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…

The view of academic discourse as a rhetorical activity involving interactions between writers and readers is now central to most perspectives on EAP, but these interactions are conducted differently in different disciplinary and generic contexts. In this paper I use the term "proximity" to refer to a writer's control of those rhetorical features…

The presence of unfamiliar words and expressions in academic texts is a serious obstacle to students reading in a second language. EAP has responded to this challenge by taking the view that there is a common core of academic vocabulary which is frequent across an academic register. This paper briefly considers this view by examining the range,…

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)

Examines hedging in textbooks by focusing on the coverage of lexical items as markers of uncertainty and tentativeness. Tentative language continues to be a source of pragmatic failure in the writing of second-language science students. Hence, it is suggested that pedagogic writing materials would benefit from revisions based on authentic data.…