This document discusses the challenges and opportunities of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). It defines EAP as using English for purposes like studying, research, and academic communication. The document outlines key aspects of EAP like critical thinking, study skills, and understanding academic discourse communities. It also discusses balancing EAP instruction between immediate needs and lifelong learning skills. Resources are provided to help teachers address both the challenges and opportunities of teaching EAP.

1. Exploring EAP:
Challenges and
Opportunities
Laura Sagert
CIDE laura.sagert@cide.edu

2. What is EAP?
ENGLISH for
ACADEMIC PURPOSES

3. 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)

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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…)

8. EGAP vs. ESAP
EGAP (General)
• Language, conventions
and genres used across
disciplines
• Communication across
disciplines
• Focus on both immediate
and future needs
• More general materials
(including commerical
texts)
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)

9. CHALLENGES
But, 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...

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. Selection
Key criteria for selecting texts, tasks and language:
• students’ needs and objectives
• utility (accessibility and frequency)
• relevance and authenticity

16. OPPORTUNITIES
•Foster skill development and self-directed learning
•Make a difference

17. 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 .

18. 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

19. 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.

20. HELP
Recommended Resources

21. 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)

22. 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.p
df)
• 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.

23. Books for Students (and Teachers)
• EAP Series published by, Cambridge UP, Garnet
Education 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.

24. 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

25. 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

26. Thanks
Laura Sagert
CIDE laura.sagert@cide.edu
CC BY-SA 3.0