Abstract

EAP (English for academic purposes) as a field of academic enquiry and research has changed enormously over the past few decades. EAP practitioners are now able to draw on a large body of work that has both expanded and deepened the intellectual, theoretical and empirical foundations available to inform and direct praxis. EAP practitioners are now able to draw on, inter alia, research in academic discourse communities and disciplines, genre analysis, contrastive rhetoric, corpus-based research, ethnographic studies, critical EAP and academic literacies for guidance. A cursory glance at the contents page of this handbook is testament to the increasingly wide range of interests and specialisms within EAP, and the launch of the Journal of English for Academic Purposes in 2002 ‘was a clear indication that EAP had come of age as an independent academic field’ (Hamp-Lyons, 2011a:93). With equal enthusiasm, Hyland states that EAP ‘has done a good job of consolidating a position at the forefront of language education’ (Hyland, 2012:30).