1 What is EAP?

English for academic purposes, or EAP for short, is a large and growing area within the profession of English language teaching. Most universities in English-medium contexts such as the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and South Africa, as well as many other higher education contexts around the world with English as a medium of instruction (often termed EMI), have specialist EAP teachers. In many EAP classes, the majority of students have English as their second, third, or later language (usually referred to as English as an additional language, or EAL). But monolingual or first language English students may also attend, since ‘academic English’ is very different to the language used in everyday life (and in that sense, no one is a ‘native speaker’). Note that the term ‘EAP’ covers the reading of academic texts as well as writing, and also oral skills such as joining in seminar discussions.

EAP can involve students at a range of levels, but is most often used for university level – it could cover foundation courses, undergraduate teaching and postgraduate study. The students you’ll see in the videos here are all postgraduate students. Their English levels are quite high, but they want to learn language useful for their particular discipline. One way to find out how language is used in a particular subject area is to use a corpus, as you’ll see next.