The IATEFL English for Specific Purposes SIG Conference: Ankara June 18th-19th 2010

The IATEFL English for Specific Purposes SIG Conference in Ankara brought together teachers from not only Turkey but from around the World to discuss contemporary issues in the field of academic English. The range of presentations included two from the School of languages where I work.

The opening plenary of the conference was from Olwyn Alexander, a teaching fellow at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh (and Chair-elect of BALEAP). In ‘The Leap into TEAP: the role of the BALEAP competency framework in the professional development of new EAP teachers’ Olwyn described how Teaching English for Academic Purposes is a mature and expanding discipline which has the potential to inform teaching practices in other areas of ELT with its needs-driven contextualised approach. In the UK, noted Olwyn, the British Association of Lecturers of English for Academic Purposes (BALEAP) is playing a key role in setting and maintaining standards in EAP, through its accreditation of pre-sessional courses and also through the specification of a framework of EAP Teacher Competencies.

This framework now informs the approach to recruitment and professional development of teachers on BALEAP accredited pre-sessional courses. In her talk she derived some ‘taken for granted’ aspects of EAP which are essential for new teachers to understand. She also presented key aspects of the BALEAP competencies framework divided into core competencies which new EAP teachers can reasonably be expected to bring with them to their new role and advanced competencies which require further development. Finally, she suggested some of the attributes that new EAP teachers need to acquire to work successfully in EAP.

I liked the way Olwyn tracked the development of EAP and found the presentation a great way to open the event.

Fredricka L. Stoller, from Northern Arizona University, delivered ‘Preparing Students for the Realities of Mainstream University Classes.’ Students, Fredricka intimated, enter English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programs with pressing language- and content-learning needs (Hyland, 2006; Stoller, 2002). In a relatively short period of time, their EAP instructors must prepare them for the realities of mainstream classes. In her plenary, she explored the essential components of effective EAP curricula, taking into consideration student needs, student goals, institutional expectations, and final performance outcomes. Fredricka also considered a variety of mechanisms for integrating language and content instruction, with the goal of creating a coherent EAP curriculum that assists students in developing the skills and strategies needed for success in future mainstream university classes. The session concluded with an examination of the challenges, dilemmas, and tensions experienced by EAP instructors, and the EAP programs in which they work, and an exploration of some possible solutions.

I found Fredricka’s presentation to be a good introduction to those with only a very brief knowledge of EAP, i.e. probably very eye-opening for some in the audience.

William Grabe, also from Northern Arizona University, discussed ‘The Role of Reading in EAP Instruction.’ According to Grabe, reading plays a prominent role in EAP instruction. It is a primary source of academic information; it is a skill that can be used beyond formal language instruction to build academic skills further; and it is central to multi-skills, multi-task assignments that support academic learning. While reading at all levels is useful for improving both language and academic skills, the development of more advanced reading skills is critical for EAP academic success.

His presentation briefly noted research foundations for a set of implication for reading instruction. These implications were then translated into more specific recommendations for EAP reading curriculum design and instructional activities. Multiple activities and task types were presented and a number of demonstrations will be given.

It was a pleasure to listen to Grabe, who is a legendary figure in the field of reading. His presentation was a lot more accessible than I’ve found him to be in the past and he got a really great reception from everyone in attendance.

In his plenary, Garnet Education’s Terry Phillips asked the question, ‘What grammar do EAP students really need?’ Most EFL course books, even those used to teach EAP students, are still organised to a grammatical syllabus which, in effect, is largely a verb tense syllabus. The focus in such a syllabus is on paradigmatic relationships – I am, You are, He is etc. EFL teachers, Phillips suggested, are therefore trained to teach verb tense grammar and are generally good at this. In this view of language, complex verb forms, like the present perfect modal passive, are the basis of advanced level English. However, English is, in fact, largely a syntactic language, where word order is more important than tense choice. The function of a word in a sentence cannot normally be recovered from the form of the word in English, only from its position in a phrase or sentence, so students of any form of English need a good grasp of acceptable syntactic – or horizontal – structure. They need to recognise and be able to produce the basic S (subject) V (verb) O (object) sentence, and from there to expand with pre- and post-modification, and to recognise where adverbial phrases can be added. This is especially true for students of academic English. Recent corpus research , reported in, inter alia, the Longman Grammar of Written and Spoken English (Biber et al, 1999), indicates that complexity in academic English lies in the noun phrase, the adverbial phrase, and clause joining and embedding. The presenter briefly reviewed research findings and then laid out some practical ways of teaching syntactic rather than paradigmatic grammar.

I’m always a bit wary of plenary talks delivered by people from publishing houses for obvious reasons but I really enjoyed this one, even though I would have liked a bit more focus on the ‘academic’ grammar promised.

Ken Hyland, from the University of Hong Kong, delivered the final plenary: ‘Let’s be specific: disciplinary writing and EAP.’ It is now largely accepted that, for the moment at least, English should be taught to facilitate students’ studies at university and to encourage participation in global networks of scholarship, but what kind of English should be taught is more controversial. In his paper Hyland argued that the emergence of community-oriented views of literacy and students’ writing experiences at university encourage us to attend to the specific contexts of language use. Because texts are only effective when writers employ conventions that other members of the community find familiar and convincing, these conventions are likely to differ across disciplines.

Identifying the particular language features, discourse practices, and communicative skills of target groups therefore becomes central to teaching English in Higher Education, and teachers have to become researchers of the genres they teach. In his presentation Hyland revisited some of the arguments for specificity by drawing on research over the last decade into both student and professional academic writing. Through analyses of different corpora, he additionally attempted to highlight something of the disciplinary-specific nature of genres and show how writers use rhetorical choices to create a recognizable social world.

Ken, you’re a legend, what can I say!

In addition to the great plenaries and many other fine presentations, the School of Languages also had a robust representation at the event. In their presentation entitled ‘Developing Communication Skills with a Specific Focus on Public Speaking’, my dear colleagues Zeynep Önel and Meral Güçeri discussed the fact that learners vary in their speaking ability and that most people get nervous while speaking in public. Noting that going through the ‘dos and donts’ of oral presentations and viewing several videos in the classroom are usually useful awareness raising tools, Zeynep and Meral suggested that more needs to be done in order to build relevant skills. Their session therefore focused on the tools used to develop strategies to enhance effective public speaking.

Making an oral presentation requires a thorough understanding of the task, in-depth research, careful preparation and content relevance (focusing on an issue and designing the content accordingly taking care about the flow of the ideas and providing meaningful examples). Furthermore, attention to the needs of the audience and designing relevant slides must also be considered. Even though the pre-oral preparation stage seems to establish the backbone of the OP, it is the delivery skills which make an OP success or failure. Possibly due to excessive use of internet, learners have difficulty in establishing eye contact, adjusting the tone, level and pitch of their voice, gestures and postures. The session aimed to share learner OP strategies which have been developed in order to overcome oral presentation anxiety.

The ever inspirational Benet Vincent was good enough to take me along as his sidekick for a presentation entitled ‘Bridging the lexical gap between EAP and Faculty courses’, which described the development of a corpus based on core texts from a Freshman Social and Political Science course at Sabanci University. We then explained how keywords were identified and extracted from the corpus by comparing it with a corpus consisting of the textbook used on the program using the freeware program Antconc.

The aim of the process described was to identify lexis that could be included in the vocabulary syllabus at Upper Intermediate level so that all students on the program would be exposed to these items before moving into Faculty. We also explained how the items identified were incorporated into the vocabulary syllabus, including discussion of the materials thereby produced such as concordance lines. Finally, we discussed ideas about the means by which corpus data of this kind could be used pedagogically, thus leading to greater teacher awareness in this area, as well as the benefits to learners of such an approach.

I was really happy to have attended the event, which both gave me lots of new ideas to consider but also confirmed that our school is definitely blazing a trail in this field.