In the UK, North America and Australia, credit-bearing discipline specific English
for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses are seen as a challenge to remedial views of
English as a Second Language and a key element in revitalizing a profession on the
periphery of the institution. However, the EAP field has to confront not only
institutional challenges to its acceptability as a discipline but also tensions
within the field. In this article we examine the tensions which underpin current and
future directions in the field, review the development of credit-based EAP courses
in the US, UK and Australia, and illustrate our discussion with a case study from
the University of Melbourne. We conclude by arguing that discipline specific
credit-based EAP offers promising hope for the future of the EAP discipline in
higher education, but that to achieve this end the field and practitioners need to
find a position between critique of and accommodation to discipline specific content.
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