I
suppose
you could argue that
there isn't very much difference between academic english and general English.
all the, outside of specialist and technical language
em, there aren't really any
grammatical patterns or vocabulary
that appeared in academic English but don't also occur in general English
At that level
you could say that there is very much difference
but there are differences obviously in frequency so if we take words like uh...
procedure,
process, system
then they occur much more frequently
in academic language than in general language and that becomes the focus of academic language
because they're more frequent
and therefore more important.
Em, if you look at it another way though we could say that academic english is quite
different from general English because there are certain
contexts, texts that are
special to
to academic communication so
lectures, seminars occurr in academic life but not so much outside.
Text as well essays, dissertations occurr in
an academic context but not in the general context so it's the
the features of those contexts, lectures seminars and the texts like essays,
dissertations
that become the material for
for teaching English for academic purposes.
Em, if you think about
skills for uh...
EAP
I suppose you could say that the most important skill is is writing
because that's where most of the the assessment is of students' work.
But obviously a lot of other skills go into being able to to write
successfully: reading, listening,
interacting with tutors and fellow students as well. Most of the information
we write about
is, we gather from reading so
reading skills like skimming, scanning
uh... guessing the meeting of unknown words and so on
uh... are important skills.
Lectures too - we gather information from lecturers that feeds into our writing uh...
so,
having skills for understanding lectures is important.
Different disciplines to some extent communicate in different ways
so we've tried to accommodate that in the course by
getting students to think about to find out about how things are done
specifically
in in their discipline.
So, just to take a
are very simple example
uh... different disciplines have
uh... different attitudes to the use of 'I'
in their wrighting.
Some subject areas like
education
tend to allowed the use of 'I' and are quite happy with kind of a personal use
and statements,
whereas other subjects like engineering
and tend to avoid the the use of 'I'.
And again trying to get students to
to find out about what happens in their own discipline is very much a a feature of
the course.
We've tried to to make it uh... an integrated skills approach so
it's looking at reading, writing, speaking, listening
and looking at academic culture, working in a an academic environment,
whereas a lot of other previous material has tended to focus on
one
skill so
wrighting or reading and so on.
Another thing that to some extent differentiates the material from what's
come before is is authenticity.
Um... and we very much tried to make uh...
as much of the material as possible authentic
so there are authentic lectures, the reading texts uh... are authentic
Because students are going into their academic programs and
are not going to be encountering material which has been filtered for
vocabulary.
They're going to get the
full material
that native speakers have to
read. So
to help them prepare for that, for that moment uh...
we we've
tried to focus on authentic material.
The other thing that we've we've tried to do is to uh... consider
uh... current thinking in research
and and
have tried to reflects this current thinking in the
material. Areas like genre analysis and phraseology,
and the sort of the academic socialization
for for students to become members of an academic community.