Discourse-based approaches to EAP

Abstract

Since the advent of Communicative Language Teaching, discourse has played a central role in English teaching. Pennycook (1994, p. 38) claims that “it is rare to find people involved in language teaching who are unaware of the significance of discourse for teaching reading, writing, intonation or spoken language, and for the evaluation of students’ communicative competence”. Communicative competences, i.e., grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic, pragmatic and strategic are also perceived as discourse competences. Celce-Murcia and Olshtain (2000) argue that the main competency within the communicative competence framework is discourse competency, claiming that it is “in and through discourse that all of the other competencies are realized (p. 16).” Therefore, it is evident that discourse should become an integral part of every ESOL syllabus, methodology and assessment (Celce-Murcia & Olshtain, 2005). This presentation will share a number of discourse-based teaching components, such as authentic learning texts, integration of top-down and bottom-up processing, meaning over form – pragmatics over grammar, background knowledge – schemata and context, and their practical application in the classroom.