First, apologies to all looking for information on Employee Assistance Programs or Education Abroad Programs. This EAP is English for Academic Purposes. I was originally responsible for the coining, so must bear some of the blame for the confusion of acronyms.
For the time being the best use for this page may be to offer some annotated data deriving from the work of the Unit and from some work done abroad, in the hope that this may be of interest to other teachers (and, in certain cases, students) of English for Academic Purposes.
Inspired by COBUILD's excellent Wordwatch feature, this page allows you to kibbitz the discussions of language points (lexical, syntactic and discoursal) that take place in one-to-one consultations when students bring us their written drafts for discussion. In many cases the revision is supported by concordance data: in other cases it employs intuition: but in all cases it depends on the joint 'negotiation' of meaning by consultant and student. New points are added on an irregular basis.
Previous Kibbitzer pages:
If you found the Kibbitzer feature useful or interesting, visit the University of Toronto's excellent page on Academic Writing.
For many years the English for International Students Unit at Birmingham University ran team-teaching sessions for Masters courses that have a high proportion of students from abroad. The team-teaching work involved recording lectures in subject departments and holding a follow-up class taught jointly by the EISU teacher and the lecturer. Inter alia we paid attention to the 'colloquial technical' language used by the lecturers to check whether the students were able to work out what it means and whether they were able - where appropriate - to find equivalent expressions that could be used in formal written English. This file is a small collection of citations (160) collected in the course of this work, together with annotations on their formal and functional characteristics. I hope the data will be of interest to other teachers of English for Academic purposes, and also to students who plan to come to the United Kingdom to study and who wish to be alerted to the sort of English they may have to deal with in university lectures.
An important part of the work of the Unit is to teach students the linguistic and rhetorical conventions that
apply in writing research reports for international refereed journals. A few years back an informal research group in EISU carried out some analysis of a corpus of approx. 434,000 words from Nature, the leading British scientific research journal. Here is a (first) fragment of that analysis: an examination of the contextual patterning of 5 'reporting' verbs in the data: indicate, show, suggest, find and demonstrate
Some EAP resources on the Web:
Kibbitzer 77: Predominate
The Airy-fairy and the Nitty-gritty
It is Presented Initially: Linear Dislocation and Interlanguage Strategies in Brazilian Academic Abstracts in English and Portuguese
This paper was originally published in 1992 in Ilha do Desterro 21 pp. 9-32. Based on a corpus of 100 academic abstracts in English and Portuguese published in the journal Ciência e Cultura in 1980-1, it examines the use of the (A)VS structure in Portuguese to 'front' certain types of information in abstracts, and whether and how the writers attempt to preserve that fronting in their English abstracts.
Five Reporting Verbs from 'Nature'
at the University of Strathclyde 9th-11th April.
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Last updated 22nd December 2000