Workshop - Curriculum design in EAP: A social semiotics approach

CELT Visiting Scholar 

Register your attendance here

Dr Namala Tilakaratna (American University of Sharjah) will be visiting the University of Leeds on 3rd and 4th July. We have organized a workshop and interaction with colleagues working on EAP or in sessional provisions or conducting scholarship around genre and discourse in the disciplines (anyone interested is welcome). 

One of the most challenging aspects of teaching in higher education is being asked to design a curriculum. You may have learnt about social semiotics and genre pedagogy and successfully used it to analyse text, to create powerful pedagogy and yet you have rarely thought about the macro design elements of putting it all together in the form of coherent curriculum. Sometimes you have to create a curriculum from scratch or even worse, materials are inherited, objectives and lesson outcomes have been described and approved of by university or centre management and you have the daunting task of creating an impactful curriculum that enhances student learning. The first question that emerges is “where do I start” and the next is typically “how can I create curriculum that fulfills the needs of my students” enabling them to have ‘mastery of genre’ in their disciplines extending to critical orientations to text? These questions often emerge despite the fact that social semiotics has extensive and detailed publications explaining the different stages of curriculum design such as needs analyses, text analyses, feedback, testing, assessment and rubric design. Less attention is paid in publications on how to make the daunting and often messy process of curriculum design visible. This workshop focusses on different types of curricula from those co-created in collaboration with other disciplines in modules which embed EAP instruction, to constructing EGAP curriculum that are designed with large disciplinary and sometimes multidisciplinary and multimodal concerns such as in science and design. This workshop tries to answer the question of where to start, what resources to use and how to go about building a curriculum that draws on the vast resources that have been created by genre pedagogy and SFG experts. It provides insight into drawing on and successfully utilising the rich pedagogical research in Systemic Functional Linguistics from primary and secondary schools, higher education and ELT. 

Dr. Namala Tilakaratna has extensive expertise in higher education research with a focus on students’ learning of academic English, critical thinking, and reflection skills. Engaging in research across education, linguistics (social semiotics), and literacy, she has shared work in diverse international contexts, including Australia, South Africa, and Singapore. She served as a senior lecturer in the National University of Singapore (NUS) from 2018 to 2023. Her publications and research interest can be accessed on her Google Scholar profile.