Now that I am (temporarily) teaching EAP (English for Academic Purposes), I thought I would combine my Top 10’s in ELT idea with my useful EAP resources idea… Here is a list of great resources for EAP teachers and their students. As with all the Top 10 (+) lists, feel free to comment and suggest additional resources – new ideas always welcome!

Books

 EAP Essentials – by Olwyn Alexander, Sue Argent and Jenifer Spence.

This is a really useful book for anyone in EAP, whether new to it (as I am) or experienced (is my hunch) – it is a very interesting read, treating all aspects of EAP in great detail. It includes tasks throughout, which make you read actively, and a CD with lots of sample EAP materials on it. The materials are cross-referenced to in the text, and exemplify the authors’ perspectives on effective EAP teaching. The lucky teachers on the Sheffield Uni pre-sessional induction were given a free copy before Jenifer Spence proceeded to teach us how to teach EAP! I couldn’t benefit from this freebie, however, as I had already bought my own copy (last year), to try and learn a bit about EAP before applying for jobs…

English for Academic Purposes – by Edward de Chazal

This comprehensive take on EAP has the added benefit of being available in electronic form. (Generally a good thing if you are in the habit of moving from one part of the world to another on a regular basis!) It deals with the history of EAP, methodology, language, criticality, skills and more.

Online Resources

 The Oxford University Press ELT Blog

On the OUP ELT blog, you can find a number of blog posts that are EAP-related. Click on the picture to be taken to the results of a search for these posts.

 Lexico Blog

I first came across Julie Moore rather recently – at IATEFL, where I attended her brilliant talk . Since then, I’ve also discovered this blog of hers, which is full of high quality posts. Can be relied upon for good food for thought if you are EAP-oriented, or if you just like reading interesting things! In her blog, you can also find some information about the e-book she made for Teacher to Writer, How to write EAP materials. Which is another great resource for the list:

How to write EAP Materials

Writing materials is something we all do a bit of, even if it’s just for us to use with our own students. This little book is a great way to improve what you create and learn more about EAP in the process! Highly recommended.

EAP Infographics

EAP Infographics is a project in progress by Adam Simpson, and an ingenious way of presenting EAP language and functions visually. Adam also gives you a run down on the what and how of making and using infographics here . Whether you use Adam’s visuals or start making your own, your students may well find the visuals helpful as a means of making the language and functions clearer and more memorable. They may serve to clear up doubts that learners have regarding meaning and usage too.

Wordandphrase.info 

This is a fantastic tool. It is an interface for corpus analysis, which enables the user to generate definitions, synonyms, collocates and concordance lines. There is a special academic section of the site, pictured above, which is where you want to direct EAP students to, rather than the general part of the site. This tool is helpful in pushing learners to become more autonomous, as you can deal with vocabulary-related questions by directing them to explore a word or chunk using this tool, rather than relying on you. If they use a word or chunk wrongly in their writing, you can also direct them to look at it using this tool and try to correct their mistakes independently. Hopefully this approach also makes the correct version more memorable, as more processing would go into the process of correction. Learners may need some guidance initially, as concordance lines can be a bit daunting. The great thing about the concordance lines generated by this site is that they are colour coded by word type, which makes picking out patterns that much easier.

Google docs

Of course Google docs is not aimed at EAP teachers and learners. It is aimed at and accessible to everybody. If you haven’t got a gmail account, why not make a dummy account so that you as a teacher have access to this valuable tool? Many universities give staff gmail university email accounts, so you might get one that way too! Google docs is a collaborative tool. It allows multiple users to edit documents simultaneously. It also includes a chat function and a commenting function. The combination of multiple editing and chat function means that it is ideal for group projects and the commenting function makes feedback very easy. I’ve used it a lot in my EAP writing classes recently – in class, students work in pairs or groups to do activities (e.g. write an introduction, write a paraphrase etc.), compare their output with the rest of the class and I comment on their output too. The end result is a collection of e.g. paraphrases commented on by the teacher, which can then be a resource for students to come back to, if they are struggling with the element in question. I get them to submit their homework this way too, so that it, too, can be compared and become a class resource. Students can learn from their own and each other’s mistakes. And, of course, unlike the usual scraps of paper that students seem to produce when they have to write anything down, or the haphazard notebook full of anything and everything, documents in google docs are easy to come back to and look at beyond the time of production.

Academic Vocabulary 

The University of Nottingham have made this brilliant website based on Avril Coxhead’s Academic Wordlist, which resulted from research she did into vocabulary used in an academic context. Nottingham Uni have developed a collection of tools that make the list even more helpful. For example, you can paste in a text and the site will highlight all the academic words. You can also gap those words out to create an activity for students to do. You could for example do this with a transcript from a lecture: get learners to listen and complete the gaps, thus focusing them on the academic vocabulary. Students could use this tool autonomously too, to help them build up a bank of academic words collected through looking at texts or simply by using the lists and sublists, as well as associated concordance activities.

Using English for Academic Purposes: A guide for students in higher education

This comprehensive website could be of use to the teacher who is new to EAP and wants to learn more about it (ahem!) as much as for the students it is directed at. Why not divide up the site between your group of students, and get groups of them to explore each section of it. Give groups a little time to discuss what they found, then regroup the groups to present to each other about their section of the website. The next homework could be to try a different part of the website, based on needs, weaknesses and\or interests.

Useful EAP-related resources

And finally, I am including this post, even though it’s number 11,  because in it are gathered a whole lot more links to EAP-related resources, that I started collecting over a year ago now, to help me find out more about EAP because I knew I wanted to work in a university this summer! 🙂 Happily for me, I made it! Currently working at Sheffield University and loving it. (Though it’s the reason why this blog has been so quiet! Turns out pre-sessionals are all-consuming for the most part! 😉 )

I hope you find these resources useful and please do comment with further resources to add to the list! I would love to know about them! 🙂