English for academic purposes (EAP) has grown into a multi-million dollar enterprise over the past 25 years. EAP differs from general English courses by focusing on the specific needs of students using English for academic studies. While individual teachers have addressed academic contexts for some time, EAP emerged as a defined field in the 1970s through organizations like SELMOUS. EAP aims to prepare students for academic genres, registers, and discourse through a focus on skills like academic reading, writing, and study strategies. Needs analysis is fundamental to the EAP approach of designing courses tailored to students' academic situations.

1. English for academic purposes
by Liz Hamp-Lyons
M.A. Sem.3
Department of English,
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

2. Introduction
• Over the past 25 years TESL/TEFL in
universities/colleges and other academic settings
- or in programmes designed to prepare non-
native users of English for English-medium
academic settings - has grown into a multi-
million-dollar enterprise around the world.
• Teaching those who are using English for their
studies differs from teaching English to those
who are learning for general purposes only, and
from teaching those who are learning for
occupational purposes.

3. Background
• The practice of teaching EAP has been with us
for a long time - wherever individual teachers
of non-native students in academic contexts
have taught with a view to the context rather
than only to the language - but the term 'EAP'
first came into general use through the British
organisation SELMOUS (Special English
Language Materials for Overseas University
Students), which was formed in 1972.

4. • Although the organisation's first collection of
papers from its annual meeting was titled
English for academic purposes (Cowie and
Heaton 1977), it didn't change its name to
include the term until 1989, when it became
BALEAP (British Association of Lecturers in
English for Academic Purposes).

5. • The field of EAP was first characterised within
a larger perspective by Strevens (1977a).
Strevens saw EAP as a branch of the larger
field of English for specific purposes or ESP
(which was known in its early days as 'English
for special purposes').

6. • He described, first, a move away from an
emphasis on the literature and culture of
English speakers and towards teaching for
practical command of the language; and,
second, a move towards a view that the
teaching of the language should be matched
to the needs and purposes of the language
learner.

7. • EAP is an educational approach and a set of
beliefs about TESOL that is unlike that taken in
general English courses and textbooks. It begins
with the learner and the situation, whereas
general English begins with the language. Many
EAP courses/programmes place more focus on
reading and writing, while most general English
courses place more focus on speaking and
listening. General English courses tend to teach
learners conversational and social genres of the
language, while EAP courses tend to teach
formal, academic genres.

8. In discussing ESP and EAP, Strevens (1977b) argued
that courses can be specific in four ways:
1. by restricting the language taught to only those
skills which are required for the learner's
immediate purposes;
2. by selecting from the whole language only those
items of vocabulary, grammar patterns, linguistic
functions, etc., which are required for the learner's
immediate purposes;
3. by including only topics, themes and discourse
contexts that are directly relevant to the learner's
immediate language needs; and
4. by addressing only those communicative needs
that relate to the learner's immediate purpose.

9. • It can be seen that when all four kinds of specificity are
applied to a course, the result is something quite restricted;
this restriction resulted in some dissatisfaction with early
approaches to ESP.
• EAP, on the other hand, has generally managed to escape
these problems because the academic context has proved
able to provide subject matter that is sufficiently specific
and relevant to satisfy learners' needs but also sufficiently
general to be applicable across a fairly wide range of
contexts. It also offers subject matter that can satisfy some
of the broader educational and social aims that learners
and teachers bring to the education process. Jordan (1997)
offers a useful and comprehensive overview of practice in
EAP.

10. Needs analysis
• is fundamental to an EAP approach to course
design and teaching. If a general approach to an
EAP course is taken, the course usually consists
primarily of study skills practice (e.g. listening to
lectures, seminar skills, academic writing, reading
and note-taking, etc.) with an academic register
and style in the practice texts and materials. If a
needs analysis indicates that the study situation
is more specific, many of the same areas of study
skills are still taught, but with particular attention
to the language used in the specific disciplinary
context identified in the needs analysis.

11. The language is attended to at the levels of:
• register: lexical and grammatical/structural
features (the best-known work is Ewer and
Latorre 1969);
• discourse: the effect of communicative context;
the relationship between the text/discourse and
its speakers/writers/hearers/readers. See the
Nucleus series (Bates and Dudley-Evans (eds)
1976-85); see also the English in Focus series
(Widdowson 1974—(1980)) and
• genre: how language is used in a particular
setting, such as research papers, dissertations,
formal lectures (the work of Swales has been
most influential here; see also Chapter 27).

12. • Needs analysis leads to the specification of
objectives for a course or set of courses and to
an assessment of the available resources and
constraints to be borne in mind, which in turn
lead to the syllabus(es) and methodology. The
syllabus is implemented through teaching
materials, and is then evaluated for
effectiveness.

13. • The development of the field of EAP has been
rapid in the little more than 20 years since its
recognition as a legitimate aspect of ELT.
Nowadays it is accepted that TESL/TEFL to
learners who are bound for or participating in
formal education through the medium of English
should include a component of study skills
preparation. Even for those who have reached
high educational levels in their own language,
there are differences in study behaviours in the
Anglo tradition, and these differences are
becoming increasingly well understood through
the research described below.

14. Research
• As is the case in ESP (see Chapter 19), much of
the EAP materials development described in
the practice section below is underpinned by
work in needs analysis. The most thorough
EAP needs study was conducted by Weir for
the development of the Associated Examining
Board's TEAP (Test of English for academic
purposes), and is summarised in Weir (1988).

15. • A good overview of needs analysis is provided
by West (1994), and papers describing needs
analyses in particular geographic and
educational contexts frequently appear in the
journal English for Specific Purposes.
• Jordan (1997: 29) sees four dimensions of
needs: those of the target situation, of the
employer or sponsor, of the student, and of
the course designer and/or teacher. Research
into EAP falls within one or more of these
areas.

16. • Analyses of the linguistic and discoursal
structures of academic texts fall into the 'target
situation' category. This work includes macro-
level analyses such as studies on: the structure of
theses (in particular Dudley-Evans 1991); text
features such as hedging (e.g., K. Hyland 1994;
Salager-Meyer 1994; Crompton 1997); and
analyses of genres which are elements of 'texts',
such as paper introductions (e.g. Dudley-Evans
and Henderson 1990b) and results sections (e.g.,
Brett 1994). It also includes micro-level analyses,
such as Master's work on the use of active verbs
in scientific text (Master 1991).

17. • The term 'texts' is used in the discourse analysis
sense here, and EAP research includes studies of
spoken texts and genres such as seminars (e.g.
Furneaux et al. 1991; Prior 1991) and lectures
(most notably Flowerdew 1994a). Studies of the
textual practices of academics (e.g. Latour and
Woolgar 1986; Myers 1990; Dudley-Evans 1993,
1994b) offer another interesting area that feeds
into EAP practice and theory: by understanding
what 'experts' do, novice academics can shape
their own academic language towards those
models.

18. • Research into the academic language needs of
students is more humanistic than research
that looks at texts, genres and academic
contexts; it incorporates a wider view of
'needs' and typically includes students 'wants'
and preferences as well as more concrete
needs. The first major study in this area was
Geoghegan (1983), who interviewed non-
native students at Cambridge University; this
work made clear how students' perspectives
can be compared to those of other
stakeholders.

19. • Research in this area attends to affect, i.e.
how students feel about their study
experiences (e.g. Casanave 1990; Johns 1992);
it also includes studies pointing out
differences between students‘ wants and
expectations and staff's expectations (e.g.
Channell 1990; Thorp 1991; Grundy 1993).

20. • The related field of contrastive rhetoric combines
the textual perspective and the student
perspective, as it studies how students' academic
work (usually written work) in English is affected
by what they know about their own language
(Kaplan 1966, 1988; Connor and Kaplan 1987;
Connor 1996). Some work also queries the
consequences for students when they have to
accommodate too many of the conventions of
English academic discourse practices, perhaps
losing to an extent their sense of identity (Spack
1988; Fan Shen 1989).

21. • This work is linked to the field of'critical language
awareness' (Fairclough 1992; Ivanic 1998; Tang and John
1999).
• Not surprisingly, there is a rich body of research into
effective teaching approaches for EAP. EAP practitioners
have concentrated on solving the problems closest to
home, since EAP is a field firmly grounded in practical
needs. The largest and most prolific field is academic
writing (e.g. Robinson 1988a; Kroll 1990; Belcher and
Braine 1995; Kaplan and Grabe 1996), particularly in the
US, but there is also significant work in academic listening
(in particular Anderson and Lynch 1988; Flowerdew 1994a),
academic reading (principally in the journal Reading in a
Foreign Language; see also TESOL Quarterly and System);
academic speaking has been mainly ignored (but see
McKenna 1987).

22. • Swales and Feak (1994) reveal the symbiotic
relationship between research and practice in
their important research-based textbook,
Academic Writing for Graduate Students.
• Other research into advanced research writing
includes Sionis (1995) and Bunton (1999).
• A growing area of research concerns the
dissertation student-supervisor relationship
and its effectiveness (Belcher 1994; Dong
1998).

23. • There is also significant research into the
assessment of EAP. This began at the end of
the 1970s with the development of the
English Language Testing Service (ELTS) by the
British Council under B.J. Carroll, and
continued through the 1980s in the work of
Weir for the Associated Examining Board on
TEAP.

24. • As ELTS became the standard measure of
English proficiency for non-native speaker
applicants to UK and Australian universities, a
major validation study (Criper and Davies
1988) was conducted and was followed by a
full research and development project
(Clapham and Alderson 1996) culminating in
the introduction of the IELTS (International
English Language Testing Service) in 1989.

25. • The major EAP assessment in the US is the
Michigan English Language Institute's
Academic English Test, which is used almost
entirely internally.

26. Practice
• A main activity of specialists in EAP is
materials design and development. In-house
materials can be specific to the study context
of the students, and can be designed to suit
pre-study classes where all the practice
materials must be built into the course text, or
to concurrent courses where the materials
can be closely linked to the teaching going on
in a subject class. Published materials, on the
other hand, are inevitably fairly general.

27. • The fundamental similarities between study
demands at the same educational level can be
capitalised on in creating materials intended to
provide basic preparation for good study habits.
Among the earliest books in this area were Study
Skills in English (Wallace 1980), Panorama
(Williams 1982) and Strengthen Your Study Skills
(Salimbene 1985). EAP courses also typically
focus attention on the language skills separately:
the 'rules' and strategies of academic skills are
not like those of the general language skills, and
this is acknowledged in books such as Study
Listening (Lynch 1983), Study Writing (Hamp-
Lyons and Heasley 1987) and Study Reading
(Glendinning and Holmstrom 1992).

28. • Some of the books in the Cambridge
University Press study skills series are a
decade old now, but are still popularly used in
many countries.
• One of the aspects of EAP that attracts the
best English language teachers is the potential
for developing one's own material based on
needs analysis of the immediate situation. In
fact, all the textbooks mentioned in this
section began as in-house materials and were
later polished into textbooks; this is also true
of Swales and Feak (1994).

29. • In-house materials have the great strength of
responding directly to the local needs; however,
the more specific materials are to a situation, the
less likely it is that they will be published as
textbooks for economic reasons.
• In the USA a concern with literacy dominates the
literature and the terminology of academic skills
development (see, e.g., DiPardo 1993; Johns
1997). Readers can usefully refer to the journal
College Composition and Communication; for
attention to the literacy skills of second language
(L2) and second dialect users, readers can refer
to journals such as College ESL and the Journal of
Basic Writing.

30. Current and future trends and directions
• We can expect that more attention will be
paid to EAP at pre-tertiary (college) levels. It is
increasingly understood that children entering
schooling can be helped to learn more
effectively, as well as to integrate better into
the educational structure, if they are taught
specifically academic skills and language as
well as the language needed for social
communication (Heath 1983; Hasan and
Martin 1989; Christie 1992).

31. • In counterpoint to the probable increase in
attention to EAP in early schooling, thesis
writing and dissertation supervision are also
receiving more attention at present, as
indicated above.

32. • The knowledge base which has built around
traditional university-based academic needs has
led to the understanding that academic language
needs neither begin nor end in upper high
school/undergraduate education, but span
formal schooling at every level. Going still
further, a related development is a concern with
the English language skills of non-native English
speaking academics, especially those teaching
and researching in non-English language
countries such as Hong Kong and Singapore, and
this group's needs are beginning to be addressed
(Sengupta et al.1999). We can expect this more
all-encompassing view of EAP to develop much
further before it is exhausted.

33. • The discourse of academic literacy is more
usually found outside TESOL: e.g. in the USA in
work relating to students from ethnically and
dialectally diverse backgrounds (e.g. Berlin
1988; Auerbach 1994; Fox 1994) and in highly
politicised terms (e.g., Freire 1970 [1996];
Giroux 1994). In the UK it is associated with
the Lancaster critical linguistics group (e.g.
Fairclough 1992; Ivanic 1998); and in Australia
with the critical genre group (e.g. Cope and
Kalantzis 1993; Luke 1996).

34. • With its basis in educational Marxism and
critical linguistics / critical education,
'academic literacy' argues from very different
premises than traditional EAP. However, I
have argued (Hamp-Lyons 1994) that, despite
arising from quite different sociopolitical
contexts, the concepts of academic literacy
and those of EAP are linguistically and
pedagogically quite similar, and certainly the
different movements share a common desire
to provide appropriate and effective
education.

35. • The debate over motives and means in this
area - in the pages of the English for Specific
Purposes journal between Pennycook (1997)
and Allison (1996, 1998) - provides fascinating
insights into these issues. Part of this debate
relates to the role of English in the modern
and future world, and the evident dominance
it now has in scholarly publication in most
parts of the world (Swales 1990b; Eichele
personal communication 1999; Gu Yue-guo
personal communication 1999).

36. • We can expect this to be a fruitful and
controversial area of research - and polemic -
in the first years of the twenty-first century.

37. Conclusion
• EAP is a thriving and important aspect of TESOL
that has so far received less attention from
researchers than it deserves. It is also more
complex and potentially problematic than most
English language teachers recognise at the
beginning of their EAP teaching. Its greatest
strength is its responsiveness to the needs of the
learners; but this is its greatest weakness too,
making many of its solutions highly contextual
and of doubtful transferability. For this reason, it
will offer a rich site for study and practice for the
foreseeable future.

38. Key readings
• Allison (1996) Pragmatist discourse and
English for academic purposes
• Connor (1996) Cross-Cultural Aspects of
Second Language Writing
• Hamp-Lyons and Heasley (1987) Study Writing
• Hutchinson and Waters (1987) English for
Specific Purposes
• Swales (1990a) Genre Analysis: English in
Academic and Research Contexts