Between critique and accommodation: reflections on an EAP course for Masters of Architecture students

As the title suggests, this paper explores the competing pressures toward ESP accommodation to institutional exigencies and to a critical response to those exigencies. The locus of the discussion is the design and implementation of an EAP course for Master's of Architecture students in a major US university. Architectural professional education has been largely neglected in the expanding ESP literature, although the types of discourse that orchestrate professional training in this area have some interesting and unique features. We outline our attempts over 4 years to respond to these challenges and complexities, considering along the way both the practical constraints and the role of a critical pedagogy in EAP. Materials development was based in part on discoursal analysis of student presentations of their design studio work and on corpus linguistic analysis of the same material. The paper closes with some reflections on the lessons learnt.