Events

In-sessional EAP (ISEAP) continues to become an important subfield of EAP as it constitutes an ‘evolving field of teaching and learning in higher education’ (Tibbets and Chapman, 2023). Such increased importance has attracted scrutiny from neo-liberalist agendas which call for accountability regarding what is happening in this burgeoning field (see Storch and Tapper, 2009). Despite such scrutiny, ISEAP seems to still be operating on a ‘relatively thin research base’ (Pearson, 2020) as the field still lacks a coherent narrative which sheds light on how its practices contribute to student success. Understanding the impact ISEAP has on teaching and learning in HE therefore represents one way through which we can begin to fathom how these sessions contribute to student success. In this talk, we will report the findings of two scholarship projects which sought to investigate student perspectives on the value of ISEAP at a Russell Group university in the north. Driven by the need to rehumanise assessment of impact (Hulme and Evans, 2025), we will report how our use of (narrative) interviews enabled us to pay attention to the nuances of student voices towards understanding something of the HE context such voices indexed. Although the data we will report on were generated with student participants from the School of Design and School of Education, the findings share some interesting parallels. For instance, most students highlighted the role ISEAP plays in helping them to form socio-academic networks (Leki, 2007) and how these sessions also helped them to practice the performance of their academic identities by rehearsing their academic literacy practices in low-stakes, friendly environments. Our findings strongly suggest that ISEAP sessions seem to model for HE that achieving ‘liberating literacy’ (Gee, 2008) is possible as they provide both scaffolding leading to mastery of academic practices as well as provide the ‘meta-knowledge’ needed for participation in the literacy practices of the disciplines. Such findings have important ramifications on curriculum development and how HE institutions can meaningfully educate multilingual scholars by taking a ‘whole person’ approach to pedagogy (cf., Pelias, 2004). 

References 

Gee, J. P. (2008). Sociolinguistics and literacies: ideology in discourses. 3rd edition. Routledge. 

Hulme, A. and Evans, M. (2025). Evaluating the impact of embedded academic language and literacies provision in a school of education and school of music. ESP today, 13(2), 429-440.

Leki, I. (2007). Undergraduates in a second language: challenges and complexities of academic literacy development. Lawrence Earlbaum Associates.  

Pearson, W. S. (2020). The effectiveness of pre-sessional EAP programmes in UK higher education: A review of the evidence. Review of education, 8(2), 420-447.

Pelias, R. L. (2004). A methodology of the heart: evoking academic and everyday life. Altamira Press.

Storch, N. and Tapper, J. (2009). The impact of an EAP course on postgraduate writing. Journal of English for Academic purposes, 8, 207-223.

Tibbets, N. A. and Chapman, T. 2023. A guide to in-sessional English for Academic purposes: paradigms and practices. Routledge.