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.

NOTES ON EXPERIMENTS'Notes on experiments' enables teachers at both sixth-form and tertiary level to share their ideas with other readers. Physics Education welcomes submissions from readers who know of some simple improvement to a commercially made piece of apparatus, or who have designed a new gadget or improved a standard experiment. In particular the Editor would welcome brief descriptions of experiments devised or procedures evolved during the course or project work or investigation undertaken by students; such submissions should be made under the joint name of the teacher and the student.