Paul Thompson from Birmingham University joins me to talk about English for academic purposes. What is academic English? How much does it vary between subjects? How can teachers assigned to teach academic English figure out what to teach? Which activities from general English classes translate best to academic English classes? And asides from listening to lectures, what do university students need English for?
Hi Paul, thanks for joining us. To begin with what is academic English? Is there a way to define it and does it change much between the different academic subjects that there are? Academic English is to some extent it is a construct because when you go into different academic settings you find that there's actually quite a variety, quite a diversity of types of language use within different contexts.
Yet there are some recurrent features in academic English. You've got the sort of the typical sort of depersonalised voice. There's the importance of the noun phrase.
So spoken language, for example, tends to be characterised in terms of verb phrases. Written academic language tends to be much heavier on noun phrases. The university where I teach, Birmingham University, the pre-sessional unit used to focus on the noun phrase and start off with a sort of very basic noun phrase and then gradually make it bigger and bigger and bigger in order to help students to sort of see how noun phrases can just grow in size and information.
So you might take a verb which has been something like to measure, to measure something. You turn it into a noun, you call it measurement and then you've got the measurement. And the measurement of what? The measurement of the phases between the cycles of x. And then you might think well actually we could put something before the word measurement.
So we could say the precise measurement of the phases between the cycles etc. And that's basically just a noun phrase. It's got measurement at the beginning.
You've got the before that and then you could put an adjective to pre-modify the noun. And then you can have post-modification with all this additional information about measurement. And that kind of building around nouns is very common in written academic language.
But of course when we compare writing about literature to writing about nuclear physics we might end up saying that these are very different types of writing. But they both count as academic English. So you said that academic English varies a lot between subjects.
I mean that's definitely my experience. I've studied before engineering and education and writing dissertations for those two subjects. I found the rules and conventions to actually be very different.
That must make it really difficult for teachers I suppose to know what to focus on when teaching academic English. So how can teachers figure out what to teach? Let's say I'm about to teach a group of physics students. Academic English for physics.
How can I work out what language those students will need in order to be successful at their subject at university? Yeah absolutely. I mean I'd see that as sort of fitting into English for specific purposes. So we're looking at sort of for example working with a group of physicists.
A key concept there is doing a needs analysis. Thinking not just that you've got to teach language with a few physics words in order to increase vocabulary should be relevant to their subject. But then also think about what sorts of things do the students need to learn how to do? What are they going to be using language for? What are they going to be needing to understand? And what are they going to need to be able to do to say or write in English? One thing is to do what's called a needs analysis which is to collect as much information as possible about the kinds of language situations they're going to find themselves in.
So if they're going to a physics course they're going to be doing primarily lectures and seminars. If they're doing seminars what actually is a seminar? I did literature as an undergraduate and I had my own idea of what a seminar was. And I started working on a project where we collected data for a corpus of academic spoken English.
And I went around different departments at the university saying do you mind if I come in and record your lecture? Can I record a seminar? And some of them would look at me blankly and say what do you mean by seminar? And I thought this was such a ridiculous question because surely everybody knew what a seminar was. But in that university the science seminars tended to be practice sessions or sort of problem solution sessions where they might work through a number of practical problems which they would try to solve individually. And then they come together and work through the problems together in order to, in a sense, apply what they've been learning from the lectures to specific problems.
And so that notion of what a seminar was was quite different from my own. And I would have thought as a teacher I would need to be presenting different kinds of language from the kinds of language which you would need for a literature seminar, for example. So, getting information about the language needs of the students.
What are they going to be doing? What are they going to be engaging with? And then moving on to finding some examples. Often this is difficult to get hold of because you can't necessarily get a recording of a lecture. You can't necessarily get a recording, interactions in laboratories or whatever.
You can get a lot of written data. You might be able to get some examples of student assignments which is an excellent thing because, again, as a literature teacher I wouldn't really be able to imagine what a physics assignment is like. I'd need to see some evidence of what these texts look like and then I can start thinking about what kind of language is needed, what language knowledge and skills are needed.
And the other things that you can do is try to find a physics teacher and then ask politely if you can ask some questions. Find out what the expectations are of the staff in that department. The other thing, of course, is just to go onto the internet and do some searching for physics.
You'll be able to find quite a lot of material online. The problem is you don't know whether that's actually similar to what's being used within the context that your students will be moving to. So it's very much to do with gathering information, gathering examples of language use that you can then look at, do a quick analysis of in order to find out what language structures are relevant, what sorts of reading the students do, possibly also, to some degree, the sort of formality, informality of language interactions within that community, etc.
Great. So that was what academic English to teach. Next I wanted to ask you how teachers can teach academic English.
I think a lot of the time in general English classes, teachers get students to do tasks and activities that ideally should be related to the real world. So typical things might be planning a trip, giving directions, deciding what items to take to a desert island. I'm not sure the last one's very realistic.
But anyway, what about teaching for academic English? What sort of tasks and activities should teachers use there? Because obviously, the context that students will be using that language in might be very different to the context students will be using general English in. Typical EAP, English for Academic Purposes, textbooks, typically sort of have things which are to do with in the classroom or in the lecture theatre, which is fine. I mean, it's great that that stuff is there.
So that, for example, in spoken language, you would have a sequence of activities which lead up to doing presentations. And a lot of the time you would work in little groups and you would develop something to present to the rest of the class. And gradually you can build this up to become more and more formal and sort of academic in nature.
So the presentation is a wonderful way to get a classroom community, but also develop students' ability to present clearly and concisely. And often, if you're working with a slightly mixed group of students, so that you've got some students who are going to be studying economics and some of them are going to be studying management and some of them going to be studying accounting or whatever, that they can give presentations in which the audience is not all expert. So they need to make sure that their presentation is clear and accessible to everybody there.
And that's good stock in trade, in a sense, for spoken academic teaching activities, which develops through cooperative learning into a presentation with your subject as the main content. Similarly, lectures, you can get hold of recordings of lectures and you can build up a set of activities for comprehension, etc. Problem with that is sometimes that the content is actually not as accessible as imagined.
So that if you got a physics lecture, if you've got a genuine physics lecture, it may well be beyond the level of the students who haven't actually started their course yet and you're assuming that they're all physicists so they should understand. But the other type of lecture is to have something on, say, global warming, and the students all go, oh, not again, because it's in every textbook. Everybody does this.
And you follow the lecture. Now, teaching how to listen to a lecture can be problematic in that a whole lecture is usually too much. You know, if you've got a sort of 50 minute lecture, how are you going to break that down into parts that could be digestible without you spinning a 50 minute lecture over five lessons, making the content more and more, sorry, less and less interesting to the students as it goes on and on and on.
One thing that hasn't been focused on so much is the everyday language that's needed as well. Because part of being at a university, for example, or in any learning situation is being able to interact with others to build up good relationships, friendships with other students, to be able to talk to your teacher in an acceptable way. Quite often, students want to make a good relationship with their teacher, but they may be a little bit awkward in the way that they go about this.
So I think there's also a value in looking at the language around being on a campus. Basic things like your library book is so overdue and you go in and you want to try and excuse yourself for having brought it back late, feeling incredibly uncomfortable. So how do you go about doing that sort of thing? And that's something that we were addressing in our textbook campus talk, where we're not just looking at language in the subject, the lectures, the presentations, the seminars, but we're also looking at things in more general terms, like working together on a problem, reacting to people's statements.
If somebody says something that you don't agree with, how do you respond to that? If somebody says something you do agree with, how do you respond to that? And seeing language in academic settings is not simply a question of classroom interactions, but also interactions within the broader community.