulary. Yet the substantivenature of such language work is underrepresented in EAP discourse around skillsand needs.

6. EAP: beyond skills

Teaching EAP, in the British higher education context at least, is predominantlyskills-based. The background setting for such skills teaching is the university andthe pedagogic genres of higher education, most prominently the lecture (listeningto, and note-taking) the academic essay, and the seminar (presentation and dis-cussion). The language skills of reading and the independent nature of research for


writing which is usually reading-based are also important. All of these skills are‘study skills’ and while some EAP curricula may identify a separate module enti-tled ‘study skills’ where things such as using the library, or time management, orexamination techniques are dealt with separately, by and large the higher educationpedagogic—genre-based skills cover ‘study skills’ as a whole.

There are procedural elements to such skills teaching that are of undoubtedmerit. Indeed, many ‘home’ students would benefit from a similar provision. L2students, for example, are often complimented on their delivery of seminar papers,because they have paid attention to structuring and to the use of OHP slides,which ‘home’ students have not been specifically taught. The same applies to read-ing strategies and the processes of drafting and editing that are inculcated in writ-ing classes.

A focus on ‘self-directed learning’ or learning to learn is also foregrounded inEAP curricula. The assumption of independent thinking and initiative-taking istaken for granted in British higher education and it is only when international stu-dents are not sure what is expected of them that this taken-for-grantednessbecomes clear. Even PhD students, for instance, often expect much more ‘guid-ance’ (in their terms), from their supervisors than they get, a culturally embeddedfactor that was shown also in Belcher’s (1994) study. However, there is also a dan-ger that concerns with procedures and strategies for study and ‘learning to learn’may overdetermine the EAP curriculum. Students can become demotivated by thefocus on study skills and the learning process when these become not only theintended outcome of practice, but also the topic content of texts and discussionsfacilitating those outcomes. As one Taiwanese student put it to me: ‘They [suchtopics] may be alright for British students who don’t know about studying but wealready know all that’. This student obviously felt patronised, although she mayhave been overestimating her capabilities. Learning to learn in culturally differentways is certainly necessary, as these impinge on uses of language, but perhaps thiscan be achieved by interacting with more intellectually stimulating texts. Thissuggestion is similar to that of Horowitz (1986) on the process approach to writingwhere the basis for writing was restricted to personal meaning and discovery. Inboth cases, while there is some merit in the approaches, there is also an insularityand circularity that prohibits engagement with wider and more varied academicdiscourses.

In the humanities and social sciences, especially, it is the quality of engagementwith the intellectual subject matter that is crucial. Such quality is determined notonly by familiarity with the kinds of questions that the disciplinary discourse asksand the analytical terms that are its theoretical signposts, but also by the ability tomanipulate a wide range of vocabulary and structures and not have the ‘quality’ ofthe argument ‘marred’ by infelicities of style and expression. The focus on skillstends to value communicability over linguistic expression, but the fact is that, forbetter or worse, how something is expressed is important. As Cameron has put it:

linguistic bigotry is among the last publicly expressible prejudices left to mem-bers of the western intelligentsia. Intellectuals who would find it unthinkable to


sneer at a beggar or someone in a wheelchair will sneer without compunction atlinguistic ‘solecisms’. (Cameron, 1995: 12)

This succinctly encapsulates the pervasive tendency to comment on language usein both social and moral terms and so from the point of view of EAP, where thereis arguably a greater premium on the use of language being suitably academic, it isincumbent upon teachers to help students avoid those readily available stricturesand to focus on giving them control over the language. Students need to be able tomanipulate language in order to show their understanding of, or be able to nego-tiate with/argue over content, and therefore language proficiency is as importantas content knowledge.

7. EAP as intellectual challenge

At the root of many of the problems in EAP is the language-content dichotomy,which is not a strict dichotomy, but a hierarchised one where in institutional terms,‘content’ is deemed more important than ‘language’. This subordinate positioningis bolstered by the assumption discussed in Section 3 above, that language pro-ficiency is only a pre-requisite and not an ongoing process of development linkedto what is being studied. Such a pre-requisite assumption applies also to writing inthe disciplines, which Russell (1991) sees as beset by the ‘myth of transience’whereby writing is deemed to be a unitary skill, learnt once and for all before mov-ing on to other things. Zamel (1998: 253), in similar vein, talks of the ‘essentialistview of language in which language is understood to be a decontextualised skillthat can be taught in isolation from the production of meaning and that must be inplace in order to undertake intellectual work’. This comment resulted from the fol-lowing response from one of her faculty informants, who talks of students notreceiving ‘adequate English instruction to complete the required essay texts andpapers in my classes. These students may have adequate intelligence to do well inthe courses, but their language skills result in low grades’ (Zamel, 1998: 252). Adisembodied proficiency score as an entrance criterion, which is often the same forboth undergraduates and postgraduates, and the assumptions that go along with itthat language is a finite object or capacity, helps to maintain the conceptualisationof language work as intellectually empty. The dominant discourse within EAPitself, which focuses around skills, further helps to maintain this conceptualisation.

The issue of the extent to which EAP work is seen as challenging has been raisedbefore in the literature. For example, in their comparative study of writing experi-ences in the EAP writing class as opposed to writing in the disciplines, Leki andCarson (1997) found that one of the factors missing in the EAP writing class wasthat of ‘intellectual challenge.’ More pro-actively, in her promotion of a ‘criticalEAP’ which ‘positions EAP teachers as active intellectuals whose curricular goalsextend beyond merely propping up content courses’, Benesch (2001: 84) makes arobust case for the intellectual commitment of EAP teachers rubbing off on theirstudents. As she puts it: ‘I have not come across recommendations in the literature


that EAP teachers find one area of study that interests them and promote thattopic as an object of inquiry even though their intellectual engagement could be agreat stimulus for students.’ (Benesch, 2001: 84). In her case, it was her commit-ment to feminist issues and to making female anorexia an important part of theEAP/Psychology course she was part of, which she felt not only made up for alack in the psychology course as currently constituted, but motivated her studentsthrough her own commitment to and enthusiasm for the topic.

Such content may therefore be ‘borrowed’, as it were, from the course pro-grammes that students are going onto, or are already studying, or as in Benesch’scase, may derive from the intellectual interests of the EAP lecturers themselves. Iwould suggest that it is essential that an EAP practitioner gains some familiaritywith at least one other disciplinary or interdisciplinary area. Which area woulddepend on the local circumstances of their work: the point is that whatever the‘content’ background, language can be the foreground, and the focus on languageis more committed when the content is intellectually stimulating. For example, lan-guage tutors can supplement attending lectures and providing feedback by readinga book or books on the course reading list and developing tasks around excerpts.Arguably, there is too much fear and trepidation in EAP discourse around tread-ing on other people’s territory, as it were. Spack’s (1998) formulation, ‘how farshould we go?’ seems to epitomise this, although I would support her general argu-ment championing the expertise of language teaching itself.

A greater focus on the language of intellectually challenging content does notmean that we teach content in the same way that a specialist in its backgrounddiscipline might. Background reading for an independent EAP seminar could besimilar to that for a sociology seminar for example, but the seminar treatmentwould be different. It is most unlikely that a sociology seminar would focus specifi-cally on the language used in any text. However, in the EAP seminar, an in-depthfocus on the material embodiment of the text, i.e. the vocabulary, the grammar,and the rhetorical organisation, would be an important focus for students. Under-standing the language thoroughly, as well as why it has been used in the way it hasbeen used, heightens understanding of the ways of thinking of a discipline. Forexample, an in-depth look at one excerpt from a book can act as a metonym forthe whole book. It gives students an insight into the kinds of vocabulary chosenfor the arguments relating to the particular subject matter, as well as the opport-unity to look at more structural features, such as how a cause and effect argumentis made, or how claims are hedged. This kind of metalinguistic analysis, also advo-cated by Johns (1997), can be supplemented by exercise types which require stu-dents to use and manipulate actual expressions and constructions. CLoze tasks onalready-analysed passages are a good way of reinforcing specific vocabulary itemsand collocations. They also appeal to the memorisation strategies which many stu-dents are used to, as well as making them meaningful by contextualising them indiscourse. Making students aware of just what a difference a choice of word orword class can make can be implemented by exercises which require such manipu-lative changes. These might include linking the verb or noun with the right prep-osition, or following through a change in the overall structure of a sentence from a


change of expression. Examples for such manipulation can come from students’own texts, as well as from extracts they have studied. Where access to academiccorpora is possible, the corpora may also be used to isolate specific features and tocreate exercises. A more concrete manipulation of the linguistic materiality withoutwhich the ‘content’ would not exist can have a more lasting effect, and moreimportantly give the student a greater degree of choice over linguistic expression inEnglish.

Coverage of a specific topic in a language class treatment is unlikely to be aswide as in a sociology course, or a media course, or whatever, but topics chosenshould be coherent. They should be broad enough in scope to sustain conceptualconsistency, but also offer the opportunity for a range of texts by different authorsto be studied and key ideas to be reiterated. A topic or theme such as ‘the legacy ofthe European Enlightenment’ or ‘postmodernity’ appeals to a range of differentprogramme areas, but is also specific enough to provide genuine critical engage-ment.

8. EAP: Beyond the communicative approach

The need for detailed attention to the materiality of language use has been some-what eclipsed by the success of the communicative approach. This has led to awidespread degree of tentativeness in the research literature over paying attentionto language detail. In their study of PhD students, Casanave and Hubbard (1992)for example, acknowledge the fact that writing quality might affect faculty opinion,but their assertion is so hedged as to convey reluctance of the fact rather than pro-mote rigorous attention to it. They state: ‘we should probably not be too hasty toeliminate concern for local language problems from our graduate writing classes’(Casanave & Hubbard, 1992: 4). A need for greater attention to language washighlighted also by Grundy (1993) whose study led him to suggest that ‘researchstudents should be privileging English language work over academic subject workand that even their modest confidence in their level of language competence maybe misplaced’ (Grundy, 1993: 32).

In her well-known example of a student who was playing off the language tutoragainst the ‘subject’ tutor, Johns (1988) has questioned whether the insistence onthe endings on nouns and verbs in the language class are in fact necessary transfer-able skills, or whether more useful transferable skills should be researched. Thestudent said:

This was written for Dr Oades. I put endings on verbs and nouns for you, buthe gives me a B without them. (Johns, 1988: 57)

While on the one hand, we could say that the student in this example was clev-erly writing for her/his audience, and manipulating the language accordingly, didDr Oades really want to have noun and verb endings left off? Might the studenthave achieved an ‘A’ if the grammar had been flawless, if all subjects and verbsaligned? Presumably Dr Oades could afford to give the student a B because the


grammatical mistakes were not so intrusive that he could not determine whether ornot the student had understood the issues or had done the required work for theassignment, and so on. The language tutor, by contrast, could not give a B unlessthe noun and verb endings were in place, and arguably this stricture is providingthe student with more widely relevant ‘transferable skills’.

In the context of performance in academic discourse, I am arguing that languageform, as well as language as used in a particular theoretical discourse, are equallyimportant. In this respect I’d like to take issue with the notion of ‘surface’ or‘superficial’ features of language. The formulation ‘surface’ suggests ‘unimportant’.The formulation is probably a result of the rejection of focus on form for its ownsake which underlies the shift to communicative language teaching, but it under-estimates the extent to which students need to be able to manipulate different con-structions, widen their lexical and collocational repertoire, develop a widersensitivity to nuancing through language use, and structure an argument in orderto enhance their academic performance, and their academic voice in the widercommunity.

The rejection of a focus on form may have contributed to what Delpit (1998) hasreferred to as ‘the sense of paralysis and powerlessness’ (p. 207), affecting teachersof literacy because such a focus is perceived to be alien to the home cultures oftheir students. While Delpit is not primarily concerned with academic literacy, thesame issue can apply in the academic context. She makes a powerful case for dis-pelling this paralysis and re-focussing on giving students the opportunity to dothings with and through language that they would not otherwise be able to do ifthey did not also have access to ‘mainstream’ literacy in some cases, or ‘academicliteracy’ in the university context. We may or may not be empowering our studentsto greater things after they have worked with us, but if they can work with Englishin the way that they want to without drawing attention to a grammatical errorhere, or ambiguous syntax there, both of which can lead to complete deictic dis-orientation for the reader, then we are acting politically in the way that Gee (in theL1 context ) suggests is the contemporary role of the English teacher. He states:

The English teacher can cooperate in her own marginalisation by seeing herselfas ‘a language teacher’ with no connection to social and political issues. Or shecan accept the paradox of literacy as a form of interethnic communicationwhich often involves conflicts of values and identities, and accept her role as onewho socialises students into a world view that, given its power here and abroad,must be viewed critically, comparatively, and with a constant sense of the possi-bilities for change. Like it or not, the English teacher stands at the very heart ofthe most crucial educational, cultural and political issues of our time. (Gee,1990: 68)

The post-colonial theorist Ashcroft (2001: 58) talks of the concern for properspeech as a classic demonstration of cultural hegemony, but also points to theambivalence of hegemony, and states that ‘mastering the master’s language hasbeen a key strategy of self empowerment in all post-colonial societies’. He also


asserts that ‘proficiency in the language does not exclude the capacity to use it in away that localizes it’ (Ashcroft, 2001: 57). He cites the case of the Trinidadianindependence leader, Eric Williams, who used his flair for language to expose thenature of imperial history in its treatment of the West Indies. This, as Ashcroftsays, is a key ‘interpolation’ of global knowledge. Interpolation of oppressed orsilenced discourses and experiences can perhaps best be achieved through a con-summate proficiency in dominant forms of the language. We language teachersshould not therefore be afraid of inculcating language proficiency.

There is a need for a much more robust conceptualisation of language work,particularly in the university context, and EAP needs to reconsider its currentemphasis on communicability at the expense of accuracy and precision. After all,these are precisely values that typify academic discourse. Nor are communicabilityand accuracy in conflict. Accurate language use, especially in written language, ispart of the academic message. The instrumental view of language in EAP needs tobe adjusted, the constitutive importance of language in the academic context betterrecognised, and the intellectual labour of language work promoted for what it is.

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Joan Turner is Head of the Language Unit at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a Senior

Lecturer. She has written a book on study skills for SAGE (2002), and published on EAP, academic lit-

eracy, conceptual metaphor, and cross-cultural pragmatics.

Language as academic purpose

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