Gabriella Jenei: Referential Cohesion in Academic Writing • A descriptive and exploratory theory- and corpus-based study of the text-organizing role of reference in written academic discourse
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2. A GENRE-ORIENTED APPROACH TO ANALYSING COHESION IN WRITTEN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE
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2.2. Definition of key concepts
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2.2.3. English for academic purposes

2.2.3. English for academic purposes

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Broadly speaking, EAP refers to “any English teaching that relates to a study purpose” (Dudley-Evans & St. John, 1998, 34), but this paper will only focus on written EAP. While most of our communication involves spoken interaction with others, the importance of written texts in an academic discourse community should not be underestimated. Academic writing is a principal product of academic life (e.g., published articles, book reviews, conference papers; or in education: textbooks, study guides, handouts, etc.). According to Hyland (2000), writing is not just a by-product of disciplines, but it is actually producing them. In his view, it is not only the content but also the way it is presented that “makes the crucial difference” (Hyland, 2000, 3) between disciplines. His proposed model of “social constructionism” (Hyland, 2000, 6) is based on the assumption that the intellectual environment in which academics live and work crucially affects not only the methods they use and the topics they are interested in, but also the way they report their research. Successful academic texts transform “research findings or armchair reflections into academic knowledge” (Hyland, 2000, 6).

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There have been a large number of studies on the surface linguistic features of English academic writing. Probably the most comprehensive description of English for academic purposes (EAP) is provided by Biber et al. (2002) on the basis of a multidimensional analysis of the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language Corpus. The authors emphasize the complex task that non-native speakers face in having to cope with the variety of registers within EAP in an English-speaking context. In their view, academic texts include not only textbooks, but also handbooks, catalogues and informational web pages that “present information in dense, complicated syntactic structures” (Biber et al., 2002, 43). The complexity of academic texts results in a two-way struggle. On the one hand, the language of academic discourse may be difficult for non-native speakers, but on the other hand, native or expert users of English may also struggle with the interpretation of awkward structures produced by novice writers. These two groups, as Halliday (2004) put it, “may respond to scientific English in different ways” but “it is largely the same features that cause difficulties to both” (Halliday, 2004, 159).
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