ACTIVITIES FOR TEACHING SYNTACTIC AND MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURES FOR EAP IN SCIENCE: THE NOUN PHRASE
ACTIVITIES FOR TEACHING SYNTACTIC AND MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURES FOR EAP IN SCIENCE: THE NOUN PHRASE

Summary/Abstract: In selecting EAP practical tasks teachers must take into consideration a wide range of factors. EAP students are usually advanced users of English and their general objective is to become expert communicators in their study fields. Therefore, theoretical knowledge and practical training must go hand in hand. Discourse analysis has brought immense contribution to the description of academic communication, whether concentrating on lexical-grammatical aspects, on structure and function, on socio-linguistic aspects of professional discourse or on cognitive aspects. The knowledge gained from such research must be converted into activities that effectively develop the skills and understanding of academic discourse in sciences. Also, sequences of practical tasks must cover structural aspects of the language used in academic science texts as well as functional ones which illustrate the way grammatical and lexical resources are chosen and employed in a discipline specific discourse. The paper presents a step-by-step sequence of tasks and variations which can be used in teaching the noun phrase to EAP students of engineering and hard science disciplines. Without attempting generalizations, bringing in statistical data about frequency and distribution of key lexical-grammatical features in a disciplinary discourse (where available) can help students and EAP teachers understand disciplinary variation. Where such features make up, quantitatively and qualitatively, important resources for disciplinary communication, their understanding guarantees our students a better integration into the discourse community of their disciplines.

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