| English for Academic Purposes(EAP)focuses on the study of specialized English language teaching practices that relate to a learning purpose.The past few decades have witnessed the rapid expansion and dynamic development of EAP,with a large and growing number of articles being published.This upsurge in the number of publications calls for studies to delineate the intellectual structure and evolution of this field.Previous scholars devoted themselves to extracting research topics and tracking the historical development of different disciplines,using both qualitative and various quantitative methods,such as bibliometric approaches,rule-based approaches,topic modeling approaches,and dependency-based approaches.However,these approaches were challenged due to their heavy reliance on human judgments and simplistic index for topic identification.Therefore,there is an urgent need for developing methods to better capture the development of a certain area.To bridge the aforementioned research gaps,this study aims to describe the research trends and explore the evolution of research topics in EAP research through a combination of dependency relations and complex network analysis.Specifically,this study attempts to reveal the research trends,the evolution of EAP in terms of research topics,and the dynamic development of EAP in terms of research topic co-occurrence networks based on a corpus of 10399 EAP-related research articles abstracts(1990-2020)retrieved from Scopus.As for research trends,it was found that there has been a considerably increasing trend in EAP studies over the past thirty years,indicating researchers’ growing interest in EAP research.This explosive growth in publications might be related to the necessity of English as the leading language for academic knowledge dissemination and the growing fierce competition in academic communities.Concerning the evolution of EAP research topics,it was found that hot topics that have gained growing research interest were those related to language teaching,which underlines the fact that EAP is a discipline with a consistent focus on pedagogical practices.In contrast,other topics(e.g.,language learning,subject)have experienced a decrease of interest over the past three decades.In addition,some of the frequently investigated topics have remained popular over the past thirty years,e.g.,attitude,gender,higher education,and reading comprehension.Researchers’ constant interest in these topics may reflect that these topics have remained the mainstays of EAP over the last few decades.The dynamic features of the EAP field were further scrutinized.As for local metrics,the results found that there has been a steady interest in topics concerning English,student,teacher,reading,writing,etc.,showing their importance in EAP research.As for the global features of the entire networks,a significant upward trend was detected in the number of nodes and edges,which suggests the growing diversity and complexity of the EAP field.Similarly,average density and average degree were increasing,indicating that topics in the field of EAP have evolved to be more centralized and more associated.In addition,the average clustering coefficient also experienced a noticeable increase,which reveals a more frequent exchange of knowledge and a stronger cluster innovation capacity within the EAP field.Interestingly,the average path lengths of the three networks showed a clear downward trend,indicating a growing tightness of the major topics.The present study enriches the application of quantitative linguistic methods to the EAP field.This study attempts to help EAP researchers gain a better understanding of the evolution and dynamic development of the EAP field.Besides,as for teachers and students,our findings provide references for them to learn the core topics,hotspots,and emerging trends in this field.In addition,this study also has implications for future studies to broaden the applications of quantitative methods into less touched fields. |
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