plinary community as experts. However, to the extent that undergraduates
are expected to read RAs, the genre could provide appropriate material for
teaching reading. The choice of suitable texts depends upon the results of
the needs analysis and the individual teaching circumstances of the teacher,
but an understanding of variation in academic discourse is important to
inform this choice.
TASK 1 Variation in EAP 1
Choose two short texts/extracts (about 200 words each) of academic dis-
course which vary in mode (spoken/written), discipline and genre. Use
MICASE for spoken texts and MICUSP for written texts. See Chapter 4
for access details.
2
Compare the two texts and identify at least five features that characterize
the variation in mode, discipline and genre.
3 Do your two texts show the differences in usage that you would expect?
Explain what you find.
4 Would a similar task be useful for your students? Why or why not?
Key features of academic discourse In this section we are particularly concerned with features that affect the
construction of discourse beyond the sentence level, rather than with
sentence-level grammar points. We do not provide a full account of all impor-
tant features; instead we focus on those aspects that are likely to cause stu-
dents problems, particularly when they try to produce texts themselves.
Among the criticisms that are often voiced by content lecturers is that
student texts are ‘disjointed’; they fail to make a point or develop arguments
logically. We begin by considering how information is presented in English
and what makes a text flow.
Theme and information structure In order to explain why such problems occur, we can analyze clauses as the-
matic units and information units (Halliday, 1994). The ‘theme’ of a clause
is the first element; it establishes what you are talking about; the remaining
