The Development Of Eap

By Author: Alex Lee
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Ironically, from the perspective of this review, what has arisen alongside this enhanced professionalism has been a growing independence from published course materials. As teachers come to a fuller understanding of the specificity of the needs of their students, they become less happy with published course books and more confident in their capacity to develop materials which will be specifically relevant to the needs of their learners. In my own practice as a teacher of E A P in U K universities, and then as a teacher educator on the MA in ELT and Applied Linguistics at King's College, I have both experienced and encouraged this kind of independence. As this review is looking specifically at published EAP writing materials, the potential tension between the desire of publishers to create mass markets and this growing professional independence is something that will have to be Thomas Sabo taken into account.

A second strand in writing instruction in E A P programmes has had a very different starting point. While EAP in the United Kingdom can best be understood in the context ...
... of the spread of the English language to other educational cultures and the rapid growth in the number of La students entering UK higher education, the development of EAP in North America can be seen as a response to the expansion of higher education in the United States in the 19605 and 19703, and the need to strengthen the literacies of students who would previously have been excluded from university studies. Sometimes called the 'Current-Traditional' approach (Johns 1997), or more generally, 'Composition Studies', this approach to EAP is situated in a North American liberal arts tradition of teaching a common programme of composition and rhetoric in the freshman year (first year) of university studies. Johns comments:

In these approaches, which continue to influence many modern literacy textbooks and classrooms, the emphasis is on formal, 'factual' text organisation. Written texts are categorized into 'rhetorical modes', identified ways of organizing content at the paragraph or discourse level. Mode categories include 'illustration, exemplification, comparison, contrast, partition, classification, definition, causal analysis, and so on' (Silva 1990:14-5). Students are asked to practice these modes by imitating their forms, much as grammar-based classes practice correct forms at the sentence level. (Johns 1997: 7)

Methodologically, Composition Studies has also been strongly influenced by what has been known as the Process Approach to writing instruction (Flower and Hayes 1977; White and Arndt 1991). As the teaching programmes for freshman composition have often had many points in common, and as they are typically free-standing programmes with no direct links to disciplinary specific studies, it has been possible to develop teaching and learning materials which can address the needs of a large population of students and teachers, as well as a major intellectual culture with professional associations and major journals (most notable College English). This, in turn, has generated a significant mass market to which the publishing industry has been able to respond with a rich and varied range of books which purport to meet the needs of students across a wide range of levels. The issue that arises here is the extent to which materials that have been developed for this specific educational culture can be transferred to other. Thomas Sabo Jewellery Another question to consider.

In Tribble (1996), I categorized the two approaches outlined above as 'Social/Genre' and 'Intellectual/Rhetorical' and will use these terms as neutral shorthand in the rest of the review. The third tradition I need to mention is more commonly known as 'Writing in the Disciplines' in the United States and as 'Academic Literacies' (Lea and Street 1998, 2006)