Critical English for Academic Purposes

Theory, Politics, and Practice

Sarah Benesch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780805834345
• eBook ISBN: 9781135663544
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Critical English for Academic Purposes: Theory, Politics, and Practice is the first book to combine the theory and practice of two fields: English for academic purposes and critical pedagogy. English for academic purposes (EAP) grounds English language teaching in the cognitive and linguistic demands of academic situations, tailoring instruction to specific rather than general purposes. Critical pedagogy acknowledges students' and teachers' subject-positions, that is, their class, race, gender, and ethnicity, and encourages them to question the status quo. Critical English for academic purposes engages students in the types of activities they are asked to carry out in academic classes while inviting them to question and, in some cases, transform those activities, as well as the conditions from which they arose. It takes into account the real challenges non-native speakers of English face in their discipline-specific classes while viewing students as active participants who can help shape academic goals and assignments.

Critical English for Academic Purposes: Theory, Politics, and Practice:

* relates English for academic purposes and critical pedagogy, revealing and problematizing the assumptions of both fields,
* provides theoretical and practical responses to academic syllabi and other institutional demands to show that teachers can both meet target demands and take students' subjectivities into account in a climate of negotiation and possibility,
* offers "rights analysis" as a critical counterpart to needs analysis,
* discusses the politics of "coverage" in lecture classes and proposes alternatives, and
* features teaching examples that address balancing the curriculum for gender; building community in an EAP class of students from diverse economic and social backgrounds; students' rights; and organizing students to change unfavorable conditions.

This book is intended for undergraduate and graduate courses for preservice and in-service ESL and EAP teachers. It is also a professional book for those interested in critical approaches to teaching and EAP.

PART I:
THEORY AND POLITICS

Chapter 1
A History of English for Academic Purposes

This history of English for academic purposes (EAP), like all overviews, is subjective. Choices of which citations to include and leave out depend on the aims and predispositions of the overview’s author. Yet, while acknowledging my subjectivity, in this chapter I try to present the history of EAP from the perspective of specialists who have shaped the field over the last 30 years and to honor their contributions. Further on, I highlight concerns raised about EAP from outside the field (see chap. 3). This is not to say that EAP has developed without criticism from within. On the contrary, theoretical and pedagogical differences, many of which I discuss in this chapter, are prevalent in the EAP literature as they are in all academic fields. Indeed, discussion of these conflicts has contributed to shifts in EAP’s research and teaching methods over the years.

Although such contestation and debate appear frequently in the EAP literature, its politics remain largely hidden. Power issues have been ignored in the name of pragmatism, that is, fulfilling target expectations without questioning the inequities they might perpetuate or engender (Benesch, 1993). These questions, though, are not the focus of the present chapter. Instead, I save them for the next chapter in order to first present a chronology of the intellectual history of EAP, a discussion of its theoretical influences from the 1960s to the present. One way my subjectivity manifests itself in this presentation is that I devote more space to the recent years of EAP, that is, to needs analysis, study skills, linked courses and genre analysis, and less space to the early years of register analysis and rhetorical analysis. This choice was guided by my teaching and research experience, based on more recent developments in EAP’s history than on earlier ones.

Some of those I cite in this overview, such as Tony Dudley-Evans, Ann Johns, and John Swales, have both participated in and chronicled EAP’s history, offering a longitudinal view as well as eyewitness accounts of EAP curriculum development in particular settings. Others I cite contributed to the field during a single period, yet their work has led to refinements in EAP theory and practice.

THEORETICAL INFLUENCES

The theoretical influences that have shaped EAP throughout its 30-year history include: linguistics; applied linguistics; sociolinguistics; communicative language teaching; writing across the curriculum; learning theory; and genre studies. The emphasis, however, has been less on research and theory than on curriculum and instruction, leading some EAP specialists to raise concerns about unquestioned assumptions driving the development of classroom materials and activities. McDonough (1986), for example, is troubled that “insufficient attention is paid to the research sources from which pedagogical decisions— about materials, methodology and so on—either are drawn or might profitably be so” (p. 17). She calls for “classroom-initiated research” informed by theory to arrive at an “integrated view of research” that erases distinctions between practitioners and researchers of EAP. (p. 23) As I show in the later stages of this chronology, that type of research is currently being carried out, especially in linked courses.

Yet, there has been a positive dimension to EAP’s historical favoring of application and teaching materials over research and theory. Due to its preoccupation with syllabus design, materials development, and pedagogy, EAP has become increasingly responsive to the complexities of institutions, teaching, and learning in local contexts. That is, although the early years of EAP focused mainly on teaching the lexical items and types of texts students might encounter in their work or academic courses, in recent years, social context, with its unpredictability and multiple meanings, has become a central concern. It is now recognized that knowledge is socially constructed and that linguistic analyses of texts, the basis of early EAP instruction, are an insufficient foundation of instruction. The following retrospective reveals how EAP arrived at its current acknowledgment of the centrality of context as it moved through various stages of its history: register analysis; rhetorical analysis; study skills and needs analysis; and genre analysis. These stages are presented chronologically, but it should be noted that they are overlapping and not mutually exclusive; although some EAP specialists are conducting the type of integrated classroom-based research McDonough (1986) has called for, others continue to carry out more traditional text and discourse analysis.

HISTORICAL TRENDS

Register Analysis

The early history of EAP spans the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, beginning with the emergence of English for science and technology (EST). EST, at that time, was intended to provide an alternative to English language teaching as humanities, preparing students to read literary texts. The goal was to move away from “language teaching as a handmaiden of literary studies” toward “the notion that the teaching of language can with advantage be deliberately matched to the specific needs and purposes of the learner” (Strevens, 1977, p. 89). Strevens (1971b) argued that by teaching only literature and not other kinds of texts, secondary school English teachers, in the United Kingdom and other countries, were neglecting to prepare “scientifically inclined” students for further studies. He claimed that many teachers trained in literature were predisposed to viewing science as “cold” and literature as “warm”: “Literature is held to be the only morally and aesthetically worthwhile subject. Scientists are stated to be philistines…and any activity that smacks of measurement or quantification is low-valued” (p. 8). Reacting against what he saw as the literary bias of English language teaching, Strevens recommended offering courses geared to the eventual uses students would make of the language in their future studies and jobs. He believed that at the beginning levels, these courses might include scientific vocabulary exercises and scenarios set in scientific situations, such as labs. At more advanced levels, EST might include replicating and discussing experiments and teaching scientific texts.

The postwar boom in funding for science and technology by the United States and the United Kingdom included subsidies for English language teaching (ELT) and teacher training (in chap. 2, I explore the economic roots of EAP and their political implications). The response of ELT specialists was to shift instruction away from the traditional focus on grammar and literature toward greater attention to features of scientific English. Attempting to capture and characterize the uniqueness of scientific English, EST research during this period consisted primarily of frequency studies of lexical items and grammatical features in scientific texts. Huddlestone (1971), for example, carried out a 4-year linguistic study of 135,000 words of scientific English, looking for patterns in single sentences and clauses (cited in Macmillan, 1971a). This register analysis and similar ones were the basis of EST instruction for students who had usually acquired a degree of proficiency in reading English.

EST textbooks based on register analysis were published during this period, one example being Ewer and Latorre’s A Course in Basic Scientific English (1969). The authors based the material on a study of 3,000,000 words of “modern scientific English ranging from popular writings to learned articles and graded according to both frequency and complexity” (Macmillan, 1971b, p. 23). Each unit of the text includes a reading passage written by the authors, comprehension questions, vocabulary exercises, structural exercises, and a discussion and criticism section. Also included are a dictionary of scientific terms and an index of grammatical structures found in the reading passages (Macmillan, 1971b).

Swales (1988) cites Herbert’s (1965) EST text, The Structure of Technical English, as perhaps the first English for specific purposes (ESP) textbook, one based on “a serious and detached investigation into the characteristics and the language found in science and engineering written texts” (p. 17). Each section of that textbook begins with a 500-word passage written by Herbert to illustrate certain aspects of technical style rather than to convey content. The accompanying exercises serve to highlight and review lexical items and grammatical points in the passage.

EST texts of this period were admired for their “coverage of…semi-technical language” (Dudley-Evans & St. John, 1998, p. 21). However, they were also found to be pedagogically and theoretically unsound: “The passages were dense and lacked authenticity, the accompanying diagrams were not very supportive, and worst of all, the exercises were repetitive…” (p. 22). Doubts about the application of register analysis to teaching English for science and technology led EAP research away from linguistic form toward communicative purpose and role, through the use of rhetorical analysis (Robinson, 1980). Yet, Robinson (1980) acknowledges a place for register analysis in local settings: “ESP courses should be designed locally for specific target audiences with any register analysis confined to the particular set of textbooks for their special subject that a particular class employs” (p. 19). As Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998) point out, although register analysis is no longer the focal point of EAP research and teaching, the use of computers has led to a resurgent interest in quantifying grammatical features of ESP texts.

Rhetorical Analysis

The second stage of EAP, during the 1970s, was more rhetorical in focus. Rather than simply enumerating and describing linguistic features of scientific English, researchers investigated the relationship between grammatical choices and rhetorical purpose. The Washington State ESP group is usually cited as an example of discourse analysis during this period, especially its identification of levels of abstraction and rhetorical functions in scientific texts. Whereas register analysis dwelled on the grammar of sentences, this group attended to paragraphs. Hoping to help engineering students “manipulate scientific and technical information” (p. 128), Lackstrom, Selinker, and Trimble (1973), members of the Washington State group, studied two areas of grammar that their students struggled with: articles and tense choice. In particular, they focused on how presuppositions, “information shared by the technical writer and reader,” affect surface-level syntactic choices of articles and tenses within paragraphs. They were not as much interested in “physical paragraphs,” groups of sentences demarcated by indentation, as they were in “conceptual” ones, “organizationally- or rhetorically- related concepts which develop a given generalization in such a way as to form a coherent and complete unit of discourse” (p. 130).

To explain how concepts within a paragraph (defined in this way) interrelated, they offer a rhetorical-grammatical process chart for EST of four discourse levels with different rhetorical purposes but related hierarchically to each other. In the chart, the four rhetorical levels, A-D, are: purpose of the total discourse; function of the units that develop the purposes of Level A; rhetorical devices employed to develop the functions of Level B; and relational rhetorical principles that provide cohesion with the units of Level C. Level A includes presenting information, presenting a proposal, and detailing an experiment. Level B includes reporting past research, discussing theory, and stating the problem. Level C includes definition, classification, and explanation. Level D includes natural principles, such as time and space order, and logical principles, such as analogy and exemplificiation. In addition, for each level the authors include grammatical choices, articles, and tenses.

The rhetorical-grammatical process chart describes EST paragraph development as a set of hierarchical relationships constraining and guiding rhetorical choices. Building on this type of rhetorical analysis, Selinker, Todd- Trimble, and Trimble (1978), discuss a second method of paragraph development, rhetorical function-shift development. Whereas in the first type of paragraph development, generalizations and supporting statements are clearly stated, in the second type “clearly stated core ideas are seldom found” (p. 314). In addition, shifts in these paragraphs from one rhetorical function to another are not signaled, making comprehension difficult for students, according to Selinker, Todd-Trimble, and Trimble (1978). To improve the comprehension of EST texts, they taught students to anticipate shifts by carrying out rhetorical analysis, sensitizing them to changes in communicative purpose occurring in paragraphs.

Drobnic (1978) offers an example of rhetorical analysis applied to teaching materials in his discussion of a course for Taiwanese nuclear engineers. To introduce the relationship between physical and conceptual paragraphs, he first gave students a three-paragraph text on atomic fuel published by the U.S. government. The text defines atomic fuel and discusses the ingredients used to produce it. After reading the text, students completed fill-in-the-blank questions about each physical paragraph and then constructed a flowchart of all the information in the text.¹ According to Drobnic, the flowchart allowed students to grasp “the conceptual unity of the stretch of text” and to become “adept at recognizing conceptual paragraphs” (p. 11) in subsequent lessons.

Other classroom materials based on rhetorical analysis include the English in Focus series, edited by Patrick Allen and Henry Widdowson between 1974 and 1980, nine textbooks, each dealing with a different subject area, including medical science, agriculture, and social science. In their introduction to the teacher’s edition of English in the physical sciences, Allen and Widdowson (1974), explain that their goal is “not to teach more grammar, but to show students how to use the grammar they already know” (p. xi). That is, the authors assume that students “have a considerable dormant competence in English” as well as “knowledge of basic science” (p. xi). The aim of the textbook, therefore, is not to teach science per se but, rather, “to develop in the reader an understanding of how this subject-matter is expressed through English” (pp. xi– xii). To carry out this goal, the authors offer eight units, seven of which open with a short simple reading passage, followed by exercises referring back to rhetorical features in the passage. The units also include guided paragraph writing and a longer reading passage intended to “approximate the kind of language that the student will find in his scientific textbooks” (p. xii).

However, assumptions on which the English in Focus series was based have been questioned. Robinson (1980), for example, challenges Widdowson’s hypotheses that the deep cognitive structures of the sciences exist independently of their realizations in various languages and that students draw on their prior acquisition of those deep structures when learning the surface forms of scientific English. According to Robinson (1980), this formulation assumes that knowledge is separate from language and that with input from EST teachers, students can call on a storehouse of nonlinguistic scientific knowledge when learning the surface forms in the target language, a dubious and untested hypothesis, also questioned by Swales (1988). Knowledge is socially constructed, not universal or nonlinguistic, according to Swales. It is “influenced by national, social, cultural, technical, educational, and religious expectations and inspirations” (p. 72). Nor can the prior teaching of scientific knowledge in L1 be assumed, Swales points out, further calling the rationale of the English in Focus series into question.

Starfield’s (1990) discovery that the Allen and Widdowson textbooks were not applicable to her teaching situation at the University of the Witswatersrand, South Africa supports Swales’ (1998) critique of the series. Finding that her non-native speaking students had not been taught science in L1 in high school, she was forced to reject what she calls the Widdowsonian translation approach: “based on ‘translating’ into English the knowledge the students is already presumed to have in the L1” (p. 87). Her university students had been taught science in L2 by high school teachers who were themselves non-native speakers of English and who were found to be proficient neither in English nor in science. Therefore, “few assumptions can be made about students’ scientific knowledge or their language proficiency” (p. 87). In place of the translation approach, Starfield organized team-teaching, where language and subject specialists planned and cotaught courses, thereby “embed[ding] language in the reality of students’ mainstream course content” and “reducing cognitive demands on them” (p. 88). Other examples of team-teaching and linked courses, aiming to contextualize language teaching, are discussed later in this chapter.

Study Skills and Needs Analysis

Increased attention to how students acquire English in academic settings shifted emphasis from linguistic and rhetorical forms to study skills and strategies. In fact, the interest in study skills was so great that by the late 1980s, Jordan (1989) declares: “Study skills is seen as the key component of EAP” (p. 151). Coinciding with this development was the appearance of needs analyses describing the types of tasks, skills, and behaviors required of learners in present and future target situations. Munby’s (1978) taxonomy of skills and functions and Richterich and Chancerel’s (1977) systems approach, sponsored by the Council of Europe, are needs-analysis prototypes from that period. Jordan (1997) classifies Munby’s approach as “target situation analysis,” concentrating on precourse assessment of the skills required in future courses. The Council of Europe’s systems approach, according to Jordan (1997), is “present situation analysis,” an ongoing assessment of a large number of variables, including the learner, teacher, institution, curriculum, assessment, and the interaction among them. Jordan believes that subsequent needs analyses have been “refinements to the starting positions of present situation and future/target situation” (p. 25).

Target Situation Analyses. During the early to mid-1980s, EAP researchers in U.S. universities conducted target situation analyses to discover the skills and assignments ESL students were likely to encounter in future academic classes across the curriculum (Horowitz, 1986b; Johns, 1981; Ostler, 1980). These studies were, in part, a reaction against the growing interest in process approaches in L1 and L2 composition research and teaching. EAP specialists were concerned that the focus on students’ writing processes detracted from what they saw as the business at hand: preparing students for courses across the curriculum. They rejected the premise of process advocates, such as Zamel (1976, 1982), who argued that if students were guided through the same types of activities carried out by professional writers—invention, drafting, revising and editing—they could apply these practices to any assignment they met. Horowitz (1986a) was especially critical of the emphasis on conferencing and revision, pointing out that some types of academic writing, such as essay examinations, do not call for multiple drafts. Instead, they are timed writings designed to test knowledge: product, not process. Horowitz (1986a), therefore, believed that process writing was inadequate, perhaps harmful, preparation for the demands of academic courses.

To discover those demands and provide “realistic advice about appropriate discourse structures for specific tasks” in EAP (p. 447), Horowitz (1986b) surveyed writing-assignment handouts and essay-examination questions from 36 faculty (out of 750 contacted) at a midwestern university. According to Horowitz, the most important finding of his survey was that the writing tasks were highly controlled by faculty who offered detailed instructions about content and organization. His data analysis includes a taxonomy of writing tasks, including summaries of/reactions to a reading; annotated bibliographies; syntheses of multiple sources; and research projects. It also includes a set of skills required for carrying out those tasks: selecting relevant data from sources; reorganizing data in response to a question; encoding data into academic English. In his pedagogical recommendations, Horowitz proposes exercises to “simulate university writing tasks in a practical way” (p. 455) and to offer students ways to work on “information-processing problems” (p. 460).

Having concluded from his survey that “[g]enerally speaking, the academic writer’s task is not to create personal meaning, but to find, organize, and present data according to fairly explicit instructions,” Horowitz (1986b) recommends an emphasis in EAP on “recognition and reorganization of data” rather than “invention and personal discovery,” tenets of process writing. (p. 455) Perhaps revealing a lack of conviction about the generalizability of his finding, Horowitz tentatively proposes EAP curricula based on his small sample at a single university. Yet, he also calls on EAP teachers to conduct their own target situation analyses. That is, he simultaneously recommends restructuring of ESL teaching based on an admittedly limited survey and suggests further research in local contexts to bring EAP instruction in line with the cognitive and linguistic demands of college courses in those institutions.

A similar tension appears in Johns’ (1981) report of a survey of 140 faculty at San Diego State University. The author makes recommendations based on her small sample and calls for further research at her own institution and at others to “teach more of the skills that the students will actually need” (p. 56). In her study, Johns asked respondents to rank English skills in order of importance for a particular class they taught. Finding that reading and listening were ranked highest among faculty teaching lower- and upper-division classes, Johns (1981) recommends “systematic teaching of listening and note-taking” (p. 56) in EAP classes and a de-emphasis on speaking and writing, except in the service of lecture and textbook comprehension: “Writing, for example, could involve the paraphrase or summary of reading materials or the organization and rewriting of lecture notes” (p. 56). Curiously, the finding that the majority of faculty, except those in engineering, ranked general English above specific-purposes English is dismissed as a matter of ignorance: “There could be ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part I: Theory and Politics
• Part II: Practice
• References