Yuka Iijima, Sayako Maswana, Hironori Watari, Hiroshi Yamada, Sachi Takahashi and Toshiyuki Kanamaru
Despite an increasing need for EAP education at undergraduate level in Japan, its practice, pre-service teacher training, in-service teachers’ professional development and relevant research are still limited. Aiming to support the dissemination of EAP, since 2016, our research team has investigated current EAP practice in Japan and sought to identify teacher competency and quality assurance (QA) benchmarks appropriate to the cultural context. This paper describes the scope and process of our recent four-year research project (2019–2022) based on two preliminary studies. The first study investigated the use of BALEAP’s (2008) Competency Framework for Teachers of English for Academic Purposes (CFTEAP) at UK universities. Interviews with four EAP and TEAP course managers suggested that the CFTEAP underpins various approaches to pre-service teacher training and practitioners’ professional development at both individual and institutional levels. The second study examined the potential relevance of the BALEAP Accreditation Scheme (BAS) criteria (BALEAP, 2018) to the Japanese context. Two Japanese EAP curriculum administrators’ responses suggested that their institutions’ practices meet most of the BAS criteria and that they are generally applicable in Japan, although some areas were perceived as important but not practised for context-specific reasons. The paper has implications for the implementation of TEAP and QA frameworks in culturally contextualised EAP programmes.