Tony Myers and Jaime Buchanan
This paper looks at the way in which a Gulf university EAP program sought to address the issue of teaching students how to succeed in their specific disciplinary genres within a generalized EAP course. Firstly, it looks at how stakeholder needs were determined by a target–situation analysis, involving a curriculum mapping of genre types employed across the university, and a present situation analysis of course provision, learning outcomes and institutional constraints. It then attends to the resultant course design that aimed to develop genre literacy in a specific learner constituency through both raising genre awareness and furnishing students with the appropriate interrogative devices to engage critically with future disciplinary tasks. The paper goes on to examine the underlying principles that informed the course design. It looks at Sydney School Genre Pedagogy (SSGP) for the teaching approach, at Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) for the development of an understanding of the pertinence of audience, purpose and context, and at English for Specific Purposes (ESP) for an approachable conceptual mapping of genres we could use across the course. The paper concludes with an assessment of the limitations and successes of the course.
