Ahead of his talk at IATEFL 2015 about developing elementary English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students’ academic language, Edward de Chazal, co-author of Oxford EAP, considers the increasing relevance of EAP teaching for elementary students and younger learners. Have you ever used the saying “The difference is academic”? The fact that it means “There is no meaningful difference”, says something about the negative historical attitude of the British towards academics! But for the purposes of EAP I’d like to propose using the saying literally. In other words, EAP is different to other English language teaching contexts and the main difference, of course, is that it’s academic in focus. At IATEFL Glasgow I was one of the conference reviewers and I used this saying as the title of my review – what I argued was that over the years IATEFL itself has become increasingly academic. Sure, there’s still a lot of fun to be had, but an increasing number of the sessions are academically-inspired, covering research, serious ideas and theories, and EAP. Ideally, sessions should be both academic and fun! If one discernible trend in English language teaching is towards more specificity including EAP, there’s another important trend too: towards teaching ever-younger learners and lower levels. And in EAP the two trends come together. Going back, many would argue that you can’t teach EAP at lower levels, like elementary / A2. Looking forward, that’s exactly what’s happening, around the world and on an increasingly massive scale. I argue that as EAP teachers we should engage with this process and shape it. Let’s start by looking at EAP. What is the essence of EAP, and can it happen at A2? Big questions, short answers: at its heart EAP is about using academic language in a meaningful way; and yes, A2 is a great place to be doing this. For the first question, remember that the ‘E’ in ‘EAP’ stands for ‘English’, and the ‘A’ is for ‘Academic’. EAP students may be at an elementary level in terms of their English language, but they’re not elementary in cognitive terms. When we start teaching them they will already have had many years of schooling, usually have chosen a subject to study, and are planning to do so in English. We do them no favours by dumbing down the content and skills, provided these are achievable. So, what language can A2 EAP students learn? Time is limited, and we need to spend much less time on verbs, and more on nouns. Verbs are useful and necessary, but it’s inefficient to work through all the tenses; instead let’s stick to the present and past tenses, plus the passive as it’s widely used in academic texts. Nouns are far more frequent in academic texts, and a particular feature of such texts is the large proportion of noun phrases. The latter are all but absent from general English coursebooks, but should form a major part of EAP materials at this level. There are other key language areas too, including working with different sentence patterns, linking language, and specific areas like the language of evaluation. Above all, language learning needs to be contextualized and meaning-driven. In my IATEFL Manchester presentation I’ll be investigating what academic language we can focus on with our A2 EAP students. In doing so, we’ll see how language, context, and meaning are crucial for successful learning. Participants will identify and analyse the target language in different graded authentic academic texts, and will be empowered to follow these principles with new texts with their own students. In short, as I wrote in the IATEFL 2012 Glasgow Conference Selections, English language teachers are working towards educating our students for their own education. The difference is academic.
Tag Archives: Edward De Chazal
Moving into EAP: navigating the transition
What exactly is EAP and how should it be taught? Edward de Chazal, a freelance consultant, author and presenter, discusses the challenges and opportunities for teachers moving in this area of English language teaching ahead of his webinar on the subject.
First and foremost, you’ll want to know what EAP really is. ‘What is EAP?’ might sound like a straightforward question, but there’s quite a lot to it. For some people EAP means study skills – for example making notes while listening to a lecture – yet there’s much more to EAP than this.
It’s helpful to start with the three key words in EAP – English, Academic, Purposes – and look at each of these in turn.
What English should we focus on?
English is such a vast language that we need to be clear about what’s most relevant for our students, and spend time on this. We simply don’t have the time to cover everything.
For vocabulary, it’s useful to divide the language up into three broad groups:
• Core vocabulary – the most frequent words including prepositions and determiners, and frequent nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs
• Academic vocabulary – this is central to EAP and includes all the words which express meanings in any discipline, for example ‘argument’, ‘in terms of’, and ‘significantly’
• Technical vocabulary – this includes discipline-specific vocabulary, such as ‘genome’ (genetics) and ‘flotation’ (economics and finance).
In EAP we need to focus mainly on the first two of these – core and academic. Learning subject-specific words is beyond the scope of most EAP programmes, which tend to be general (i.e. where students of different disciplines study together in the same classes) rather than specific (where classes are built round students from similar disciplines, such as engineering or economics).
In addition, there’s grammar. As Ron Carter and Michael McCarthy have pointed out, ‘there are no special structures which are unique to academic English and never found elsewhere’. What’s strikingly different is the frequency and complexity of grammatical structures in academic language. For instance, the passive is far more frequent, accounting for about 25% of all main verbs in academic texts. Complex noun phrases are very frequent too – look out for examples like ‘a difficult investment climate characterized by over-regulation’ and unpack these in your EAP classroom.
What does Academic really mean?
We’ve all got our own experiences of academic life and culture – the schools and universities we’ve studied at and the places where we’ve taught. In EAP we have to prepare our students to survive in a context which potentially has three shocks: academic shock, language shock, and culture shock. Academic institutions like universities have their own cultures and ways of doing things. There are different academic communities – to some extent artists behave differently from biologists. But there are many things in common, such as the principle of academic honesty (don’t use other people’s material without acknowledgment) and the necessity to communicate.
What Purposes are there?
The main purpose of EAP is to enable students to be able to study effectively in their chosen programme, in English. To do this, students need considerable autonomy. Autonomy and independence don’t just happen – in short, EAP teachers need to enable students to learn how to be more autonomous. Students need to learn how to study effectively, individually and collaboratively with other students. And they need many other skills and competences, such as how to search for source texts to use in their writing and speaking.
There’s another, more distant, purpose to EAP. Most students aren’t doing further study in English for its own sake. Rather, it’s a means to an end – a professional purpose.
So, there’s a lot going on in the field of EAP. In my webinar on Thursday 20th November we’ll be exploring this through the lens of ‘E’, ‘A’ and ‘P’. Join us and see what it all adds up to!
EAP in the classroom Part Three – Developing student independence
In the last of a three-part series on teaching EAP, Edward de Chazal, a freelance consultant, author and presenter, looks at effective strategies to help students work more independently.
In English language teaching in general, and EAP in particular, independence is talked about a lot. Teachers say they want their students to ‘be more independent’ and ‘work more independently’. But what does this mean, and how can it happen?
Student independence is a major aim of EAP – eventually, when they are studying in their departments, students need a significant degree of independence in order to function effectively and succeed. Typically, most of their EAP input takes place before they start their academic programme, so EAP teachers need to use materials which lead to independence. For instance, rather than presenting one particular reading text for intensive focus – an inward-looking task – a more outward-looking task would enable students to learn skills and techniques which they can independently apply to other texts.
Independence is both an abstract concept – a ‘state of mind’ perhaps – and a physical concept. Ultimately, students need to become independent of their (EAP) teachers, the timetabled lessons, and the materials. Put simply, the independent student no longer needs to be told when to study, how to learn, and what to focus on. They have become skilled at searching for source texts, selecting and evaluating what they read, and processing parts of the material into their own new texts such as essays and presentations. Linguistically, cognitively, and academically, these are complex processes.
Relying on teacher input
A key point about independence is that for many students it doesn’t just happen. The role of the EAP teacher is vital: paradoxically, significant teacher input is needed for student independence to develop, especially in its early stages.
To illustrate this, I’d like to use an example from my own education. When I was studying English Literature at grammar school (an old-fashioned type of secondary school; there aren’t many grammar schools left now), we had to analyse poems. We had never seen these poems before (they were known as ‘unseen’), and they were quite difficult. Early on in the process, our teacher would try to elicit meanings, using questions like ‘What does this mean?’, ‘Why is the poet using this word here?’, and ‘What does this line suggest to you?’ Yet at this stage the teacher did most of the explaining – we listened carefully and read closely, and by the end of the lesson we were able to understand the poem pretty well. However, I remember wondering how I would ever be able to analyse a poem myself – independently – it just seemed too difficult without the support of the teacher. This story has a happy ending: gradually we did learn how to analyse an unseen poem, and most of us in the class achieved a very high grade in our A-level exam. Significantly, this skill is transferable: poems are not the only things I can analyse.
This example tells us several things. The teacher has a key role to play, and they need to use appropriate yet challenging materials. There has to be sufficient support and staging, particularly earlier on in the process of becoming more independent. Independence takes time to develop, and students will develop at different speeds and in different ways.
Developing student independence
Conversely, if the teacher continues to do too much, their students might remain over-reliant and excessively dependent. In order to become more independent, students need to be engaged with the material, and become more responsible. In this context responsibility means taking the initiative – finding new texts, and using the available resources and technologies.
We’ve incorporated many of these ideas into Oxford EAP. The theme of the final unit in Oxford EAP Upper-Intermediate/B2 is ‘Independence’, and the lecture in this unit presents many of the ideas in this article. Integrated throughout the different levels of the Oxford EAP series are Independent Study tasks, which ask students to go and find out something new. Similarly, the sequences of tasks in the skills modules are designed to be transferable, so that the student can apply the similar techniques to new contexts. The independent student has an initiating approach to their learning; they are resourceful, reflective, and critical. They like to go beyond what the teacher and the materials require them to do. In short, the ultimate goal of EAP is independence, and with good materials and teaching, it is highly achievable.
This article first appeared in the February 2014 edition of the Teaching Adults Newsletter – a round-up of news, interviews and resources specifically for teachers of adults. If you teach adults,subscribe to the Teaching Adults Newsletter now.
EAP in the classroom Part Two – Focus on listening
In the second of a three-part series on teaching EAP, Edward de Chazal, a freelance consultant, author and presenter, looks at effective listening strategies and appropriate materials to support students in their chosen disciplines.
Listening is a core activity in EAP: when students are studying their chosen disciplines, they will have to deal with a range of spoken texts – which involve listening. For many people academic listening implies lectures, yet there many other types of spoken text: presentations and papers; seminars and discussions; tutorials and small-group events; one-to-one meetings and supervisions; collaborative activities such as group work and projects; and more informal activities like dealing with administration staff and social interaction. These can be highly varied – from informal to formal, straightforward to complex, transactional (e.g. a lecture) to interactive (e.g. a group project).
Accessing the content further
Clearly a lot of information is given through spoken texts, and students need to be able to understand them. However, understanding is just part of the story. Listening is not simply a passive activity. Two key roles of the academic listener are interpreter and recorder. The listener has to work out the meaning of what they are listening to, including the speaker’s main points, arguments, and stance. They may also have to record this information, for example by making notes. In this way the listener can access the main content – via their notes – to use in future spoken and written texts. Lectures can be highly complex, and taking notes typically involves far more than listening and writing. In short, lectures are integrated, cyclical, and multimodal. Lectures are integrated as they develop a topic which students might be reading about, talking about in seminars and discussions, and ultimately writing about in their essays and assessments. They are cyclical in that they form part of longer cycles of knowledge: the material in lectures may also be developed and presented in conferences, and then published in articles and textbooks.
Multimodality means using various ways and technologies to present information. These can include visuals (such as PowerPoint slides), embedded hyperlinks to external content such as websites and podcasts, other video and audio content, as well as other spoken and written texts including student questions and handouts. Any or all of these may be incorporated into a single lecture.
These characteristics mean that students have to work with multiple inputs of text, knowledge, and language; furthermore, while doing so they have to respond to these inputs by making notes (in a lecture) or making a relevant contribution (in a discussion). Challenges for the student include language (phonology, vocabulary, grammar), and other aspects such as reading a lecture slide while listening, or dealing with the cultural dimensions of the input.
Effective learning strategies
Given all these characteristics and challenges, how can EAP teachers facilitate effective learning? Above all, learning needs to be focused and realistic, with clear objectives. Good materials are vital. Time is limited, and students typically have a great deal to learn. It is better to follow these principles and make some measurable progress, for example by moving from B1 to B2, than adopt a ‘hope for the best’ approach through unfocused activities such as exposure to a series of difficult lectures without providing the appropriate support. Think of someone you know who has lived in a foreign country for years without learning much of the language – lots of exposure in itself is not the same as moving forward in terms of language level.
To be effective, EAP listening tasks need to be staged, scaffolded, and supported. This support can take the form of sample texts to aim for (such as student presentations), carefully selected language for intensive focus, and achievable outcomes like completing a set of notes. With lectures, the tasks can include relating the information on visuals to the lecturer’s spoken text. In addition, reading is a good preparation for listening – in authentic academic contexts students typically read something on the lecture topic before the lecture. Finally, follow-up tasks can be very useful, for example identifying and noting down material in a listening text to use in a new speaking or writing text.
What can we learn from these observations? Listening is a core activity in EAP, and it requires a complex set of skills and language. By using appropriate materials with achievable learning objectives, we can enable our EAP students to overcome these challenges and develop their academic listening skills.
This article first appeared in the January 2014 edition of the Teaching Adults Newsletter – a round-up of news, interviews and resources specifically for teachers of adults. If you teach adults,subscribe to the Teaching Adults Newsletter now.
Using authentic texts in the EAP classroom
What exactly are authentic texts, and how should we use them? Edward de Chazal is a freelance consultant, author and presenter. In the first of three articles on the subject, Edward takes an in-depth look at authentic texts and how bring them into the EAP classroom.
Authentic texts are widely used in EAP, and clearly there are good reasons for doing so. When students are studying in their chosen disciplines, they have to read authentic academic texts such as textbooks and journal articles, so it makes sense to bring these into the EAP classroom. I have been doing this for years, which has prompted me to think more deeply about exactly what authentic texts are and how to use them.
What is an authentic text?
An authentic text is usually taken to mean a text which was not written for the language classroom, and which hasn’t been messed with – it retains its original vocabulary and grammar, and bits of the text have not been cut out. Preferably it is unprocessed, i.e. not retyped, so it still looks the same as it always did: the same font and graphics. In other words, authentic texts are written for any purpose other than language learning, and are intact rather than processed, adapted, or simplified.
Authenticity is a broader concept, however. Not only is the text itself authentic, but also its context and related tasks. For instance, in EAP an authentic text (such as an extract from a university textbook) needs to be situated to some extent in its intended academic context. This means EAP students need to read the text in order to gain knowledge and use selected parts of it in their own new text (such as an essay or presentation), just as they would in their university department.
Choosing an authentic text for your class
When you’re choosing an authentic text to use in class, there is also the question of level to consider. By ‘level’ we usually mean language level – whether a text is at B1 or B2, for example – but there’s another crucial aspect: cognitive level. Some texts are much more challenging than others in terms of how difficult their ideas and concepts are. When selecting a text, it’s important to think about what you want your students to get out of it. Do you want them to gain a comprehensive understanding of the whole text, or will they use it more superficially – for example, in order to identify key words? In this way, you can use authentic texts which are at a high linguistic level in your lower level classes, so long as you set appropriate, achievable tasks.
Let’s try and bring all these questions together in a possible scenario. Suppose our EAP students are recent high-school graduates planning to go to university. Their English language level is solid B1. They will have recent experience of high school exams such as IB (International Baccalaureate) or A-level. Using an IB text is ideal in this scenario: it is at an appropriate level, both linguistically and cognitively. These students usually approach such textbooks in order to learn something new, as well as to develop their English.
Developing tasks and learning outcomes
Similarly, in the EAP classroom we can come up with learning outcomes and tasks which engage with the content of the text and develop language. For instance, students learn to write a summary of a textbook extract (the learning outcome), and achieve this by identifying and noting down the main points (the task), which they then use to form the basis of their summary. In this way we’ve got an example of authentic text, context, and tasks. The EAP context reflects their future academic context as they will have to read and summarize texts in the disciplines.
In short, using authentic texts means not only selecting an authentic text, but also setting up an authentic context and authentic tasks. The concept of authenticity also applies to the level of the text, including its language level and cognitive level.
In my next article I will be discussing the nature of academic listening texts and how we can use them in the EAP classroom.