Abstract

For much of the last 30 years, a majority of investigative work in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) has been concerned with the specialized discourses that specialized groups of L2 learners need to comprehend, acquire, and appropriate. Given the scope of this handbook, we felt that the right strategy would be to downplay this side of EAP and focus on other areas where points of contact between our field and other branches of L2 teaching and learning would be stronger. Further, the genre and discourse analytic literature in EAP has been widely covered in recent collections, including The Handbook for English for Specific Purposes (Paltridge & Starfield, 2013), the Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (Chapelle, 2013), and the Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes (Hyland & Shaw, 2016). So, instead, this chapter concentrates on such matters as the composition of EAP classes, EAP and second language acquisition, EAP methodologies, particularly those that interface with task-based learning and rhetorical consciousness raising, aspects of EAP course objectives and materials design, learning styles and student involvement with corpora, and EAP approaches to the four language skills. Throughout, the emphasis is on mutually beneficial interfaces between the specialized world of EAP and the broader and larger world of second language teaching and learning.