Academic vocabulary in an EAP course: Opportunities for incidental learning from printed teaching materials developed in-house

Teaching materials developed in-house are commonly used in EAP courses; however, research on their linguistic content, which can have important pedagogical implications, is scarce. This study examines the occurrence and repetition of general academic vocabulary, operationalised as the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) (Gardner & Davies, 2014), in the printed teaching materials developed in-house and used in a presessional EAP course at a UK university. The course was divided into three modules and taught over five weeks. At the end of each week, teachers provided us with photocopies of the printed teaching materials they had used. A corpus was compiled from the printed materials of each module. The results show that 846 AVL lemmas (i.e., 28.07% of the lemmas in the AVL) appeared in the materials. They were not equally distributed among the three modules and only 90 AVL lemmas overlapped across modules. The results also show that the average repetition rate of AVL lemmas in the materials was unlikely to lead to the incidental development of recall knowledge from exposure to these materials alone. Recommendations are made for the development of in-house EAP materials and teaching activities that increase students' exposure to academic vocabulary and facilitate its learning.