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  3. What are English for Academics and Professionals and Discipline-Specific programs?

What are English for Academics and Professionals and Discipline-Specific programs?

By Susan M. Barone & Debra Lee — 4/17/2015

The English Language Center (ELC) follows two main approaches from the field of Applied Linguistics to teach English in the university setting. One is known as English for Academics and Professionals (more commonly referred to in our field as English for Academic Purposes) or EAP (Belcher, 2006). Our EAP courses are Academic Writing and Academic Speaking. The EAP approach is multi-disciplinary and investigates similarities in writing across majors (e.g., economics, engineering, anthropology) on campus. Areas investigated include academic vocabulary development, sentence-level writing, organizational paradigms, and other writing features. Within our EAP courses, we individualize the content based on student fields of study. For our Academic Writing course, we use Academic Writing for Graduate Students by John Swales and Christine Feak (2012), to anchor the course. For Academic Speaking courses, we use a combination of texts and materials.

The other approach we use at the ELC is discipline specific, or what is known as English for Specific Purposes (ESP) (Dudley-Evans & St. John, 2000). In these courses, we use the content and norms of the discipline to develop language-focused content. We teach students to analyze, then replicate/modify discipline-specific language. We currently have ESP programs in three areas: business, education, and law. We work closely with the different departments and their students to ensure that the courses reflect the discipline-specific language, structures, and organization.

For both programs, we focus on how language is situated in the specific contexts found on the Vanderbilt University campus.

  • Belcher, D. D. (2006). English for specific purposes: Teaching to perceived needs and imagined futures in worlds of work, study, and everyday life. TESOL Quarterly, 40(1), 133-156.
  • Dudley-Evans, T. (2001). Team-teaching in EAP: Changes and adaptations in the Birmingham approach. In J. Flowerdew & M. Peacock (Eds.), Research perspectives on English for academic purposes (pp. 225-238). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Dudley-Evans, T., & St John, M. J. (2000). Developments in English for specific purposes: A multi-disciplinary approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.