I’ve been asked to give a short talk at the next BALEAP PIM on the the history of BALEAP PIMs (Professional Issues Meetings). As I was preparing this, I thought it would be interesting to see how the topics, as shown by the titles of the presentations, have changed over the years.

BALEAP – then SELMOUS – started thinking about holding regular meetings of members to discuss their current work in the fields of EAP and ESP in March 1987 and the first PIM was held at the University of Leicester on “Teaching English for Legal Studies” in 1991. Since then there have been 60 PIMs comprising about 700 separate papers. These have been distributed as follows:

1991-1999 – 102 (approx)
2000-2009 – 293
2010-2015 – 305

It is interesting to note that there have been more papers presented in the first half of this decade than in the whole of the previous decade.

If we look at the titles of the presentations in the three periods, we might get some ideas as to how EAP has developed. This is what the Wordle word-clouds look like for the three different periods:

PIM Presentation Titles 1991-1999

PIM Presentation Titles 2000-2009

PIM Presentation Titles 2010-2015

Another approach is to look at the Keywords produced by Wordsmith Tools.

The 22 most common Keywords for the three periods are:

If we combine these into one table and delete the common repeating words:

I think this clearly shows a change in emphasis from more general foundation courses and teaching in the 1990s to more specific courses – at a wider range of levels – using authentic materials in the 2010s with a recent emphasis on the teacher and teacher development.