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Jennifer Rice is an instructor at the American English Institute at the University of Oregon. She teaches a U.S. Department of State E-Teacher online course called ESP: Effective Practices in Course and Materials Design, and she recently developed and taught a pilot EAP course linked with Physics 101 at the University of Oregon.

If we think of English for Specific Purposes in terms of a tree, then the trunk splits into two main branches: English for Occupational Purposes (EOP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP).  On the EOP branch, we find courses that focus on the English needs of learners in a specific workplace, such as English for Chemical Engineers or English for Airline Pilots. On the other branch, we have EAP courses that focus on the English needs of learners in a specific academic course. English for Economics and English for Biology are two examples of EAP courses.  In these content area courses (i.e. economics or biology), the medium of instruction is English, so learners need to be communicatively competent in the language in order to be successful in the content area course. That’s where EAP courses come in. EAP courses focus on the language of the content area, not the content area knowledge. In other words, EAP instructors need not be experts in the content area, but instead, need to work closely with the content area experts to create a specific course that meets the learners’ needs.

These needs are based on a multi-perspective, data-driven needs assessment (NA) and are not simply based on the intuition of the EAP instructor. Some examples of what might be done during a NA are as follows: surveying former learners, interviewing the content area expert, observing the content area course, and conducting a genre analysis of authentic texts used within the content area course. Data gathered from these sources would indicate the language needs of the learners in this particular content course. The needs would become the basis for the EAP course goals. Goals should involve much more than being familiar with a list of technical vocabulary and should instead extend to cover the grammar, pragmatics, register and tone, discourse patterns of organization, and ways to compensate for communication breakdowns used within the specific content area.   

In order to maximize the relevancy for the learners, each EAP course should be specific for one content area. For example, English for Science and Technology is a commonly offered course, but Science and Technology can mean many different things. It could refer to people studying computer programming, medicine, environmental science, etc. All of these learners would very likely need different language skills to be successful in their specific content area courses, so lumping them all into one category of Science and Technology would be taking the “Specific” out of English for Specific Purposes. EAP courses should be very relevant for the learners enrolled because the material covered should specifically reflect and enrich what is happening in the content area course.