After a decade of working in translator training in Israel and another of teaching English majors, two years ago I accepted a position teaching English for Academic Purposes (EAP) at a teacher-training college in Jerusalem. I walked into the EAP classroom confident that teaching EAP to future teachers would have a great deal in common with teaching Hebrew-English translation or academic writing. I walked out of my first lesson completely flummoxed. Despite my advanced degrees and considerable teaching experience, I was totally unprepared for the challenges of teaching EAP.
Here I discuss a personal case study in role reversal. I had no prior experience in dance when I signed up for a weekly class in Broadway Jazz
and I am only marginally better at dance now than I was when I began. However, my lack of progress in Broadway Jazz has been in inverse proportion to my success in understanding my EAP students.
This paper begins with a discussion of EAP, including issues of language anxiety and motivation. The focus then moves to the literature on role reversal, specifically the language teacher as language student. Against this background, I introduce my experiment in role reversal and present the parallels between my experience learning dance and my students’ experience in the EAP classroom.
The paper closes with the argument that all teachers – regardless of whether they teach first graders or graduate students – would be well advised to study something that does not come naturally to them.