[ELTWeekly Volume 6, Issue 22 | September 15, 2014 | ISSN 0975-3036]
The OUP ELT blog has published an article dealing with international tests.
First and foremost, you’ll want to know what EAP really is. ‘What is EAP?’ might sound like a straightforward question, but there’s quite a lot to it. For some people EAP means study skills – for example making notes while listening to a lecture – yet there’s much more to EAP than this.
It’s helpful to start with the three key words in EAP – English, Academic, Purposes – and look at each of these in turn.
What English should we focus on?
English is such a vast language that we need to be clear about what’s most relevant for our students, and spend time on this. We simply don’t have the time to cover everything.
For vocabulary, it’s useful to divide the language up into three broad groups:• Core vocabulary – the most frequent words including prepositions and determiners, and frequent nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs
• Academic vocabulary – this is central to EAP and includes all the words which express meanings in any discipline, for example ‘argument’, ‘in terms of’, and ‘significantly’