I
suppose
you could argue that
there isn't very much difference between
academic english and general English.
all the, outside of specialist and technical language
em, there aren't really any
grammatical patterns or vocabulary
that appeared in academic English but don't also occur in general English 
At that level
you could say that there is very much
difference
but there are differences obviously in
frequency so if we take words like uh...
procedure,
process, system
then they occur much more frequently
in academic language than in general language
and that becomes the focus of academic language
because they're more
frequent
and therefore more important.
Em, if you look at it another way though we could say that academic english is quite
different from general English because there
are certain
contexts, texts that
are
special to
to academic communication so
lectures, seminars occurr in academic
life but not so much outside.
Text as well essays, dissertations
occurr in
an academic context but not in the general
context so it's the
the features of those contexts, lectures
seminars and the texts like essays,
dissertations
that become the material for
for teaching English for academic purposes.
Em, if you think about
skills for uh...
EAP
I suppose you could say that the most
important skill is is writing
because that's where most of the the
assessment is of students' work.
But obviously a lot of other skills
go into being able to to write
successfully: reading, listening,
interacting with tutors and fellow
students as well. Most of the information
we write about
is, we gather from reading so
reading skills like skimming, scanning
uh... guessing the meeting of unknown
words and so on
uh... are important skills.
Lectures too - we gather information from
lecturers that feeds into our writing uh...
so,
having skills for understanding
lectures is important.
Different disciplines to some extent
communicate in different ways 
so we've tried to accommodate that
in the course by
getting students to think about to find
out about how things are done
specifically
in in their discipline.
So, just to take a
are very simple example
uh... different disciplines have
uh... different attitudes to the use
of 'I'
in their wrighting.
Some subject areas like
education
tend to allowed the use of 'I' and are quite
happy with kind of a personal use
and statements,
whereas other subjects like engineering
and tend to avoid the the use of 'I'.
And again trying to get students to
to find out about what happens in their own
discipline is very much a a feature of
the course.
We've tried to to make it uh... an
integrated skills approach so
it's looking at reading, writing, speaking, listening
and looking at academic culture, working
in a an academic environment,
whereas a lot of other
previous material has tended to focus on
one
skill so
wrighting or reading and so on.
Another thing that to some extent
differentiates the material from what's
come before is is authenticity.
Um... and we very much tried to make uh...
as much of the material as possible authentic
so there are authentic lectures, the
reading texts uh... are authentic
Because students are going into their
academic programs and
are not going to be encountering
material which has been filtered for
vocabulary.
They're going to get the
full material
that native speakers have to
read. So
to help them prepare for that, for  that moment
uh...
we we've
tried to focus on authentic material.
The other thing that we've we've tried to do
is to uh... consider
uh... current thinking in research
and and
have tried to reflects this current thinking in
the
material. Areas like genre analysis and phraseology,
and the sort of the academic
socialization
for for students to become members of an academic community.
