Walking into the Nunn Hall in UCL’s Institute of Education and seeing a range of appropriately-distanced fellow students feels somewhat surreal but overwhelmingly reassuring after two years of almost exclusively online interactions. I find myself surprised at how tall or short many of my peers are—something impossible to gauge on a Zoom call. And then the class begins… It’s been over a year since I first started taking these first tentative steps towards a doctorate, and I immediatly find myself wondering what exactly it is that I actually plan to research? Should I be shining a light backwards on past experiences or should I be looking forwards to future possibilities? How best to wrap up my journey to this point in a helpful handful of sentences in order to explain myself to the others sitting around my table, all of whom seem to spring from unexpectedly distant industries and disciplines? What am I doing here?
Well, I have been working in the field of EAP for the past five or six years, now. EAP (English for Academic Purposes) is a relatively new term and represents an area of research and an industry which is rapidly expanding with the growth of English as a Lingua Franca and a rapid rise in internationalism at UK universities.
On a practical professional level, research in this area is fundamental to providing quality education to students; and having worked in a number of quite distinct institutions in teaching and senior positions, I appreciate the importance of having a handle on all matters pedagogical in this regard. However, it’s not just about getting the job done.
Underlying existential questions regarding this young discipline often prove the elephant in the room for those working in the field. The swell of international students at UK universities has been accompanied by a range of ethical issues: the creation and privatisation of departments servicing their educational needs; segregation or creation of specific degree programmes or pathways intended solely for international students with lower academic standards; efforts toward inclusivity through integrating subject-specific content and criticality into EAP courses and questioning the division of “native” and “non-native” speakers.
Increasing scrutiny has also been directed toward the inherent linguistic imperialism of adopting English as the principle vehicle of the academy, commerce, technology, and international governance. While this may seem an unneccessarily politicised and hopelessly theoretical approach, fundamentally opposed to engaging with the day-to-day mechanics of the overwhelming majority of EAP classrooms based in the Global South, the contrary may well be true. Some of the key tenets of ELT pedagogy are based on questionable premises which could prove a stimulating point of departure for exploring alternatives.