English for academic purposes: An advanced resource book (review)

With the significant growth in English for academic purposes (EAP) programs and research in recent years, this text is a welcome addition to the field. Hyland, co-editor of the Journal of English for Academic Purposes and author of many articles and books on EAP and academic discourse, has drawn on his extensive experience as both teacher and researcher to design a resource for students, teachers, and researchers of EAP.

The text is divided into three sections - 'Introduction,' 'Extension,' and 'Exploration' - each of which explores the following three themes: conceptions and controversies, literacies and practices, and design and delivery. Readers can progress by section (A, B, C) or by theme (A1, B1, C1). The first section of the text introduces the major concepts, terms, techniques, and contextual factors related to EAP. The four units within each theme include tasks for reflection on topics, teaching practices, and personal experience, as well as for the evaluation of controversies and issues in the field.

In the 'Extension' section, Hyland has compiled 20 excerpts from journal articles and books that elaborate on the themes introduced in the first part of the text. Most of the excerpts, by influential authors such as Benesch, Flowerdew, Johns, Pennycook, and Swales, are three to four pages in length; all are accompanied by pre-, while-, and post-reading tasks. This section provides stimulating discussions of current topics of interest in EAP. Although the extracts themselves are very short, an appendix offers an annotated list of four to five books per unit for further reading.

The 'Exploration' section offers a wide array of reflective and field research tasks for students to carry out. These include, among others, designing questionnaires and conducting interviews with students, subject-discipline academics, EAP teachers, and focus groups; completing observation schedules; conducting analyses of academic materials (e.g., genres, corpora, course outlines, handbooks, textbooks); setting performance objectives; developing and sequencing learner tasks; designing courses; identifying criteria for evaluating teaching resources; critiquing assessment tasks; and preparing conference posters or presentations of research results.

Users of this textbook are therefore faced with the difficult challenge of selecting from among the options provided by the author in the final section, many of which would require extensive time to complete. Tasks such as creating a Web page for a course would likely require expertise from beyond the EAP classroom, and some tasks provide less than adequate models for pre-service teachers or researchers. The development of a questionnaire, for example, requires not only information regarding relevant data to be collected (some of which is suggested in the text) but also guidelines for designing effective questions (which are not included). Furthermore, because the tasks are organized according to themes, they are not always sequenced logically. For instance, interviews with professors and students, as well as the administration of a questionnaire, are presented before the section on developing a consent form and ethical guidelines. The 'Exploration' section would have made a splendid companion volume, with more extensive guidelines to facilitate the effective completion of the valuable tasks the author has designed.

This book would provide a fine supplement to an introductory EAP course in which students also have the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills to enable them to plan EAP courses (e.g., techniques for developing academic skills). Graduate students, on the other hand, might require more extensive readings, and it is unlikely, with the growth of research in this area, that any one text could adequately satisfy this demand. The inclusion of a list of peer-reviewed journals in the field would have acknowledged and assisted in meeting this need.

It is clear that a great deal of care has gone into the selection of the themes, units, and tasks in this text, and it represents a unique collection of perspectives on key issues in the field. While the first two sections present a broad overview of English for academic purposes, the last section attempts to provide a comprehensive range of approaches to...