Review of IATEFL 2021: Sessions relevant to English for Academic Purposes and University Language Teaching - Tanya Fernbank
The IATEFL (International Association for Teaching English as a Foreign Language) Conference 2021 (19th-21st June) included several presentations and workshops on themes related to English for Academic Purposes (EAP). This review provides an overview of a few sessions which may be of interest to EAP practitioners or university language teachers who were unable to attend, should they wish to watch some of these once the recordings become available for members of IATEFL.
The conference involved online presentations and workshops from speakers all over the world and took place on the online conference platform www.hopin.com. The platform also included exhibition spaces and an option to network by being randomly placed in a meeting with one other person for up to 3 minutes.
Most of the sessions which I attended were workshops or talks related to the ESP or Research Special Interest Group. The EAP forum on Supporting EAP students (Sunday 20th) involved 3 presentations followed by a Q and A session. In his presentation Knowledge decay in EAP and bridging the gap between semesters, David Krygier discusses the reasons and methods for combating a deterioration in the performance of some EAP students between semesters, based on a study of foundation students at a Sino-Foreign university. He attributes this issue to long breaks between semesters, meaning students may not be so exposed to English during this time. Suggested methods for dealing with this problem include bridging assessments which cover the holiday period to motivate students to participate and encouraging students to keep self-study records with an online credit system. David also suggested developing microlearning, whereby students revise just one area of language in detail by watching short videos related to this, which the presenter argues can help to engage them.
In the same forum, both Kim Pederson (University of Brighton, UK) and Karen Martin (University of Bradford, UK) discuss the challenges of encouraging embedded in-sessional language support in university departments and explain how the need for such support has emerged from the necessity to improve pass rates, motivate and retain international students. Kim Pederson provides the results of a study related to Postgraduate international students on a health programme at her university in Beyond the pre-sessional: extending in-sessional EAP support. The study found that those students who engaged in the in sessional lessons improved their understanding of the need to learn more autonomously and be pro-active in communicating with tutors, as well as their critical thinking skills. It also identified students’ preferences for prompt feedback and clear one-to-one oral feedback as well as the opportunity to test the clarity of their ideas in feedback sessions. In Barriers to implementing embedded academic language support in UK universities, Karen Martin discussed the benefits and drawbacks of in sessional support, advocating the need for collaboration with subject specialists so that students improve language and academic skills related to their discipline-specific context. She also explains how making this course a compulsory part of the curriculum in one faculty has helped students to improve. Finally, she recommends encouraging commitment into embedding such courses from all parties involved in the process, from faculty level to the students themselves.
There were also two sessions on EAP teacher identity or development. First, the workshop ‘Sticky objects’: exploring quality of life for teacher development (Judith Hanks, University of Leeds, UK; Sian Etherington, University of Salford, UK; Eman Alshari, King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia) on Saturday 19th provided some interesting examples from case studies on EAP teacher emotions and resilience in the UK and Saudi Arabia. EAP teachers were asked to take pictures of what they did in their working day along with short descriptions of these, including some of their thoughts and feelings. The speakers stress the importance of creating both constructive teaching and learning communities to discuss issues of mutual interest and placing more emphasis on positive experiences for improving the quality of life of EAP teachers, rather than necessarily being positive about accepting more work than they can handle. The workshop itself also created a positive and collaborative atmosphere in using Padlets for attendees to share and comment on ideas. See the full project at: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/K170_ELTRA_FINAL_Web_15.5.20.pdf.
Secondly, Sofia Di Giallonardo (University of Glasgow, UK) explained the results of a comparative study on the professional identities of EAP teachers in EAP teacher identity: a longitudinal study, focusing on those practitioners involved in both in 2014 and again in 2019. She discusses how EAP teachers’ perceptions of their place in the academic community and their university as well as the extent of support for EAP tutors moving into academic research may affect their ability and motivation to develop agency and engage in their institutions. She also notes the variations in EAP tutors’ perceptions of themselves, ranging from seeing themselves as study skills tutors rather than EAP practitioners or as teachers rather than academics. She concludes that at the time of the second study, some EAP practitioners still felt that they occupied a peripheral role within universities. Furthermore, she notes how her department’s move from ‘Services’ part of a faculty and the move to teaching and scholarship contracts in 2019 has improved these tutors’ perception of themselves and motivation to conduct research. However, she also acknowledges that some practitioners have needed to adjust to the opportunity to do research. She therefore views it as important for EAP practitioners to have similar opportunities to conduct research as other academics, but recognises that it can also be helpful for them to have some support in transitioning to roles which involve some research.
There were also several sessions on academic reading and writing and teaching academic language, as well as assessment. For instance, in the session Designing EAP writing exams that create positive classroom washback, Beth Laureen Wiens (Zayed University, UAE) explains how her university’s EAP department redesigned writing assessment to help students improve in class rather than just for writing exams, as well as learning to use sources and to write more than just five paragraphs in timed essays. The written assessment on the EAP course in question therefore consisted of three parts; an exam where students had to identify and correct linguistic errors using a correction code already utilised in class, a summary task to be completed after listening to a short audio and an integrated writing task involving incorporating evidence a short lecture and reading text related to the theme of the written task. She argues that this tested students’ ability to use the sources to support their ideas, synthesise these sources and cite them correctly in exams. Her conclusion suggests that these strategies helped the students to improve in class as well as for the exam.
The session by Jochem Broodhuys (Queen Mary University of London, UK) Academic reading on a pedestal: looking into pre-sessional EAP courses explained the context of UK pre-sessionals for those who are not familiar with these and outlined the results of a case study on how to improve the academic writing process. He identified the issues which students in this study at one UK university had with synthesising information from sources and reading for a specific purpose and considered how to improve students’ ability motivation to complete these tasks. He therefore tried such methods as ensuring that texts are chosen for their relation to course objectives, encouraging reading with specific purposes in mind and summarising texts, through using interactive quizzes, learning journals, designing reading and writing tasks at the same time to ensure consistency. However, he did not find that students’ reading strategies had improved after applying these techniques and concluded that the links between reading and writing should be made clearer to motivate students to read productively.
In the workshop Teaching patterns in context: uncovering semantic sequences in writing (Amanda Patten and Susan Hunston, University of Birmingham, UK) discussed the importance of encouraging students to recognise semantic patterns in academic writing. For instance, this included examples such as ‘how to’ + method OR ‘that’ + effect + conclusion/ findings. They argue that if students notice the meanings in these patterns, they may be able to find replacement verbs or phrases with similar meanings. In addition, they recommend using some of the patterns identified in the Collins Cobuild dictionary https://grammar.collinsdictionary.com/grammar-pattern to find examples of such sequences and using colour coding to identify and help them remember patterns. In their view, if students can understand the academic purpose of such patterns, this can motivate them when reading and help them to use these in their writing. In response to my question about the research conducted such patterns related to specific disciplines, they mentioned that these patterns are often linked to the approach to research taken by different disciplines, such as the use of nouns related to discussion in humanities subjects.
The conference also included other sessions which may be of interest to EAP practitioners although they relate to other aspects of English Language Teaching. These included sessions on peer assessment such as that by Sally Mohamed Ali (Freelance, Sunday 20th) and on various aspects of inclusive practice such as support for students with special educational needs. Two such sessions which I attended were the plenary on Engaging students with specific learning difficulties: Key principles of inclusive language (Judit Kormos, University of Lancaster, UK, Saturday 19th) which suggested how inclusive online technology can benefit second language learners and Dyslexia and lexical notes - enhancing learning through technology (Marcio Oliveira, Associacao Cultura Inglesa Sao Paulo, Brazil, Monday 21st) which outlined the results of a study on how students can use multimodal lexical notes on Quizlet to improve their learning of new vocabulary.
In addition, in Rethinking under-represented minorities in textbooks through a discourse analysis-oriented model (Monday 21st), Sergio Durand (Escuela Normal Veracruzana, Mexico) considered how to adapt textbook exercises to allow discussion of how minority groups are represented by analysing discourse such as pronouns used to describe them. He also suggests encouraging students to thinking critically about how diverse groups are represented in texts, an idea which could be adapted for authentic EAP texts. On Sunday 20th, Yvonne Pratt-Johnson (St. John’s University, USA) discussed how to support refugee children who have experienced trauma in Trauma without borders: teacher preparation, classroom strategies and interventions, but touched on themes which are also relevant to adults in this position.
In summary, although this is not an EAP or university-specific conference, there were many presentations and workshops which are relevant to EAP practitioners and language teachers at universities worldwide. Perhaps some of these overlaps between EAP and other areas of English language teaching could be exploited further in collaborative ventures with practitioners with expertise outside the field of EAP in order to provide mutual support for improving practice within EAP and other related fields.