Coming from an ELT general English teaching context, I could find some similarities and differences between both fields. Some people would say that EAP (English for Academic Purposes) is a "more specialized" sector within ELT and this may be true, as the first came after the latter. In addition, there are other influences on EAP apart from ELT, for instance, register analysis, study skills, genre analysis, academic literacies, among others. Anyway, what is important here, is that knowing these differences will help teachers cater to the needs of EAP learners and, at the same time, use techniques that are familiar to them from an ELT background.

Time - In EAP, time is often limited, as students may already be taking the course or need to take a proficiency exam in order to be accepted in a course. Whereas in ELT, there are longer time scales.

Proficiency - Proficiency targets in EAP are frequently very ambitious, as students are coming into the field at even lower levels nowadays. In ELT, the goal is to achieve general English proficiency and this may mean different things for different students.

Focus - EAP students have an academic focus and these are defined by their specific needs. ELT students have a broader focus, which is defined by general language proficiency.

Motivation - EAP students are more often self-motivated, which is a little different from general ELT students, who often need teacher-led motivation in order to keep them coming to class.

Goals - EAP students have a clearly defined goal they are working towards, which is reaching academic independence and autonomy. For ELT students, there are students with different goals in the same class.

Material - EAP students may bring material to contribute to the lessons, as there are different fields and this helps the teacher prepare the lessons. However, there are EAP course books available in the market, which cater to general EAP skills and critical thinking following the CEFR levels. In ELT, the materials is presented by the teacher, who often chooses a course book for the level, or follows the school's programme.

Students - The most important difference between EAP students is disciplinary, which means, what subject they are planning to study. Whereas for ELT learners, the key differences can be based around culture and language.

Some similarities between both fields can be found in methods, approaches and practices. They both share: the communicative approach; task-based learning; collaborative learning; and learner-centered approach.

There are also similarities in some key skills that both EAP and ELT teachers should have. They are: planning and organization; creative skills and techniques; language analysis; communication and presentation; understanding of student behaviour, motivation and psychology; and classroom management skills. Related to those skills, Chazal (2014) points out that "EAP teachers must be able to understand and respond to their students' needs, difficulties, and learning styles".

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REFERENCES

1997. R. R. Jordan. English for Academic Purposes: A Guide and Resource Book for Teachers. Cambridge University Press.

2014. Edward de Chazal. English for Academic Purposes. Oxford University Press.

Today, I'm going to tell you how I got into EAP and some basic concepts around this field that I am beginning to study for my current teaching practice.

I have never been a one-to-one teaching enthusiast. Since when I started teaching, people would ask me if I taught private lessons and I would always say 'no' for many reasons. The first one being that I am shy, thus, I was scared that I wouldn't be able to maintain a conversation with only one person. In addition, people always came to me with very specific needs, such as 'conversation lessons', 'English for traveling' or 'business English' (too busy to answer my messages, though) and I was in the beginning of my career, still doing the CELTA, etc. Finally, I just thought teaching kids and groups was more fun. So, it was easier for me to refuse them.

However, when the pandemic hit, and we had to shift to online lessons, I could learn how to use online teaching platforms, took a few courses and now I really enjoy teaching English online. So, in February this year, I decided to put up a flyer and share on social networks for one-to-one lessons. Naturally, people came to me asking for private lessons online and I accepted them. And that's basically how I got to teaching English for Academic Purposes, which is a field I was not familiar with until this year. I now have two students with very specific needs and both of them are academics.

In order to be better informed on teaching EAP students, I did some research online and found books and materials that suited our needs. Now I am learning as I go since time is of the essence for my students.

Some basics of EAP

From what I have read so far and my teaching context, the most important aspect of EAP is that it is needs driven. In other words, students learn English with a particular purpose in mind. For instance, they may want to enter a university abroad, they may be professors in a another language wanting to teach in English, or they may even already be Master's or Doctorate students who need to improve their English skills to do presentations and write essays. Thus, their goal is identifiable and describable, and should inform the EAP programme the teacher will create for them.

Similarly to ELT, EAP involves the development of the four skills in an integrated way. However, the teaching and learning of English in EAP happens so that students can operate effectively in the disciplines.  Also, there are many skills and competences in EAP, to mention a few:

• critical thinking
• study skills (e.g. citation, referencing)
• getting familiarized with the target academic culture
• development of student autonomy and independence

It is important to mention that EAP is not concerned with subject content. Rather, its goal involves developing key academic skills, language and competences. The field concerned with teaching content through language is CLIL (Content Language Integrated Learning). For example, EAP will refer to general academic vocabulary, such as 'analyze', 'evaluation', 'conclusion', 'focus on', etc.

An increasing trend in EAP is for students to begin learning at lower levels, such as A2 and lower B1. This is my teaching context. I have one A2 student working towards becoming a B1 by the end of May - we started in March - and one B1 student trying to improve her presentation skills to be able to teach in English my the end of May. This way you can see that I am also working with ambitious goals.

Generally, EAP students are highly motivated, as they have an specific goal in mind. EAP teachers should aim to keep this motivation high and learning relevant and engaging.

I believe this is the basics of EAP, just to give a general idea. Since I come from an ELT teaching context, I will try to focus on the main differences between these fields in my next post.

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REFERENCES

1997. R. R. Jordan. English for Academic Purposes: A Guide and Resource Book for Teachers. Cambridge University Press.

2014. Edward de Chazal. English for Academic Purposes. Oxford University Press.

* This text was originally posted on my former blog - Today, my students... - on 16th February 2021.

I should have written this post about one year ago when it all started. However, as many of us teachers were, I was extremely busy trying to cope with the new reality. At first, I really thought "quarantine" would mean about 40 days at home, but here we are, eleven months later, still planning online lessons.

Back in March 2020, I was teaching at two schools: a general English course and a bilingual school, which meant two different perspectives. With my course students I had two 1 hour classes a week and with my school students I had five to six classes of 50 minutes a week. Luckily, both schools were using Google Classroom and Meet, so I had to learn how to use only one platform.

This was my context when everybody in Brazil were in "lockdown" and schools were closed for an indefinite period of time. Here, I would like to summarize both experiences because I think they were so different and it would be nice to share and remember them later on.

Teaching online at an English course

The first positive aspect of teaching in this context was having fewer students per classroom. My biggest class had only 12 students. This means that I could hear each one speaking, check pronunciation and do more error correction. I could give enough attention to each of them and better feedback to them and their parents in meetings. When there were still no breakout rooms available in Google Meet, I could create another meet and send them the link, so I still could do some group and pair work.

Another good thing was to have online platforms for all materials I was using. I didn't waste any time scanning books or looking for extra materials. All I had to think of when planning my lessons was how to adapt some of the activities to the new context. This helped me a lot.

I would say a negative thing about teaching at a course was that my lessons had 75 minutes before, and now they only had 60 minutes. So, in addition to all technical issues the student would have every class, I didn't have those 15 minutes and I really wish I did.

Also, there was no time for learner and teacher training. We learned new things as we went through the classes and shared our problems with our fellow teacher whenever we could. Many students were confused about how to use the apps and really how the Google Classroom worked. Some of them couldn't even upload their activities, and some of the young learners didn't have adult's assistance during the lessons.

The first - and perhaps only - positive aspect of teaching online at a regular school was to have more time with the students every week. I would meet them for 5 to 6 lessons of 50 minutes each, so I could do more activities and had more time to solve any technical problems. The syllabus was cut in half, so I had time to do projects, focus on phonics and reading activities.

This also had a downside. I had to find extra materials because I couldn't use the whole book. Also, the material we used in this school had no online resources whatsoever. I mean, zero! In 2020! Can you believe it? Anyway, it was extremely time consuming to find and adapt extra activities every week.

However, the biggest issue for me was how to deal with so many students in class at the same time. There were 25 in one class and 21 in another. Young learners tend to turn on their microphones to say the most random things in the most inconvenient times (during instructions, interrupting their peers, and so on), so this would happen a lot during one lesson.

Overall

The 2020 experience was definitely challenging. Personally, I could find many positive aspects to teaching online. The negative issues, I believe could have been less "traumatizing" if we had had time to do some learner and teacher training in advance. But how could we have foreseen what was coming? In my experience, there was little support from the coordination - it's understandable, as they were dealing with their own problems - and very little training opportunities.

* I did the drawings above - that's why they look so weird. I just took a photo of the drawings and edited a little on the photo editor. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I know I should have created this blog in the beginning of the pandemic, but I couldn't. There was too much going on and it was too much for me (and all of us, really) to process. However, one year after the beginning of the pandemic, I feel it's finally the time to share a few things I have been learning about teaching online, teaching children online, and why I have given up teaching at regular schools.

The only thing I can say for sure is that we will never be the same after going through a pandemic. This has affected all of us in all aspects of life. Here, I will only discuss teaching English. I will also be reposting some series I have written about on my previous blog (Today, my students...) that I will then delete, after I transfer everything from there to this place.

Anyway, I don't have any hopes up for the new blog. I will just start it. I have to begin again.