EAP & Academic Literacy

The discussion between EAP and Academic literacy has drawn the attention among educationalists, tertiary students and some people from other academic domains. EAP, according to Hocking, “was predominantly located in the field of teaching academic writing to second language speakers of English”. It’s also a key course for students in high school or pre-university institutions before entering the university. Whereas academic literacy was focused on the more general field of writing in higher education”. The link between both is about academic writing.

As every tertiary student knows that most communication between students and lecturers are through writing at university. Students are often assessed by writing reports, essays, entries, wikis and so on. So to learn the fundamental academic writing techniques is crucial. The Critical EAP was one of valuable papers I took in my first year of BA study and taught me the principles of academic writing. I suppose it should be taught from high school so that the transition from pre-university stage to the university level is not going to have too much obstacle. Unfortunately, from my recent teaching experience, the crucial role of EAP is often treated in reductionism term as remedial, study skills, or adjunct in the literature. Many high students are having trouble to write a short (500-1000 words) essay.

I also found myself still have trouble to write essays and commentaries. The problem with me is not the structure of the writing, the foci, or approaches. I could sit here and write all day about the theories, the writing processes from different range of perspectives, orientations or approaches as based on Leki (1998). However, the struggle I’m having is to construct English language into writing, I mean to create a content which has accurate grammatical structures and the rhetorical patterns.



Reference:

Leki, I. 1998. Academic writing: Exploring Processes and Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.