EAP research in BALEAP 1975–2019: Past issues and future directions

Abstract BALEAP is a global association which aims to advance the learning and teaching of EAP in higher and further education. At its fiftieth anniversary, it is timely to examine its contribution to EAP research. This paper draws on evidence from a corpus of 1,310 titles of papers from volumes of BALEAP proceedings and accounts of Professional Issues Meetings over 1975–2019. Bottom-up corpus analyses and top-down examination of the titles were used to ascertain the most frequently researched topics and the extent to which they varied over the 45 years. Six topics were each mentioned in over 10% of titles: students, language, writing, courses, assessment and specificity, but only assessment experienced a rising trend over the period. Low results were found for five approaches: intercultural, critical, corpora, genre and academic literacy. Topics that increased in popularity included in-sessional issues, technology and teacher education, while decreases occurred for graduates, language, and specificity. These trends suggest research gaps to be addressed in the least popular or declining areas e.g. digital and multimodal genres, disciplinary/interdisciplinary contexts, and with non-traditional participants e.g. teaching staff or displaced academics. This study strongly argues that the current wide diversity of research topics in BALEAP should be maintained.