Looking past limiting conditions: Prioritizing meaning in EAP

Abstract

EAP courses by their very nature are designed to help students understand and engage with academic language. Yet what if EAP practices are too far removed from academic discourse that their relevance is compromised? For better or worse, EAP teachers in Content & Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) environments often draw on EAL grammar resources to supplement the development of their situated, content-reliant teaching resources (Harwood, 2005; Lorenzo, 2013). Unfortunately, typical form-focused grammar instruction that relies on idealized, formulaïc structures can result in EAP lessons glossing over crucial concepts in students’ authentic course readings. In this article, we recount our teaching context and the realization of the gap between traditional teaching and grammar reference texts, and the instantiations of various forms of conditional language in authentic academic texts across first year university Political Science, Psychology, Physics and Economics courses. We explore the importance of conditionals and how they are typically presented; the phenomena of grammatical and logical metaphor; and suggest pedagogical activities to facilitate students’ comprehension, application and manipulation of conditional logic in their academic work.