4 - Linguistic research and EAP pedagogy

Summary

Introduction

Early classroom based EAP work focused more on teaching the language and discourse patterns typically found in academic texts, in general, rather than the language and discourse of particular academic genres. More recent work has concentrated on the language and discourse of particular academic genres, as well as the process of academic writing, and the context of production and interpretation of academic texts. This chapter will review each of these approaches. It should not be read from this discussion, however, that as each new approach has emerged, the preceding one has faded away and gone out of use (Silva, 1990). Indeed, many EAP courses today draw on each of the developments listed below rather than focus, necessarily, on the one single perspective (Johns, 2000a).

Approaches to EAP writing

Controlled composition

Earliest work in EAP teaching was based on the notion of controlled, or guided, composition. This was the predominant approach from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. It was based on the behaviourist view that language learning involves imitation, repetition and habit formation. The view of language that underlay this approach was that of language as a set of fixed patterns that a speaker or writer manipulates in order to produce new utterances. There was a prime focus on accuracy and correctness and the learner's first language was seen as a hindrance to language learning and the source of errors in their second language development.