British Council’s English for Academic Purposes: A Critical Analysis of the Coursebook Taught at Pakistani Universities

Abstract

English for Academic Purposes course focusing on the academic language needs
of students is a subfield of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). It is a type of
specialized course to integrate specific subject matter, language content, and
material based on learners’ needs. The study aims to evaluate the British
Council’s English for Academic Purposes (EAP) coursebook in terms of content,
sequencing, learners’ autonomy, motivation, feedback and focus on language
skills. Furthermore, the study tries to provide a general perception of the
usefulness and effectiveness of the coursebook for undergraduate students. The
EAP Students’ Manual coursebook is used as a primary source for the data
collection. The researcher has chosen Nation & Macalister (2010) model of
language teaching principles to analyze and discuss the data. The study found the
coursebook a useful, effective and an appropriate source of English language
learning in terms of the investigated aspects of the book. The findings report that
the coursebook provides practice and practical usage in all domains of the
academically required English language skills. It helps the students to build
language competency and to be more independent learners. In addition, it
provides an opportunity to the learners to think in the target language, use the
language more practically and learn it in a natural type of environment. The study
concludes and suggests that the content needs to be supplemented with English
language audios and videos presenting the students relevant documentaries and
helping material in order to make the coursebook and the learning process more
useful, effective, interesting and motivating. Furthermore, the study recommends
that while choosing /designing a coursebook for a certain course, it needs to be
evaluated following the various criteria and language-teaching-principles
suggested by different language researchers.