A Collaborative Instructional Approach to English Across the Curriculum

In spite of the tremendous effort made in the design and delivery of EAP (English for Academic Purposes) courses, English teachers in universities are constantly discouraged by the unsatisfactory performance of many students in their discipline-specific learning tasks in English in later years of their study. One criticism is that the dominant instructional provision “fails to address students’ real needs” (Wingate, 2018) as there are clear disciplinary variations in both spoken and written genres that are practised in the academic community. Teaching generic academic English only is considered by some as insufficient to equip students with the linguistic knowledge and skills that are necessary for students to successfully accomplish discipline-specific learning tasks since such tasks often require discipline-specific lexis, discursive patterns and textual constructions that are not necessarily taught in current university English courses. In order to address the issue, and also in response to the call for English Across the Curriculum (EAC) in academic literacy pedagogy, in collaboration with subject teachers, a system of embedding English instructions into the discipline’s curriculum was established. This paper reports on the project design, implementation process, and evaluation findings as well as challenges encountered.