The teaching of English for Academic purposes: best practices in Higher education

Abstract

This research carries out a survey of Academic English offers in Spanish speaking universities. It analyzes them through a triangulation of different theories regarding foreign language learning and didactics and pedagogy at university in order to find best practices in English teaching. It is concluded that the experiences that implement problem-based methods allow the meaningful learning of the contents through its practical application, together with its integration to previous knowledge, and it also allows to capitalize on the frequent heterogeneity of the learning groups. Furthermore, it emphasizes the importance of including these contents in the obligatory curricula, in order to democratize the access to the knowledge of the English language