Tim Johns EAP Page

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First, apologies to all looking for information on Employee Assistance Programs or Education Abroad Programs. This EAP is English for Academic Purposes. I was originally responsible for the coining, so must bear some of the blame for the confusion of acronyms.

For the time being the best use for this page may be to offer some annotated data deriving from the work of the Unit and from some work done abroad, in the hope that this may be of interest to other teachers (and, in certain cases, students) of English for Academic Purposes.

Kibbitzer 77: Predominate 

Inspired by COBUILD's excellent Wordwatch feature, this page allows you to kibbitz the discussions of language points (lexical, syntactic and discoursal) that take place in one-to-one consultations when students bring us their written drafts for discussion. In many cases the revision is supported by concordance data: in other cases it employs intuition: but in all cases it depends on the joint 'negotiation' of meaning by consultant and student. New points are added on an irregular basis.

Previous Kibbitzer pages:

  1. Connotation: incessant v. steadfast (15th April 1996).
  2. Blending: as-clause & that-clause (29th April 1996).
  3. Collocation: take (on) a job (11th May 1996).
  4. Topicalisation: As to etc. (23rd May 1996).
  5. By v. Using (5th June 1996).
  6. Data: Singular or Plural? (16th June 1996 & 3rd March 1997).
  7. Logical Connectives: Reason-result or Part-whole? (26th June 1996).
  8. Illustrate v. Account for/Explain (17th July 1996).
  9. Can a superconductor expel a magnetic field? (29th July 1996).
  10. Population which or Population who? (26th August 1996).
  11. Predict v. Forecast (8th September 1996).
  12. Offering Insights (21st October 1996).
  13. Enable v. Facilitate (5th November 1996).
  14. Premature Evaluation (12th November 1996).
  15. Which Verb for the Adverb? (11th December 1996).
  16. Composing or Compiling Information? (17th February 1997).
  17. Closely related or Deeply related? (2nd March 1997).
  18. So far v. Hitherto (26th March 1997).
  19. The Overworked 'It' (Part One) (21st April 1997).
  20. Cross-reference of relative pronouns (25th April 1997).
  21. Reason to v. Reason for (4th May 1997).
  22. Structuring a list (14th May 1997).
  23. Improve (on) (29th May 1997).
  24. Cause v. lead to v. bring about (14th July 1997)
  25. Topic prominence (9th August 1997).
  26. In Fact (27th October 1997).
  27. Comparing Like with Like (23rd Novermber 1997).
  28. Facts and Ideas (15th December 1997).
  29. Making Measurements (22nd December 1997).
  30. Heavy Subjects (7th January 1998).
  31. Read widely v. widely read (14th January 1998).
  32. Academic Modesty (18th January 1998).
  33. By contrast, etc. (1st February 1998).
  34. Taking Part in Activities (14th February 1998).
  35. The Overworked 'It' (Part Two) (5th March 1998).
  36. Making a Transition (7th April 1998).
  37. Mention (29th April 1998).
  38. Starting from the Right Place (13th May 1998).
  39. Adding Feet to the Snake (18th May 1998).
  40. View (20th May 1998).
  41. It is recommended that ... (22nd May 1998).
  42. Emphatic 'do' (28th May 1998).
  43. Although ... but (5th June 1998)
  44. 'Same or worse than' (19th June 1998)
  45. Shortcomings v. shortfall (19th June 1998)
  46. Spelling checker problems (19th June 1998)
  47. Blending: oblique and subject (15th July 1998)
  48. The or no the? (1) (17th July 1998)
  49. In accordance with v. According to (31st July 1998)
  50. Pose (22nd October 1998)
  51. In turn (13th November 1998)
  52. Throwing Light On (7th December 1998)
  53. Structuring Complex Noun Groups (5th January 1999)
  54. Challenges and Opportunities (11th January 1999)
  55. Specificity (12th February 1999)
  56. Whose Argument? (18th February 1999)
  57. Topic & Comment (25th February 1999)
  58. The Overworked 'It' (Part Three) (15th March 1999)
  59. Discourage, Prevent etc. (19th April 1999)
  60. Cross-reference through Repetition (27th April 1999)
  61. What are tests for? (3rd June 1999)
  62. In terms of etc (22nd June 1999)
  63. Existence v. Presence (8th July 1999)
  64. Express (15th July 1999)
  65. Show an Increase/Decrease (5th November 1999)
  66. Hypothetical or Real? (10th November 1999)
  67. Too v. so (12th November 1999)
  68. Until now v. To date (12th January 2000)
  69. Connotations in Contrast (20th April 2000)
  70. Apology not needed (8th June 2000)
  71. Countering arguments by raising objections (20th June 2000)
  72. Describe that? (5th July 2000)
  73. Easy to be done (7th July 2000)
  74. Stress on (24th August 2000)
  75. The question remains (31st August 2000)
  76. Order of Events (1st September 2000)

If you found the Kibbitzer feature useful or interesting, visit the University of Toronto's excellent page on Academic Writing.

The Airy-fairy and the Nitty-gritty

For many years the English for International Students Unit at Birmingham University ran team-teaching sessions for Masters courses that have a high proportion of students from abroad. The team-teaching work involved recording lectures in subject departments and holding a follow-up class taught jointly by the EISU teacher and the lecturer. Inter alia we paid attention to the 'colloquial technical' language used by the lecturers to check whether the students were able to work out what it means and whether they were able - where appropriate - to find equivalent expressions that could be used in formal written English. This file is a small collection of citations (160) collected in the course of this work, together with annotations on their formal and functional characteristics. I hope the data will be of interest to other teachers of English for Academic purposes, and also to students who plan to come to the United Kingdom to study and who wish to be alerted to the sort of English they may have to deal with in university lectures.

It is Presented Initially: Linear Dislocation and Interlanguage Strategies in Brazilian Academic Abstracts in English and Portuguese

This paper was originally published in 1992 in Ilha do Desterro 21 pp. 9-32. Based on a corpus of 100 academic abstracts in English and Portuguese published in the journal Ciência e Cultura in 1980-1, it examines the use of the (A)VS structure in Portuguese to 'front' certain types of information in abstracts, and whether and how the writers attempt to preserve that fronting in their English abstracts.

Five Reporting Verbs from 'Nature'

An important part of the work of the Unit is to teach students the linguistic and rhetorical conventions that apply in writing research reports for international refereed journals. A few years back an informal research group in EISU carried out some analysis of a corpus of approx. 434,000 words from Nature, the leading British scientific research journal. Here is a (first) fragment of that analysis: an examination of the contextual patterning of 5 'reporting' verbs in the data: indicate, show, suggest, find and demonstrate

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Back to Tim Johns's Home Page Last updated 22nd December 2000