knowledge base is under-explored by teachers and the divide between research and practice in EAP has reached a critical point.
EAP practitioners, according to Ding and Bruce (2017), by not getting truly involved in scholarship find that they are not viewed as an integral part of the academy (and often don’t view themselves as such). In this way, EAP units open themselves up to threats from outside, private providers and a de-valuing of the work they do. This occupancy of the margins of the academic space also often leads to a physical and structural confusion around the place and value of EAP. While many EAP units, when not outsourced to private companies such as Into or Kaplan, are housed in ‘Language Centres’, these centres themselves are housed in a variety of University spaces – or ‘third spaces’ as Hadley suggests (2015). In the UK, these include being part of an Academic Development Unit, a separate service unit, part of central student services; a ‘wing’ of an Academic School (usually Education or Languages and Cultures, but occasionally in less obvious places like Business Schools) as well as being fully integrated into an Applied Linguistics department. Depending on the positioning within the structure of the University, an EAP practitioner will have greater or lesser impetus, time and resources to engage in developing a knowledge base that takes them beyond the delivery of provided EAP materials and working to bridge the research practice divide.
This position is exacerbated by two further external influences. The first is the nature and timing of the EAP teaching year. Financially, the most lucrative teaching period for EAP is the summer, when international students arrive to take a pre-sessional programme for, commonly, 6 to 12 weeks prior to joining their academic programme in midto late September. The purpose of these pre-sessional programmes is to prepare international EAL students for the linguistic and literacy demands of university study in English; in the main however, the students who attend pre-sessionals do so because they have not yet met the language proficiency requirement of their academic programme via an IELTS or equivalent test score and are able to use pre-sessional assessments as an alternative. Pre-sessionals are intense periods of teaching and learning, involving both an exponential increase in student numbers for the EAP unit, and a commensurate increase in staff to teach them. This means either that an EAP teacher is engaged to work on short-term contracts and has limited job security and is thus denied the financial and institutional resources and support to engage in activities that enable them to develop and deepen their knowledge base, or, for those fortunate to have more permanent contracts, the traditional time for reflection on practice and for scholarship that is available to others on teaching and scholarship contracts, is not available. This context perpetuates the position of the EAP practitioner as just ‘a “language teacher” with no connection to political and social issues’ (Gee, 1990 in Turner, 2004: 107).
The second, powerful external force, is the relative hegemony of the IELTS exam as an indicator of language proficiency for international EAL student entry into UK education. Although in some contexts, Universities are beginning to accept other measures of language and academic literacy skills, EAP practitioners frequently find themselves having to build their teaching around the impact of this exam – whether it be moving students away from habits developed as a result of studying for the test (which, for example, requires students to write only 250 words of unreferenced argument in response to a generic ‘essay’ question), or helping students prepare for the test itself. EAP teaching and IELTS teaching are often wrongly conflated. Outside the EAP and language teaching community, there is only a vague understanding of what the different IELTS levels mean (Benzie, 2010; Murray, 2016a). Thus, academics and students alike can often work on the assumption that the stated entry level for TPG study (typically in the United Kingdom 6.5 overall with no less than 6.0 in any of the four skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening) equates to a level that will enable access to the study content with no further need for language development. In fact, contrary to this belief, IELTS itself suggests that at 6.5, for a ‘linguistically demanding academic course’ that ‘English study is needed’; for ‘linguistically less demanding academic courses’, the student’s level of English is ‘probably acceptable’ (IELTS, 2017). This does beg the question as to what kind of TPG programme could be classified as linguistically less demanding, particularly if it is one studied in the United Kingdom, alongside a global community of peers for whom English is the only common language for knowledge and social exchange.
This conflation between IELTS and EAP places EAP practitioners in a difficult position because, arguably, it devalues the complexity of the work involved in de-coding disciplinary knowledge communication discourse and in working with students to enable them to access the academy. Critically, it is often the EAP unit that becomes the target of blame when students on a programme are deemed to be struggling due to language proficiency. Thus IELTS and concurrently language is viewed as the ‘catch-all term for problems with unmet standards, and the need for remediation’ (Turner, 2004: 99) which Turner also argues results in the denial of academic respect to EAP teachers and their students. ‘The dilemma for the academic literacy pedagogies is that they are only tolerated while they remain remedial … the remedial positioning of language work is necessary in order to maintain the culturally embedded and socially embodied “habitus” of being academic’ (Turner, 2011: 37), in other words language is seen as part of the physical embodiment of an academic; it is ‘who they are’ or ‘who you become’ implicitly rather than something that can be analysed, de- and then re-constructed explicitly and expertly. I argue that it is part of the role of EAP practitioners to change this perspective amongst their academic colleagues that few are, as yet, fulfilling.
Thus, while many international students, are struggling to access their own academic ‘community of practice’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991) because the current apprenticeship does not explicitly acknowledge its shared language as something to be learned and are thus facing perceptions of being in deficit linguistically and feeling culturally excluded, their first point of contact is often with EAP teachers who are also relative outsiders to the academy. Many of these practitioners, particularly over the summer pre-sessional period, are employed with little experience, little time to equip themselves and occasionally dubious credentials. This does, then, raise the question as to how well EAP does the job it is tasked with doing, of giving ‘students access to ways of knowing’ (Hyland, 2018: 390). If EAP units, and language learning and teaching, are disconnected from and undervalued by, the rest of the academy, how do students, EAP teachers and content teachers understand where language and content knowledge connect and disconnect? How does this view of language and its place in knowledge communication impact on their teaching and learning practices and their identity as members of an academic community? And how can teaching and learning be truly inclusive and international if a focus on the (globally dominant English) language used to communicate the knowledge being gained is outwith the written curriculum? Within this book, I aim to draw out these complex themes and questions, demonstrating how they overlap, intersect and, at times, contradict. In doing so, the narratives and experiences I present feed into a global conversation and hopefully present some clear suggestions as to how to think differently and work more collaboratively to ensure that language becomes more visible across the higher education curriculum and that all students are better supported in accessing and demonstrating their own emerging knowledge.
1 The Accidental Scholar
While not the primary focus of this book, I feel it is necessary to outline my own position in relation to the investigation I undertook, and the context within which it took place. This is, in part, to acknowledge the contextualised and subjective nature of the study. As a participant as well as investigator in an ethnographic study this needs to be highlighted and recognised (Street, 1995: 51) whilst maintaining its relevance beyond the local. I also hope to provide some insights into the messy process of scholarship of learning and teaching, how it fits into the wider Higher Education landscape in the United Kingdom and to encourage other EAP practitioners who are considering or developing their own scholarship profiles.
The scholarship of learning and teaching has only recently become a focus of strategic attention, at least in the United Kingdom, in line, as I discuss later, with a greater focus on teaching as well as research excellence.
