It remains remarkable to me that the ellipted quotation from Bourdieu and Passeron – ‘Academic language is … no one’s mother tongue’ – has taken on the status of a truism. It is, after all, an elegant and appealing formulation, expressing something many people can readily recognise. Even native speakers of English have had to learn, in one way or another, how to produce academic language.
But the full quotation points in a rather different direction:
‘Academic language is a dead language for the great majority of French people, and is no one’s mother tongue, not even that of children of the cultivated classes. As such, it is very unequally distant from the languages actually spoken by the different social classes. To decline to offer a rational pedagogy is, in this context, to declare that all students are equal in respect of the demands made by academic language.’ (1995: 8)
The crucial phrase here is ‘unequally distant’. Bourdieu and Passeron are not simply observing that academic language is unfamiliar to everyone. Their point is that this distance is socially distributed: academic language is closer to the linguistic practices and cultural inheritance of some groups than of others. In their analysis, social class is therefore central to understanding how educational inequalities are reproduced.
Something similar can be asked of English academic language. Proximity to such language is again likely to depend on a range of factors, including, one would expect, social class. But there is also another obvious factor: whether the student is working in an additional language.
As Flowerdew argues, ‘Anyone who has spent any time learning an L2 will realize immediately that it will be more difficult to write in the L2 than the L1, even after many years of practice and study’ (p. 251). Yet, for reasons that are perhaps understandable – not least a reluctance to stigmatise certain groups of students – this point is often left unspoken. As Flowerdew also notes: ‘This is a Panglossian approach, however, according to which everything is for the best; there is no problem, so we don’t need to address it. Sweeping the issues under the carpet in this way, however, strikes me as morally questionable’ (p.256).
The point is not that students writing in an additional language are incapable of succeeding academically. Nor is it that universities should abandon common standards in favour of endlessly differentiated provision. It is simply to acknowledge that students do not stand in the same relation to academic language, and that pretending otherwise obscures genuine differences in linguistic challenge.
At this point, contemporary universities often distort the role of EAP in two different ways. In one, it becomes a compensatory service directed primarily at particular demographic groups. While it is a straightforward fact that studying and writing in an additional language typically places students at a linguistic disadvantage, at least for a period of time, this fact does not by itself justify differentiated institutional entitlement. On a strong conception of equality within higher education, such variation in linguistic starting point does not require separate provision, but reinforces the need for common standards and shared academic expectations. In the other, EAP is universalised into a generalised discourse of ‘academic literacies’, in which the specifically linguistic demands of studying in an additional language risk being blurred or dissolved. In different ways, both tendencies obscure what EAP is for.
A more coherent position, it seems to me, is to treat induction into academic and disciplinary discourse as part of the ordinary pedagogical responsibility of the university itself. Disciplines should be expected to teach explicitly how knowledge is argued, evidenced, structured, and communicated within their fields. Such teaching is not remedial provision alongside academic work; it is part of what academic work is. In this sense, in-sessional EAP is best understood as part of the responsibility of subject specialists in inducting students into the linguistic and rhetorical practices of their disciplines.
On this view, EAP does not function as a parallel or supplementary system directed at particular groups of students. Nor does it operate as a compensatory response to unequal linguistic starting points. It names, instead, a set of pedagogical concerns that ought to be internal to disciplinary teaching itself: the explicit articulation of the linguistic and rhetorical conventions through which academic knowledge is produced. The aim, then, is not to differentiate provision according to perceived need, but to ensure that the linguistic demands of higher education are made visible and teachable within the curriculum as a whole.
This does not deny the value of EAP altogether, but its role is limited to initial orientation into the linguistic and rhetorical demands of English-medium study before full disciplinary immersion. Beyond that point, the central responsibility for developing academic discourse belongs within disciplinary teaching itself rather than in a separate institutional domain. EAP is justified only as pre-disciplinary induction; once disciplinary teaching properly takes over the task of academic discourse, in-sessional provision becomes redundant.
References
Bourdieu, P., Passeron, J-C., and Saint Martin, M. (1994) Academic discourse: Linguistic misunderstanding and professorial power. Polity.
Flowerdew, J. (2019) ‘The linguistic disadvantage of scholars who write in English as an additional language: Myth or reality’, Language Teaching, 52(2), pp. 249–260.
(Rembrandt: A Scholar in His Study (1634))
