The ability to communicate in English is now essential to academic success for many students and researchers. Not only has the language established a fairly firm grip in higher education, particularly in the lives of postgraduate students, but also in academic research, where careers are increasingly tied to an ability to publish in international…

An important component of fluent linguistic production is control of the multi-word expressions referred to as clusters, chunks or bundles. These are extended collocations which appear more frequently than expected by chance, helping to shape meanings in specific contexts and contributing to our sense of coherence in a text. Bundles have begun to…

This article considers the notion of "academic vocabulary": the assumption that students of English for academic purposes (EAP) should study a core of high frequency words because they are common in an English academic register. We examine the value of the term by using Cox-head's (2000) Academic Word List (AWL) to explore the distribution of its…

Introduces this new journal devoted to developments and understandings in the field of English for academic purposes. Briefly sketches the context within which the journal has emerged and points to some of the issues that currently influence and confront the discipline. (Author/VWL)

Explores the most visible expression of a writer's presence in a text: the use of exclusive first person pronouns. Shows that not all disciplines follow the same conventions of impersonality, and that there is considerable scope for negotiation of identity in academic writing. (Author/VWL)