A plethora of studies on the decentering and decolonializing knowledge construction and production in global academic writing and publishing has ineluctably cast important light on how Euro-Western-centric hegemonic knowledge is preserved and perpetuated in the academia, often leading to detrimental consequences for non-Anglophones researchers and…

The internationalisation of higher education presents an increasingly urgent need to explore how universities can become more welcoming places for all students. Top-down implementation of widening participation and the inclusion of a more diverse and less prepared student population in higher education have led to social and academic exclusion,…

In the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classroom, speaking is a relatively marginalised learning activity, often employed merely to facilitate transition between activities which prioritise communication skills deemed more important. A significant consequence of this privation is limited practice in situated discourse. This paper presents a…

A wide range of English for academic purposes (EAP) programs are offered in British Columbia and across Canada. Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of an English for general academic purposes (EGAP) approach can provide important insights into how students might most benefit from their EAP program experiences. The insights in this…

Academic literacies (AL) research has made significant contributions to understandings of student writing and literacy across higher education and particularly learning development. However, researchers and practitioners both within and external to the AL movement have struggled to clarify the relationship between AL and pedagogy. English for…

Since its inception in the early 1960s, English for specific purposes (ESP) has been characterised as a materials-driven and a teacher-led movement. Distinctively separated from general English teaching, ESP teachers often function as designers and implementers in curriculum development. Attaining a certain degree of disciplinary expertise is the…

Accurate description of language use is central to English for academic purposes (EAP) practice. Thanks to the development of corpus tools, it has been possible to undertake systematic studies of language in academic contexts. This line of research aims to provide detailed and accurate characterization of academic communication and to ultimately…

In this reflective paper, we review the currently-used word classification system proposed by linguist Paul Nation (2013, 2015) and the position of the academic vocabulary in this system. Different lexical layers in this system are explained as well as the underlying assumptions. Then, taking a critical position, we raise a number of criticisms…

Recent years have witnessed a heightening of interest in the role of teachers working in EAP (English for Academic Purposes), particularly with regard to defining and debating their professional identity. However, it must be said that most authors have painted a rather dismal picture, when comparing the status and professional standing of English…

This book adopts as conceptual focus the technical mode of experience, exploring this characteristic mode of design as the angle from which the discipline of applied linguistics takes its cue. What makes applied linguistic concept formation possible? A number of elementary concepts and ideas are so basic to the discipline that they can neither be…

The rise of English-medium education has led to considerable academic interest in communicative practices in multilingual university settings. However, there is still little research into disciplinary knowledge construction in higher education contexts where English is the academic lingua franca. To address this gap, we embrace the central role of…

English for Academic Purposes (EAP) has become an increasingly prominent sector of the English language teaching profession in British Columbia, providing English language preparation for post-secondary education across a range of disciplines. This theoretical paper gives overviews of EAP and critical pedagogy, then delves into four central tenets…

This article describes the process whereby MacEwan University modified an existing EAP course, consisting of broad reading and writing topics, into an ESP course with a more targeted focus on relevant nursing-related themes to better serve the unique literacy needs of internationally educated nurses (IENs). Differing from the existing EAP course,…

In this commentary, we begin with the discussion on a brief history of academic wordlists. Adopting a comparative perspective, then, the merits and demerits of the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) and its competing counterpart the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) (Gardner & Davies, 2014) are presented. We also explore whether the AWL can…

This paper reports on a pilot course responding to facilitating academic writing for an academic writing program implemented at a provincial key university in China. Taken from an activity theoretical perspective, it discusses the practical experience collected during a pilot process of designing, implementing, and assessing a genre-based approach…