Negotiating language and content in our EAP materials: three practitioner views

1. Negotiating language and content in our EAP materials: three practitioner views Clare Carr, Terri Edwards and Michelle Joubert Durham University English Language Centre

2. Introduction

3. T Context (1)

4. Context (2) Durham English Language Centre (ELC) • Not attached to a particular department (although we do run some collaborative courses) • Academic Language and Literacy courses • Varying class sizes: up to 3-200(+)! students • Mostly international - an increasing number of home students • Mostly mixed-disciplinary

5. Context (3) Durham English Language Centre (ELC) • Non-compulsory, in-sessional, non-credit bearing (voluntary) evening classes • Mostly writing-focused • Mostly 1-3 session courses, some longer

6. Context (3): English for Law • Non-compulsory course taught within the ELC, informed by discussion with Law Department academics and students (established 2008) • Good sign-up and retention • Previously a longer course (5 sessions) with longer sessions (120 mins each, now 90 mins) • All agreed: it needed ‘freshening up’

7. Aim of our presentation: our hypothesis • Teachers’ • background • academic study • experience • would affect approaches to the weighting of language and content in materials development

8. Method

9. T Our mission… • To each separately analyse existing materials for an ESAP course: English for Law (specifically, lesson 3 of 3) • To create a reflective record of thoughts/processes in materials development – thinking of language and content • To share reflections about how we would teach it • This would help us to make explicit our views on the balance between language and content

10. Results and Discussion

11. T Immediate responses We all had different initial reactions…

12. However, although we all had different initial reactions, we realised that we were essentially doing the same things…

13. We separated our findings into • EAP content-related discussion • Law content-related discussion

14. T Reflections (1): Session ‘EAP’ content-related discussion • The number of learning objectives for each session needs to be reduced in order to create a more cohesive journey through the materials • Milk the text – students are doing too much reading for too few outcomes e.g. focus the three lessons on one essay • Authentic tasks and texts lead to authentic language use should be used throughout (NB increased reading burden – accessible topics) • Language needs to be more integrated (e.g. ‘it’ phrases): separation makes language seem peripheral • Even where content is subject-specific, there are some teachable transferable skills (e.g. the ability to unpack the structure and mine the language of a text)

15. English for Law Overview

16. Reflections (2): Text and ‘Law’ content-related discussion • As non-subject specialists within an EGAP or even ESAP programme, “we aren’t teaching them law”, “we can’t teach them law” or ever fully join the law community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) • There were some aspects of law that we knew about from reading and talking to academics and students – close relationship to Law Department e.g. (i) OSCOLA rather than Harvard (authenticity) (ii) the referencing element of Lesson 3 could be moved into Lesson 1 (to foreground the use of sources to make recommendations)

17. English for Law Overview

18. P E A Content and meaning are the drivers of both structure and language choices. We need to use the knowledge we have of ‘P’ (purpose) to direct our co-construction of ‘A’ (academic) with the students and teach ‘E’ (English language) within the TASK + CONTENT framework.

19. Conclusions and Recommendations

20. Back to our hypothesis… • Our previous background/academic study/experience affected our initial reactions • BUT: • We agreed far more than we disagreed – shared identity as part of an EAP community of practice • Wider issues of agency, power relations, identity, expertise, positioning of EAP practitioner within the university, department titles, occluded genres – all things we can’t easily solve alone – filter down to affect lesson planning

21. So, what does this tell us about our unified approach to balancing language and content? • Turner (2004)…. “in the context of performance in academic discourse…language form as well as language as used in a particular theoretical discourse or equally important“ • Language and content are inseparable – it’s about integrating the teaching of language and content even though as EAP professionals we may be unfamiliar with discipline content • We can and must use our shared identity as EAP practitioners to inform the EAP content of our ESAP teaching • As a by-product, we can increase both our profile and status in the university by championing our linguistic expertise and its applicability and usefulness to students of all disciplines.

22. T Implications and Recommendations • Collaborative planning and sharing of resources/expertise is to be encouraged • EAP practitioners should consider developing expertise in the writing practices of particular disciplines BUT needn’t be content experts • Wider ethnography (as in ESP) may be helpful – triangulation of product and process: texts, lecturer feedback, faculty and students as far as possible and us as teachers • As a department at Durham we are seeking ways to inform our practice with theory, expanding EAP content knowledge by integrating theory from, e.g. Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, passim) and Academic Literacies (Lillis & Scott, 2007), ESAP and genre analysis (Hyland, 2002; Nesi & Gardner, 2012): the TEAP reading group

23. T TEAP reading group • Hood, S. (2008). Summary writing in academic contexts: implicating meaning in processes of change. Linguistics and Education 19, 351-365. • Macnaught, L., Maton, K., Martin, J.R., and Matruglio, E. (2013). Jointly constructing semantic waves: implications for teacher training. Linguistics and Education 24, 50-63. • Turner, J. (2004). Language as academic purpose. Journal of English for Academic Purposes. 3, 95-109.

24. References • Hyland, K. (2002). Specificity revisited: how far should we go now? English for Specific Purposes, 21(4) 385-395. • Lave, J. and Wenger E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. • Lea, M. R. and Street, B. V. (1998). Student Writing in Higher Education: an academic literacies approach. Studies in Higher Education 23(2), 157-172. • Lea, M. R. and Street, B. V. (2006). The “Academic Literacies” Model: Theory and Application. Theory into Practice. 45(4), 368-377. • Lillis, T. and Scott, M. (2007). Defining academic literacies research: issues of epistemology, ideology and strategy. Journal of Applied Linguistics. 4(1) 5-32. • Nesi, H. and Gardner, S. (2012). Genres Across The Disciplines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. • Stoller, F. L., Horn, B., Grabe, W. and Robinson, M. S.(2006). Evaluative review in materials development. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 5 174-192.

25. Thank you for listening.Questions/Comments? Clare Carr c.c.barker@durham.ac.uk Terri Edwards terri.edwards@durham.ac.uk Michelle Joubertmichelle.joubert@durham.ac.uk Durham University English Language Centre