In recent years English for academic purposes (EAP) has become one of the mainstream fields of practice, study and research within lan-guage education, mainly due to the position of English as the interna-tional language of higher education and scientific research. The paper briefly examines the main assumptions of the approach in the context of its links to ESP (English for specific purposes), systemic functional linguistics and new literacy studies. However, the main focus of the present discussion is on genre-based pedagogy as the leading frame-work and an important point of reference for EAP education. To illus-trate this perspective within the field, the notion of genre and its in-terpretations in foreign language teaching are discussed. Finally, two closely related academic genres – discussion and debate – are ex-plored with the aim of indicating their potential benefits, areas of dif-ficulty and challenges for students and teachers in the EAP classroom.
The paper concentrates on the notion of interaction with regard to se-lected theoretical orientations and perspectives. First, the definitions of the three frequently overlapping terms – communication, discourse and interaction – are discussed with particular attention given to their mutual relationships within presented interpretations. Next, the status of interaction in some psychological, sociological and pedagogical ori-en¬tations is briefly illustrated and a closer look is taken at interaction within cognitive, sociocultural and interactionist approaches to foreign language teaching and learning. The following part of the article fo-cuses on types of interaction in the foreign language classroom. Finally, the selected interpretations of the construct of interactional com-petence are presented and analysed.