Communicative Activities for EAP
David C. Hopkins · ELT Journal · 2011
The primary goal of EAP is to meet the needs of students who are either preparing for study or are already studying in an English-medium university or college. In order to achieve this goal and teach effectively in a university context, teachers need a sound knowledge base from which to draw. This knowledge is related to the language demands made on students at undergraduate or postgraduate level and would include skills as varied as how to use the university library to carry out research for an assignment, to how to read critically, assimilate the information, and use it to form arguments in a piece of academic writing such as an article for a journal. In their excellent book EAP Essentials, Alexander, Argent, and Spencer (2008) provide a clear description of some of the key differences between General ELT and EAP. They describe how there is a difference in the kind of materials used between the two, with General ELT relying on texts and tasks that are ‘usually short and quickly covered’, compared to EAP that uses texts and tasks from university-level study that are ‘inherently long and dense’ (ibid.: 4). Another key difference, and one that is familiar to any EAP teacher, is the constraint of time. A General English student may have practical time constraints too, of course, but for an EAP student already at university there is an urgent need to be able to operate in the academic community as soon as their course begins. This means that EAP students are highly motivated and usually extremely focused and serious about what they expect from their English lessons. EAP students tend to be very tolerant: tolerant of lessons that may be more teacher centred than those they had in their previous experience of learning English, tolerant of lessons that are less interactive, and tolerant of working on protracted tasks, sometimes over a series of lessons. They are less tolerant, however, of their time being used to carry out tasks that do not appear to be tightly focused on helping them achieve their goals. The teacher does not need to worry about the students’ attention, nor their motivation, but they do need to worry about whether they are meeting their needs as efficiently as possible in the time given. Which brings us to Communicative Activities for EAP.