EAP Essentials

Olwyn Alexander co-authored Garnet Education's EAP Essentials and Access EAP. She teaches English for Academic Purposes to engineering, management and translation studies students at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. She has collaborated with colleagues Sue Argent and Jenifer Spencer in writing two distance learning courses: Academic English for Business and Academic English for Science and Technology. Her current research interests include the use of learning teams for managing large classes and how to establish links between research and teaching in the EAP classroom. Sue Argent co-authored Garnet Education's EAP Essentials and Access EAP. She has taught EAP for a number of years in universities in Papua New Guinea and in China, as well as in the UK. She has also taught in adult and further education delivering ESOL and EAP training and supporting teachers. She has written corpus-based EAP courses for distance learning with Olwyn Alexander and Jenifer Spencer, including specialist courses for business studies and science and technology. Her interests are critical thinking and student autonomy. Jenifer Spencer is the co-author of EAP Essentials, with Olwyn Alexander and Sue Argent. This teacher's handbook was based on the insights gained from developing and delivering the Heriot-Watt EAP teacher development course and focused on linking classroom practice and course content with current research, particularly in the areas of discourse analysis and the use of corpora. After graduating in Chemistry and Philosophy and teaching in the school sector, Jenifer was involved in community education provision for ESOL adult learners, teaching courses in EFL, Business English and EAP at Stevenson College Edinburgh. In 2001, Jenifer joined Heriot-Watt University as part of a team researching and writing a corpus-based EAP distance-learning course for students preparing to study Management degrees. She was later involved in developing a parallel course to prepare students for degrees in Science and Engineering subjects. Other materials development projects have included a research skills module to prepare students for the reading approaches needed for study at masters level. She now works as a freelance editor, writer and consultant, with a particular interest in academic genre studies and the study of academic vocabulary and was recently involved in editing the discourse analysis volume Arab News and Conflict by Samia Bazzi (John Benjamins, 2009).