The Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes

Ken Hyland, Ken Hyland, Philip Shaw, Ken Hyland, Philip Shaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138774711
• eBook ISBN: 9781317328094
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes provides an accessible, authoritative and comprehensive introduction to English for Academic Purposes (EAP), covering the main theories, concepts, contexts and applications of this fast growing area of applied linguistics. Forty-four chapters are organised into eight sections covering:

• Conceptions of EAP
• Contexts for EAP
• EAP and language skills
• Research perspectives
• Pedagogic genres
• Research genres
• Pedagogic contexts
• Managing learning

Authored by specialists from around the world, each chapter focuses on a different area of EAP and provides a state-of-the-art review of the key ideas and concepts. Illustrative case studies are included wherever possible, setting out in an accessible way the pitfalls, challenges and opportunities of research or practice in that area. Suggestions for further reading are included with each chapter.

The Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes is an essential reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of EAP within English, Applied Linguistics and TESOL.

1 Introduction

Ken Hyland and Philip Shaw

DOI: 10.4324/9781315657455-1

EAP: growth and significance

The term English for academic purposes (EAP) covers language research andinstruction that focuses on the communicative needs and practices ofindividuals working in academic contexts. It therefore includes a range ofactivities from designing listening materials to describing the discourse ofdoctoral defences, and while often characterised as a practical affair, itgoes beyond preparing learners for study in English to understanding thekinds of literacy found in the academy. EAP is, then, a branch of appliedlinguistics, consisting of a significant body of research into effectiveteaching and assessment, descriptions of the linguistic and discoursalstructures of academic texts, and analysis of the textual practices ofacademics.

It is a field which has witnessed rapid expansion and development over thepast thirty years. The term EAP seems to have been coinedby Tim Johns in 1974 and made its first published appearance in a collectionof papers edited by Cowie and Heaton in 1977 (Jordan, 2002). Driven by the growth of English as the leadinglanguage for the acquisition, dissemination and demonstration of academicknowledge, EAP has emerged from the fringes of the English for specificpurposes (ESP) movement in the 1980s to become an important force in Englishlanguage teaching and research. Drawing its strength from broad theoreticalfoundations, a commitment to research-based language education, and thesubject-matter expertise of its students, EAP has sought to reveal some ofthe constraints of academic contexts on language use and to develop ways forlearners to gain control over these. These learners, moreover, are now adiverse and heterogeneous group which includes not only the traditional EAPconstituency of undergraduates studying in English as an additional language(EAL), but also secondary and primary students and academics writing forpublication or presenting papers at conferences. All of these must, in someway, gain fluency in the conventions of English language academic discoursesto understand their disciplines and to successfully navigate their learningor their careers.

EAP has also changed its character over the years. It may originally havebeen a purely practical affair concerned with local contexts and the needsof particular students, but as the interconnectedness of the contexts andour understanding of the needs have developed, EAP has become a much moretheoretically grounded and research-informed enterprise. As the chapters inthis volume illustrate, the communicative demands of the modern universityinvolve far more than simply controlling linguistic error or polishingstyle. So while EAP continues to involve syllabus design, needs analysis andmaterials development, it has had to respond to the heightened, more complexand highly diversified nature of suchdemands. Supported by an expanding range of publications and researchjournals, there is a growing awareness that students, including nativeEnglish speakers, have to take on new roles and engage with knowledge in newways when they enter university. They find that they need to write and readunfamiliar genres and participate in novel speech events.

The chapters in this book describe some of the diverse ways that EAP seeks tounderstand and engage learners in a critical understanding of theincreasingly varied contexts and practices of academic communication. Theyalso suggest something of the contribution which EAP has made to appliedlinguistics and language education. Assisted by a healthy receptiveness tothe understandings of different perspectives, ESP has consistently providedgrounded insights into the structures and meanings of texts, the demandsplaced by academic contexts on communicative behaviours, and the pedagogicpractices by which these behaviours can be developed. As a result, EAP hasconsistently been at the front line of both theory development andinnovative practice in teaching English. EAP is, in essence, research-basedlanguage education and the applied nature of the field has been itsstrength, tempering a possible overindulgence in theory with a practicalutility.

But this practical orientation has also been a serious weakness, particularlyin universities, where EAP comes to be seen as a low-status serviceactivity. The assumption underlying this practice is that there is a singleliteracy which students have failed to acquire, probably because of gaps inschool curricula or the insufficient application of learners themselves.Students are seen as coming to their university studies with a deficit ofliteracy skills which can be topped up in a few English classes. In thisview, literacy can thus be taught to students as a set of discrete,value-free rules and technical skills usable in any situation. In fact,however, the English we encounter and are expected to produce in academicsettings differs in cognitively significant ways – by genre, by stageof writing and by discipline – from that which we find outside of theacademy. Facilitating the learning of this discourse requires time,resources, and the co-operation and respect of subject specialists.

The rapid expansion in the number of learners of English for AcademicPurposes has led to a similar expansion in the number of EAP teachers. Andthis means that many – probably most – of the teachers of EAParound the world are not native speakers of English. The needs of thesenon-native teachers are different from those of native speakers, and thisrecognition has led to new developments in EAP materials and teachertraining courses.

Some key features of EAP

As illustrated in Table 1.1, EAPrests on four main principles which reflect its origins in ESP and whichdistinguish it from other areas of TESOL.

Table 1.1 Four main principles of EAP

Concept	Gloss
Authenticity	Classroom texts and tasks should be as close to thereal academic world as possible.
Groundedness	A commitment to link pedagogy and research. Aresearch base underlies materials and instructionalpractices.
Interdisciplinarity	EAP is not itself a theory or a methodology butemploys an eclectic range of theories andmethods.
Relevance	Linguistic and contextual relevance is ensuredthrough needs analysis.

Authenticity

Authenticity is one inheritance from ESP and a key concept in EAP.Originally it simply meant using texts in class where the vocabulary andgrammar had not been simplified, but it now includes classroom uses ofreal examples of spoken, written, graphical and non-verbalcommunication. It requires us to distinguish between different types ofwritten texts, and embed all this textual material in authentic tasks.This means teachers are encouraged not only to use real texts, but alsoto process them as their students would in the real world. However,although the mantra of authenticity encourages teachers to use authentictexts as genre models, where students need to see how cohesion,coherence and rhetorical structureare maintained, authentic texts do not always fulfil these criteria, andteachers also have to be willing to tailor a text to improve itsreadability or to highlight a given feature. More broadly, recognisingthe value of authentic tasks and models for students has encouragedresearch into academic texts of a wide variety of types on a massivescale, both increasing our understanding of academic genres andimproving methods for analysing them.

Groundedness

EAP has consistently provided grounded insights into the structures andmeanings of texts, the demands placed by academic or workplace contextson communicative behaviours, and the pedagogic practices by which thesebehaviours can be developed. EAP is founded not only on the analysis oftexts but also, less often but increasingly frequently, the contexts inwhich these texts are found. But while the main contribution of EAP hasbeen to offer a pedagogy for learners with identifiable academiccommunicative needs, the process of working towards this goal has seenimportant theoretical and methodological concepts sharpened and refined,most notably those of genre, discipline, communityand needs. Importantly, the groundednessof EAP has also meant that teachers, and many students too, do not justread the research, but are actively involved in creating it.Teachers have become practitionersas they consider the discourses of the students they are teaching, andof the disciplines and genres that their students are studying. Byunderstanding the genres we teach and the students we work with, ourresearch feeds back into the design of curricula, courses, materials andtasks.

Interdisciplinarity

EAP is not a theory or a method but an area of study. As we havesuggested, this does not mean that EAP lacks a theory, but it is anapplication of several theories and methods to specific registers. EAPdraws its strength from a broad and eclectic range of different ideas,and its effectiveness lies in employing the ideas that offer the mostfor understanding communication and for classroom practice. Among these,we can include: systemic linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics,critical theory, social constructionism, communicative languageteaching, contrastive rhetoric, socio-cognitive theory and the sociologyof scientific knowledge.

Relevance

Finally, EAP tries to be relevant to students. It relies on needsanalysis to systematically identify the specific skills, texts andcommunicative practices that a particular group of learners will use.Research and needs assessments are fundamental to EAP approaches tocourse design. Thus, in some circumstances, this may mean identifying anumber of general skills for a heterogeneous group of students fromdifferent fields or for freshman or pre-university students who need tobridge the English they are familiar with at school to that which isexpected in the disciplines. Here, various skills related to lecturecomprehension and participating in seminars may be needed together withkey writing practices such as using sources, impersonality andnominalization. If a needs analysis indicates that the study situationis more specific, then it is likely that instruction will focus on thegenres required in the discipline and the preferred patterns ofcommunication which students need to succeed.

The idea of needs therefore provides a link betweenperception and practice, and underlines research, authenticity andinterdisciplinarity. While at one time relevance involved simply makingsure we were teaching useful lexis and grammar, today it acknowledgeswider contexts. EAP teachers have increasingly recognised that texts andtasks are enmeshed in other texts and in the situations in which theyare used. For research, this means understanding how texts work inparticular disciplines, seeing genres, for instance, as repeated kindsof social activity designed to be both recognizable and convincing tospecialist readers rather than just arrangements of forms. For teaching,it means preparing students for a range of activities focusing oncommunication rather than just specific aspects of language. The conceptof needs, however, has been criticized as privileging institutionalinterpretations of student needs and so creating courses whichaccommodate student learning to the demands of powerful institutionalvalues and practices. We turn to this issue now.

Caveats, limitations, and cautions

While these characteristics underpin the strengths of EAP, they alsocontribute to its limitations, in particular: a tendency to workfor rather than with subjectspecialists, a vulnerability to claims that it ignores students’cultures, and a reluctance to critically engage with the values ofinstitutional goals and practices.

The first issue arises from the practical orientation of EAP, which tends topush it down the pecking order of university subjects, so that it is seen assubservient to the more prestigious theoretical disciplines rather thandeveloping its own independent subject knowledge and skills. This leads towhat Raimes (1991) calls ‘thebutler’s stance’ on the part of EAP, which acts tode-professionalize teachers and allows universities to marginalize EAPunits. EAP comes to be regarded as a ‘service activity’, shuntedoff into special units, and marginalized as a remedial exercise designed tofix-up students’ problems.

As we noted above, this conceptualization makes it impossible to address thereal issues. EAP has generally not responded robustly to this misconceptionand too often accepted the underlying assumption that there is a singleliteracy which students have failed to acquire. Literacy can thus be taughtto students as a set of discrete, value-free rules and technical skillsusable in any situation. However, the idea of professional communities, eachwith its own particular practices, genres, and communicative conventions,leads us towards a more specific role for EAP at the same time as a growingbody of literature into how knowledge is socially constructed throughdisciplinary discourses, strengthens the theoretical underpinnings of thisview.

Bourdieu famously observed that academicdiscourse is no one’s mother tongue, but the children of middle-classfamilies with a mastery of the standard language find it considerably easier(Bourdieu & Passeron, 1965). It ismore difficult for learners to acquire academic English if their own set ofdiscourses or ‘culture’ is less congruent with those of theacademy, whether or not some kind of English is their first language. EAPhas validly been charged with failing to engage with students’cultures and it is only in the last decade or so that EAP has begun to takeissues of culture and background seriously. This is partly because notionsof culture often essentialize learner groups: they lump individualstogether, ignore differences and devalue their practices. This neglect isalso due to the influence of Western, and particularly American, conceptionsof individualism which are highly suspicious of the idea of culture. Butcontrastive rhetoric, and its more recent incarnation as interculturalrhetoric, has offered insights for teachers into how students’culturally preferred ways of writing might impact on the ways they write inEnglish. Problems remain, however, so that discussions of‘culture’ can be ethnocentric, for example, and it is not alwayspossible to distinguish the impact of first language or limited proficiencyon writing difficulties. Furthermore, academic writing in a given disciplineis an expression of the culture of the discipline, which is by no means thatof any particular state or region, or even class.

Nevertheless, there is growing evidence that different groups tend to uselanguage in different ways: employing different organisational patterns,making different persuasive appeals, using different ways of incorporatingmaterial, and relying on different linguistic features. The process ofacquiring the norms of academic English or the English of a discipline mustbe different for these different starting points.

Understandings of culture, moreover, remind us that we are members of severalcultures simultaneously – ethnic, age, disciplinary, etc. – andraises the possibility of conflicts students may experience in thesemultiple memberships. As our reference above to different kinds of Englishsuggests, there are potential clashes between, for example, the ways thatacademic and ethnic cultures use English, which raises the issue ofnon-standard forms and the question of whose norms will be used to judge theconventions student writers use. Many post-colonial countries have developedthriving indigenous varieties of English which are widely used and acceptedlocally but which diverge from international standards. EAP teachers nowtake the issue of appropriate models for EAP seriously, exploring how farthe professions, corporations and disciplines in which they work toleratedifferences in rhetorical styles.

Finally, the expansion of EAP as a force in language education has beenaccompanied by a growing sense of disquiet concerning the socio-politicalimplications of both the dominance of English at the expense of otheracademic languages, and the additional burden which such demands place onstudents and scholars alike. The advantage of a near-universal academiclingua franca must be seen against the loss of linguistic diversity and thedifficulties for students and academics required to study and publish in aforeign language. Whether or not this dominance is the result of aconspiracy orchestrated by political and economic interests or the legacy ofUS and British colonialism, it has real effects on the lives of students,academics and universities across the globe who must read, write and oftenpublish in a language that is not their own.

This raises the issue of EAP’s response to these issues and whether itis a pragmatic or a critical discipline. Do we see our role as developingstudents’ academic literacy skills to facilitate their effectiveparticipation in academic communities? Or do we have a responsibility toprovide learners with ways of examining the academic socio-political statusquo to critique these cultural and linguistic resources? But things areseldom as starkly polarized in the real world and it is a rare EAP teacherwho consciously sets out with the intention to replicate existing power relations by teaching prestigiousforms of discourse. While criticized for taking an‘accommodationist’ view of language learning, designed to fitstudents into the cogs of the institutional machine (e.g. Benesch, 2001), the EAP agenda has always been tohelp learners gain access to ways of communicating that have accruedcultural capital in particular communities, demystifying academic discoursesto provide learners with control over the resources that might enhance theircareer opportunities. In the natural sciences, at least, it has to berecognized that the discourse to be acquired has emerged over the centuriesand has the prestige to...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction—Ken Hyland and Philip Shaw
• PART I Conceptions of EAP
• PART II Contexts for EAP
• PART III EAP and language skills
• PART IV Research perspectives
• PART V Pedagogic genres
• PART VI Research genres
• PART VII Pedagogic contexts
• PART VIII Managing learning
• Index