Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Series editors' preface
- Preface
- I ISSUES IN ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES
- II THE ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES CURRICULUM
- Introduction to Part II
- 11 The EAP curriculum: Issues, methods, and challenges
- 12 Twenty years of needs analyses: Reflections on a personal journey
- 13 The curriculum renewal process in English for academic purposes programmes
- 14 Team-teaching in EAP: Changes and adaptations in the Birmingham approach
- 15 Does the emperor have no clothes? A re-examination of grammar in content-based instruction
- 16 The specialised vocabulary of English for academic purposes
- 17 Language learning strategies and EAP proficiency: Teacher views, student views, and test results
- 18 Issues in EAP test development: What one institution and its history tell us
- 19 Teaching writing for academic purposes
- 20 Reading academic English: Carrying learners across the lexical threshold
- 21 Incorporating reading into EAP writing courses
- 22 The development of EAP oral discussion ability
- 23 Second language lecture comprehension research in naturalistic controlled conditions
- 24 Designing tasks for developing study competence and study skills in English
- 25 Promoting EAP learner autonomy in a second language university context
- References
- Index
20 - Reading academic English: Carrying learners across the lexical threshold
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Series editors' preface
- Preface
- I ISSUES IN ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES
- II THE ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES CURRICULUM
- Introduction to Part II
- 11 The EAP curriculum: Issues, methods, and challenges
- 12 Twenty years of needs analyses: Reflections on a personal journey
- 13 The curriculum renewal process in English for academic purposes programmes
- 14 Team-teaching in EAP: Changes and adaptations in the Birmingham approach
- 15 Does the emperor have no clothes? A re-examination of grammar in content-based instruction
- 16 The specialised vocabulary of English for academic purposes
- 17 Language learning strategies and EAP proficiency: Teacher views, student views, and test results
- 18 Issues in EAP test development: What one institution and its history tell us
- 19 Teaching writing for academic purposes
- 20 Reading academic English: Carrying learners across the lexical threshold
- 21 Incorporating reading into EAP writing courses
- 22 The development of EAP oral discussion ability
- 23 Second language lecture comprehension research in naturalistic controlled conditions
- 24 Designing tasks for developing study competence and study skills in English
- 25 Promoting EAP learner autonomy in a second language university context
- References
- Index
Summary
The ESP reading problem
With the growth of English as the lingua franca of work and study, many non-English speakers find themselves needing to attain some level of proficiency in English in order to function in jobs or courses. However, they may have limited time to devote to language learning, and little interest in knowing English outside the work or study context. Responding to these circumstances, English for Specific Purposes (ESP) curriculum designers have attempted to reduce the time frame of learning through domain targeting. They attempt to identify and teach the lexis, syntax, functions and discourse patterns most commonly used in a domain (for chemistry students, test tubes, passive voice, clarification requests and laboratory reports). This approach has given waiters, tour guides and airline pilots enough English to function in their domains after relatively short periods in the classroom. But it runs into complications when the specific purpose is to read extended texts in a professional or academic domain.
It now seems clear that the cross-domain generalities of English (pronoun system, verb tenses, basic vocabulary, etc.) can be introduced and practised within a subset of the language. Simple reading tasks such as understanding signs and instructions can be undertaken knowing only the English used in a particular job or profession. But does this hold true for reading longer texts? Consider the position of the learner who knows the grammar of English and the technical terms of a domain: text analysis shows that these terms are typically rather few (Flowerdew, 1993c), roughly 5% of tokens (Nation, 1990).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Research Perspectives on English for Academic Purposes , pp. 315 - 329Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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