In Sections I and II of this book, we considered general issues regarding

TASK 2 Selecting texts for teaching features of 
academic discourse
1 
Find a text (written or spoken) that would be suitable for teaching one or 
more of the features of academic discourse described above (information 
structure, nominalization, stance, source use) to an EAP group you are 
familiar with.
2 What feature(s) of academic discourse would you teach and why?
3 What makes this text suitable for these students?

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Academic discourse 103
Teaching and learning features
of academic discourse
In the previous section, we examined some discoursal issues that may cause 
problems for learners; next we consider some approaches that have been 
used to deal with such issues in EAP contexts.
If you are an experienced general English teacher, you may have used 
an approach which is based on teaching a set of grammar points using the 
deductive procedure of Presentation–Practice–Production (PPP). PPP is 
based on a view of language as divisible into discrete items that can be 
taught separately, and is thus often implemented at the level of the indi-
vidual sentence. While needs analysis may show that your students require 
practice in sentence-level grammatical features, they will also have to handle 
discoursal features, which span whole texts. It is these features that we have 
particularly highlighted in the section above. Thus even where we can dis-
tinguish an individual instance, for example of a hedge, it does not operate 
in isolation, but rather in conjunction with the statement it modifies, situat-
ing that information in relation to the entire argument. Working at sentence 
level, then, is limited in its applicability, since it does not allow us to take 
account of this wider context and the discoursal and interpersonal implica-
tions of the feature we are teaching.
Approaches to teaching academic discourse contrast with PPP in that the 
starting point is typically the text; as Swales (2002) points out, EAP is char-
acterized by its top-down approach. Genre-based work (see Chapter 4) is 
of this type, since it begins by analyzing an example of a genre, considering 
its audience, purpose and the social context in which it occurs and identify-
ing its constituent moves and steps in order to understand how its structure 
fulfils its purpose. The linguistic features of the text are studied to ascertain 
how they are used to realize this generic structure, and while individual 
features are practised, such work is performed in relation to the genre being 
taught and with an understanding of why the feature is used and how it 
functions to achieve its purpose.
When teaching a genre, students’ attention can be drawn to important lin-
guistic features by means of questions which instruct them to identify certain 
forms and link them to their functions or vice versa. Learners can also be 
asked to compare different versions of the text or to modify the text them-
selves so that they can observe the way in which changes in the text lead to 
changes in its effect. The aim is to increase students’ conscious awareness 
of a given feature, a procedure which draws on the hypothesis that learn-
ers must first notice language features before they can be learned (Schmidt, 
1990). Building on their increased awareness, students can then be asked to 
incorporate the studied feature into their own example of the genre.
In contrast to a genre-based approach, corpus-based work is a bottom-up 
procedure. Corpora (see Chapter 4) offer a useful supplement to work on texts 

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104 Teaching and assessing EAP
and are especially relevant in the case of a register- or genre-specific corpus. 
However, their most important benefit is that they provide multiple authentic 
examples of the feature studied. This allows the implementation of an inductive 
approach such as that proposed by Carter and McCarthy (1995): Illustration– 
Interaction–Induction. Illustration exposes students to authentic data in the 
form of concordances. At the Interaction stage students discuss the data, with 
the teacher retaining the option of intervention to help them notice features 
and come to conclusions. Finally, at the Induction stage, students formulate 
their own rules or generalizations derived from the data. This procedure also 
promotes noticing and encourages students to make and test hypotheses.
How, then, can features of academic discourse be taught? We have out-
lined some possible options above and clearly your work must fit within 
your own context and meet the needs of your learners. However, it is impor-
tant to adopt an approach that allows for the teaching of discoursal fea-
tures to be integrated into work on texts and for students to focus on the 
construction of meanings that are appropriate and relevant within their 
academic context. Finally, we would encourage you to experiment where 
possible and reflect on what works. Teaching and learning are such complex 
activities that there can be no one-size-fits-all formula and a combination of 
approaches is most likely to prove effective.