Like any language event, it’s a question of context.

Universities are resistant to change. Although they are the place where existing knowledge is questioned, that’s just an intellectual construct.  As Sir Ken Robinson famously joked a large number of university professors behave as if their bodies exist to carry their heads to meetings, i.e. the disparity between the theoretical cutting–edge stuff going on in the institution and the reality/structure of the institution itself is most striking.

The same seems to be true of EAP, since while the rest of the EFL world has moved on to view English as a global language, with it’s new acronyms EIL or ELF, the world of EAP provides definitions such as “It is probably true that most EAP lecturers are working in institutes of higher education where English is the medium of instruction” uefap.com

Hopefully this is not the case – as any reader of MAK Halliday would agree.

Our French students need English, which I call EAP because they are University students who have to read academic papers and, for some, will later have to write them and communicate the results of their research in English at international conferences. However, their medium of instruction is French. As undergraduates, English is often “just another subject” of their course.

When the newly arrived “good at English” students use a register which is totally inappropriate to an academic setting it becomes obvious that they do need EAP (add examples here). Their surprise at their discovery that they actually do have something to learn from us is quite amusing.

The heterogeneity of our classes is the biggest challenge to our teaching, with the same-exam-for-all on this University course.  And there lies the first big difference between the EFL as it is portrayed in the blogosphere and English at the University, namely, exams. As both carrot and stick, it most certainly is a means of getting people working.

In this context, many moons ago, we were told by a colleague “look these kids are scientists, they’re used to learning formulae, just tell them what they have to learn and they’ll get on with it” (ah the good old days!) which led to our students having lists of words to learn long before that was acceptable practice!  Now just bear with me a moment, while I dare to say that the rest of “just tell them what they have to learn” was translated into a course syllabus covering the most frequent structures for scientific writing (measurement, frequency, comparison, means&process, cause and effect, modification, etc.) 10 chapters in all, which has since been published as a course book!  But there are three advantages to this system (for their first year of “academic” English).

a).  it provides the “nul en anglais” with an attainable goal which enables them to break the cycle of I’m-no-good-at-English and take wings – but that’s another story.

b). it’s a great place to start for teachers, who have no knowledge of what aspects of the language are important for academic purposes – after a year with “the book” they are totally aware of the “typical content” of an EAP course.

c). Putting the teachers in such a straitjacket curriculum, leads to very inventive teaching (see “Creativity from Constraints”)

Oh dear – that’s just the first year. So I’ve hopefully put a “1” at the end of the title in the hope of a part 2 to address some of the questions brought up by Olwyn Alexander and Sue Argent

And a book to read