Invited Keynote Speakers

 

ABSTRACTS

 

EAP Teaching Materials: Science, Art, or Craft?
John M. Swales
In this presentation, I reflect on the disjunctive question raised in its title. I discuss first the role of research studies into the features of academic texts, into the processes of their production, and into the struggles of apprentice academics to gain effective control of this register. In what sense then is knowledge of this complex body of literature necessary and sufficient for EAP practitioners’ ability to provide valuable teaching materials? Next, I explore the role of creativity and inspiration in the design of EAP materials. Is this enough, and in what way? In what sense could smart methodology overtake the need for careful discourse analysis? As a third take on this question, I approach the concept of craft, by which is meant professional and technical skills, such as the fashioning of clear instructions, providing the “right” amount of help, and the careful sequencing of tasks. Throughout I illustrate the issues through my own struggles—and those of some colleagues—to strive for quality in the demanding context for EAP materials production. And, at the close, I attempt to answer the question raised in the title.

Some Dichotomies in Genre Analysis for Languages for Specific Purposes
John Flowerdew


Genres are staged, structured, communicative events, motivated by various communicative purposes, and performed by members of specific discourse communities (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993, 2004; Berkenkotter and Huckin, 1995; Johns, 1997). Since its inception with the two seminal works on the topic by Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993), genre analysis has taken pride of place in much of the ongoing research in languages for specific purposes (LSP). The goal of much of this research is pedagogic, the understanding being that good genre descriptions can feed into pedagogy in the form of syllabus and materials design. In this paper I will discuss a number of dichotomies for genre research.

 

Text Connection at Tertiary Level: Patterns and Functions
Maggie Charles


Ever since Halliday and Hasan’s ground-breaking work on cohesion (1976), the teaching of connective devices has been considered an important pedagogical issue. One of the grammatical resources for creating cohesion is the use of adverbial connectors (e.g. thus, however), which signal the logical relations present in the text. The use of such cohesive ties is characteristic of academic writing, but can pose considerable problems for writers who are non-native speakers of English. This paper examines the frequency and patterns of occurrence of selected adverbial connectors, drawing on data from the British Academic Written Corpus (BAWE). The corpus contains assignments written for assessment and awarded good grades in a wide range of disciplines at three universities in the UK. The data show that connectors vary considerably in frequency according to discipline and/or genre. Furthermore, even within the same semantic group, each connector may be associated with its own preferred patterns of use and with the performance of specific rhetorical functions. Thus the contrastive adverbials rather and instead tend to follow negation in the preceding clause, while however may be used to draw attention to problems experienced by the writer:

… it should be possible to calculate, or at least estimate the molar extinction coefficients. However, I was unable to find literary values for the solubility of complexes in toluene. (Chemistry subcorpus)

In order to improve connector usage at tertiary level, this paper argues that it is necessary to focus both on the patterns of use of individual connectors and on the rhetorical functions they perform. Such an approach would enable students to gain greater understanding and proficiency in text connection.

Reference
Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

 

The data in this study come from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, which was developed at the Universities of Warwick, Reading and Oxford Brookes under the directorship of Hilary Nesi and Sheena Gardner (formerly of the Centre for Applied Linguistics [previously called CELTE], Warwick), Paul Thompson (Department of Applied Linguistics, Reading) and Paul Wickens (Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes), with funding from the ESRC (RES-000-23-0800).

 

Cultural Issues in ESP/EAP
Tatyana Yakhontova


Language mirrors culture, while culture can influence language. Raising awareness of others’ cultural values and behaviors and understanding of one’ own is therefore important for learners and can help them to avoid inappropriate language use and communicative conflicts. In ESP/EAP, developing sensitivity to professional or disciplinary cultures, often in their interplay with ethnic cultural factors, is considered now to be a requirement already reflected in the content of university courses and numerous teaching materials for nonnative speakers of English.
The purpose of this paper is to show, by describing and analyzing ESP courses, taught at a Ukrainian classical university, how source language and understanding of appropriate cultural values influence content and methods of teaching English for social and professional purposes. Also, an experience of teaching an EAP course (with a special emphasis on writing) to Ukrainian doctoral students in sciences is shared and discussed. The ways and strategies of explaining cultural differences in writing are suggested, which are based on current insights from the field of contrastive rhetoric allowing us to deeper understand the notion of culture and its dynamic and evolving character. From a broader perspective, it is argued that mother tongue and national academic culture play a rather noticeable role in learning English, when it is taught outside the immediate sphere of its functioning.

 

Supplementing ESP materials: Ideas from corpus-based studies
Eleni Agathopoulou


Corpus-based research can offer valuable insights to ESP/EAP practitioners. Findings from studies that draw on specialized ESP/EAP corpora demonstrate typical and less typical patterns of language use. Also, they often reveal that intuitive assumptions regarding what should be taught could be wrong and that language descriptions in commercial textbooks or style guides may be misleading. Additionally, they highlight important phenomena commonly not included in conventional ESP/EAP syllabuses. Moreover, studies exploring non-native English corpora inform us on learner problems in academic English.

In the current presentation I will discuss some findings from corpus-based research and I will offer suggestions for the possible pedagogical exploitation of these findings in the ESP/EAP classroom. Among the topics I will deal with are: titles of scientific articles (Ball 2009; Soler 2007), demonstrative pronouns and determiners in academic prose (Gray in press), idioms in spoken professional and academic genres (McCarthy and Handford 2004; Simpson and Mendis 2003) expression of stance and use of cohesion in advanced Greek learners’ English argumentative essays (Hatzitheodorou and Mattheoudakis 2007, 2008, 2009; Mattheoudakis and Hatzitheodorou in print).

References

Ball, R. (2009). “Scholarly communication in transition: The use of question marks in the titles of scientific articles in medicine, life sciences and physics 1966–2005”. Scientometrics79(3): 1-13.
Gray, B. (in press). “On the use of demonstrative pronouns and determiners as cohesive devices: A focus on sentence-initial this/these in academic prose”. Journal of English for Academic Purposes.
Hatzitheodorou, A.M. and M. Mattheoudakis. (2007). “The Projection of Stance in the Greek Corpus of Learner English (GRICLE)”. ProceedingsofCorpusLinguistics 2007. At: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/publications/CL2007/
Hatzitheodorou, A.M. and M. Mattheoudakis. (2008). “Exploring the Μarking of Stance in Argumentative Essays Written by EFL Learners and Native Speakers of English”. Proceedings of the 8th Teaching and Language Corpora Conference. Ana Frankenberg-Garcia (ed) ISLA, Lisboa. 133-141.
Hatzitheodorou, A.M. and M. Mattheoudakis. (2009). “’It is More Than True That Television Reproduces Life’: The Effect of Greek Rhetorical Conventions on Greek Learners’ Academic Writing in English”.Selected Papers from the 18th International Symposium on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. A. Tsangalidis (ed.) Thessaloniki: Monochromia Publishing. 167-176.
Mattheoudakis, Μ. & A.M. Hatzitheodorou. (in print).“Structures of Αrgumentation in the Greek Corpus of Learner English (GRICLE)”. Language Forum: An International Journal of Language and Linguistics, vol. 35.
McCarthy, M.J. &  M. Handford (2004) ‘“Invisible to us’”: A preliminary corpus-based study of spoken business English”. In U. Connor & T. Upton (eds), Discourse in the professions. Perspectives from Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 167-201.
Simpson, R. & D. Mendis (2003). A corpus-based study of idioms in academic speech. TESOL Quarterly, 37(3): 419-441.
Soler, V. (2007). “Writing titles in science: An exploratory study”. English for Specific Purposes, 26(1): 90-102.

 

ESP/ EAP Assessment Innovations in Tertiary Settings:
Proposals and Implementations
Dina Tsagari


The field of Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) is a lively, productive and at times controversial field. Until recently, there has been very little in the way of research or publication for those who need to assess language for specific purposes. Teachers and testers have had to take what has been produced for teaching purposes, and seek to convert and adapt it for assessment. There has been very little practical guidance for test development, and there has been no attempt to develop a theoretical framework within which the assessment of language for specific purposes might develop (Alderson, 2003; Dudley-Evans and St John, 1998).
This paper discusses issues related to the importance of a distinct field- and language-specific assessment and testing component within EFL and the necessity and function of specific-purpose language testing as distinct from general-purpose language testing. It goes on to define ESP testing and orientate the audience with regard to what issues are involved in establishing the test’s language construct.
The key features of ESP tests will be presented and a comprehensive framework for ESP testing will be introduced that incorporates characteristics of the test’s rubric and input, the interaction between input and response and characteristics of assessment.
Furthermore, the paper will discuss ESP test specifications and ESP test types, together with the notions of formative and summative feedback and the distinctions between norm-referenced and criterion-referenced testing. The paper will also demonstrate aspects of good ESP test development, namely, the test’s operationalisation, i.e. the application of the qualities of good testing practices which involve validity, reliability, authenticity, impact and practicality, the test’s piloting and the test’s ‘validity mosaic’ (Douglas, 2003).
The paper will round off with a brief discussion of issues and concerns involved in other methods of assessment, ranging from tutor-assessed assignments through peer- and self-assessment to portfolio assessment.

 

Using General and Specialised Corpora in EAP Teaching
Vassiliki Rizomilioti


Corpora can be extremely useful in language teaching in general and EAP in particular. With reference to EAP, the use of corpora, with the appropriate training, can be valuable for teachers and learners, who can gain insights into the workings of the language and into the specific linguistic features of the genres and disciplines they are involved with. It may also contribute greatly to autonomous learning which is of utmost importance for students at that level. This paper first presents the types of electronic corpora that may be useful in EAP.  It goes on to show what concordances, that is, occurrences of particular words retrieved from all the texts in a corpus, in their cotext, taken from both general and specialised corpora, may reveal about collocations, lexicogrammatical patterns and other important features.  It then demonstrates ways in which this information can be used both in the EAP classroom and by learners independently to raise their linguistic awareness and to contribute to the development of skills such as reading and writing. Finally it concludes by pointing out the effect of using corpora on EAP methodology and stressing the importance of training EAP teachers in corpus linguistics methods.