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GE or EAP? What should I be teaching?

At one time, nearly all English language classes involved General English (GE). Teachers and course organisers, even the students themselves, did not know precisely why they were learning English. It was simply felt that a knowledge of the language would be used, for travel and tourism perhaps, or for work in an international company. But times are changing. Most English language classes now involve, or should involve, English for Academic Purposes (EAP), because a huge number of students of English go on to study at university level wholly or partly in English medium. What is the difference between planning and teaching a course for GE students and a course for EAP students? Here are six ideas which will help you to help your EAP students.

Find out real needs

Try to find out exactly what your students will be expected to do in English. It may seem selfevident but not all English-medium faculties require the same skills from their students – see Table 1: Needs Analysis. Teach all and only the skills they actually need. If you are not in a position to find out actual needs, make sure your course covers a range of the academic purpose skills in Table 1, rather than falling back on GE items such as eavesdropping on a conversation or reading short grammar-led texts. Remember that, unlike when you have taught a GE group, the success of your teaching is going to be put to the test immediately. Your students will go to the faculty after leaving you and if they can’t cope, they will blame you.

Show Table 1: Needs analysis

Teach useful vocabulary

The work of Stephen Pinker and others on vocabulary acquisition suggests that, in the three years of university, native-speaker students expand their vocabulary enormously. This is almost certainly because they are exposed to a much wider vocabulary in the written and spoken texts they encounter during these years. Even if your students come to you with a wide GE vocabulary, they still need a functional command of common EAP words and phrases – see inter alia the Academic Word List (Coxhead) and the academic work in the Longman Grammar of Written and Spoken English (LGWSE). In addition, they need to know many content words, from their own discipline and related ones, which brings us on to…

Present useful content

Make sure you use content-rich texts with your students, not frothy, inconsequential EFL stuff. Your students will shortly enter a world of academia, with its plethora of facts, opinions, theories and abstruse arguments. Part of your job on an EAP course is to ensure that they are at first base with the language they need in order to discuss the current views in their own field, future directions in the field and perhaps the historical background, too. If you are not sure what field your students will be entering, or you do not have an homogenous group in this sense, don’t panic. Studying work in any one field will help students to understand work in other fields, at least in terms of academic words, discourse structure and sign post language. In such a case, it is probably good to take texts from a range of disciplines. The Encyclopaedia Britannica divides human knowledge into ten broad areas – see Table 2: Areas of Knowledge. A ten week course based on a different area each week would probably be very effective, as well as engaging the interest of the students. It will also expose them to some of the huge number of new words which they will meet in their faculty work.

Show Table 2: Areas of Human Knowledge

Teach useful receptive skills

One common approach to EAP follows the argument that “students are going to have to cope with complex texts in the near future so we must expose them to complex texts in our EAP course”. This is not helpful. At best, it is a test of their ability. At worst, it is a confidence-sapping exercise. Be prepared to simplify material in the early stages of the course while, at the same time, teaching them coping strategies so, as the texts get harder, they can still extract some if not all of the communicative value. A typical coping strategy in the skill of academic listening would be “understanding signpost language in a lecture” so you can predict what is coming then, if you miss a particular point, you can leave a gap in your notes and ask someone to help you after the lecture.

Teach useful productive skills

In faculty work, students rarely have to give their own opinion or their own experiences. Most of the time, they have to research facts and other people’s opinions and write or speak about them. In an EAP course, therefore, it is not particularly useful to get students speaking or writing about themselves, their family, their country etc. If they have any level in general English when they come to you, they will have done that to death anyway. On the other hand, it is pointless to ask students to write about global warming or nuclear power with no input texts, when the chances of them knowing anything academic about the subject are very low. It is better to give students research information and ask them to choose relevant sections and organise it into a talk or a written text. If you have given the research information, you can ensure that it contains target points you want students to cope with. In addition, you can check the accuracy of the students’ final piece of work. Finally, students can compare work and see what points they missed.

Teach useful structure

Hopefully, students who are about to enter a university level course in English medium will have a good level of GE so they will not need grammar work on basic tenses, but beware of falling into the trap of thinking “advanced student = arcane tense form”. Just because a student has achieved 5.5 on IELTS, it does not mean that they need to be able to produce “will have been being done”. Many writers on structure have pointed out that the real structural problems for EAP students do not lie in the verb phrase but in e.g.

• the noun phrase, with pre- and postmodification of the head word
• complex sentence patterns, with leading prepositional and adverbial phrases, clause joining and embedding
• use of stance adverbials which encode the writer’s or speaker’s opinion or attitude to a piece of information.

Once again, the LGWSE is excellent on these points. In addition, students need to be able to restate the work of others to make it their own, so they need to know a number of synonyms for frequently occurring items (things / elements / points / issues) and be able to produce a range of patterns which convey the same meaning in different ways. Plagiarism by non-native speakers is not just ignorance of the rules of academia, or laziness in bothering to change things. It is often not knowing how to express a point in another way.

Terry Phillips

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