English for Academic Purposes. Edward de Chazal

on their students’ written work, there are typically three main focuses: content, organization, and language. When giving feedback on content and organization, the focus is on aspects such as the strength of the ideas, how they are presented, the coherence of the argument, and use of academic sources. The work on language may involve identifying typical errors and giving an indication of the type of error and perhaps how to correct it. Students will then work on these errors themselves, rather than relying on their teacher to correct them, and the students’ revised texts can then be checked for accuracy. Ultimately, then, EAP teaching aims to foster students’ proofreading skills as far as possible, rather than the teacher providing a proofreading service for their students.

      Myth 7: EAP is objective rather than subjective

      Academic texts have been described as ‘objective’ rather than ‘subjective’ (for example Clanchy and Ballard (1981: 74, and 1992; also cited in Jordan 1997: 244), but this statement is overgeneralized and highly misleading. The academic world is both objective and subjective. It is objective in the sense that it searches for and transfers knowledge, and this knowledge needs to be in some sense validated. Research needs to be replicated in different contexts in order to yield similar results. However, different interpretations and evaluative responses are highly valued and essential to the dissemination of ideas and research. Such interpretations may be responses to objective evidence, but by their nature they are subjective: one person’s interpretation or evaluation of the same evidence may differ from another’s. A significant part of critical thinking is subjective and carried out by ‘subjects’ or people. None of the following examples of academic thought is an objective ‘fact’: a theory of learning; the assessment of the impact of a historical event or medical trauma; a policy response to a crisis. There is subjectivity in all of these. Academic practice is concerned with relations between objective phenomena, such as the findings of a piece of research, and subjective responses, such as interpretation and evaluation. It is important to bear in mind that these responses need to be grounded in evidence rather than seemingly plucked out of the air.