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Aims and principles

Aims: 

              • To enable students to take ownership of their own learning 
              • To surface occluded cultural practices and processes and thereby reduce cultural and linguistic barriers to learning  
              • To enable students to develop their ability to achieve the ‘appropriate arrangement of both content information and language in order to create extended spoken or written discourse’ (Bruce, 2008: 4) 
              • To enable students ‘to develop the means to negotiate and respond to the requirements of assignment genres’ (Bruce, 2011: 67) 

 

Principles: 

EAP or academic language and literacy development 

              • is available to all students 
              • values the diverse nature of the student cohort and works to be inclusive of all  
              • is developed in partnership with disciplinary academic programmes 
              • acknowledges disciplinary differences but builds on cross-disciplinary connections 
              • is student-centred and driven by student need 
              • is participatory, collaborative and co-constructed  
              • is holistic and embodied, acknowledging cognitive, emotional and social factors of learning 
              • is core to knowledge creation and communication 

 

Through collaboration with academics in other disciplines, we seek to develop and disseminate insights into areas that, following Ferguson (1997:85), should form the foundations and knowledge base of EAP insessional practice:  

              • Knowledge of disciplinary cultures and values; a form of knowledge which is essentially sociological or anthropological.  
              • Knowledge of the epistemological basis of different disciplines; a form of knowledge which is philosophical in nature.  
              • Knowledge of genre and discourse, which is mainly linguistic in nature. 

 

 References:

Bruce, I. 2008. Academic Writing and Genre: A systematic analysis. London: Continuum.  

Bruce, I. 2011. Theory and concepts of English for Academic Purposes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Ferguson, G. 1997. Teacher education and LSP: The role of specialized knowledge. In: Howard, R. and Brown G. eds. Teacher education for languages for specific purposes. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters. 

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