A history of ideas: A culture of inquiry : A content-based approach to teaching EAP

Abstract

The paper outlines a model for an English for Academic Purposes [EAP] programme designed to enhance the micro and macro study skills of students in the Arts from non-Western educational backgrounds. This EAP model draws on Jurgen Habermas‟s (1995; 1988) theory of communicative rationality to argue that the contemporary culture of inquiry in Arts‟ subjects reflects the communicative rationality that – according to Habermas -- has constituted the modern, Occidental lifeworld. The emergence of communicative rationality Habermas suggests is socio-culturally and historically specific. In other words, it has largely been absent from the socio-cultural contexts of many non-local entrants into Western universities. Yet, effective and successful participation in the Western academic discourse community, as well as everyday or non-scientific discourse communities, at least partly depends on a non-local student‟s awareness of the historical impacts generated by the developmental trajectory of communicative rationality. Successful participation in the Western academic context also depends on a non-local student‟s growing mastery over the methodologies, again generated by communicative rationality, that underpin this culture of inquiry. The EAP model proposes a practice based on a history of the ideas that form the bases of the Western academic tradition. It suggests that the macro (critical thinking, formal register) and micro-level (word choice, sentence construction) skills expected of students in Arts‟ subjects in Western universities are shaped by broader disciplinary and historical features. The pedagogical framing of this EAP model reflects the principles of situated learning theory (Lave & Wenger, 1990; McLellan, 1995) and addresses the recent research of Duff (2007), Morita (2004) and Zamel and Spack (1998).