Doceren in het Engels: niet zo eenvoudig

Omdat de universiteit steeds internationaler wordt, is doceren in het Engels een “must”. Niet zo eenvoudig als het lijkt. Hoe zorg je er bijvoorbeeld voor dat studenten hoofd- en bijzaken van elkaar onderscheiden? UGent-onderzoekster Katrien Deroey schreef er een doctoraat over

Confronting corpora with coursebooks: the case of lecture listening

This paper confronts language use in the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus with the representation of lectures in 25 listening coursebooks (Deroey, submitted; Deroey, 2017). Following key tenets such as authenticity, specificity and needs analysis, English for Academic Purposes (EAP) materials development should be guided by an understanding of target genres and their communicative demands. Yet, lecture listening coursebooks have often been criticised for their lack of realistic lecture models (e.g. Alexander, Argent, & Spencer, 2008; Field, 2011; Thompson, 2003). The aspects of representativeness examined in these coursebooks are language, lecture authenticity and research-informedness. To assess the representativeness of language, signposts of important points are compared with those retrieved from the BASE corpus of 160 authentic lectures (Deroey, submitted; Deroey and Taverniers, 2012). The coursebook lectures are also analysed in terms of their source, delivery and length. The materials are further reviewed for their use of findings from research into listening comprehension and lecture discourse. Results suggest that current lecture listening materials often do not reflect the language and lectures students are likely to encounter on their degree programmes. Moreover, materials are typically not (systematically) informed by listening and lecture discourse research. These findings highlight the need for EAP practitioners to approach published materials critically and supplement or modify them in ways that would better serve students. References Alexander, O., Argent, S., & Spencer, J. (2008). EAP Essentials: a teacher’s guide to principles and practice. Reading: Garnet. Deroey, K. L. B. (submitted). The representativeness of lecture listening coursebooks: language, lectures, research-informedness. Deroey, K. L. B. (2017). How representative are EAP listening books of real lectures? . In J. Kemp (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2015 BALEAP Conference. EAP in a rapidly changing landscape: Issues, challenges and solutions. Reading: Garnet. Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012). Just remember this: Lexicogrammatical relevance markers in lectures. English for Specific Purposes, 31(4), 221-233.  Field, J. (2011). Into the mind of the academic listener. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 10(2), 102-112.  Thompson, S. E. (2003). Text-structuring metadiscourse, intonation and the signalling of organisation in academic lectures. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2(1), 5-20.

EMI lecturer training: content, delivery, ways forward

peer reviewedThis paper presents a survey of EMI lecturer training in 18 countries worldwide. To this end, 25 articles were analysed to reveal the components, delivery, challenges and recommendations of such initiatives. This analysis found four main content components: language, pedagogy, communication and EMI awareness. Although language work was often expected and most programmes were developed by English language professionals, quite a few initiatives increased their focus on teaching strategies in response to participants’ needs. Most training was done face to face through group classes, individual support and peer learning. Microteaching with reflection, feedback and observation was greatly valued. Reported challenges included contextualisation, group heterogeneity, lecturer confidence and incentivisation. Amongst the conclusions that can be drawn from this survey, I will suggest that the multi-faceted nature of many EMI training initiatives warrants a collaboration between language, didactic, EMI and disciplinary experts. Such training can usefully be integrated into broader professional development programmes which reflect a ‘multilingual and multicultural vision of teaching and learning’ (Dafouz, 2021, p. 34) and which are embedded in the local and disciplinary context (e.g. Herington, 2020). References Dafouz Milne, E. (2021). Repositioning English-Medium Instruction in a broader international agenda: insights from a survey on teacher professional development. Alicante Journal of English Studies, 34, 15-38. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2021.34.08 Deroey, K. L. B. (2023). English medium instruction lecturer training programmes: content, delivery, ways forward. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 62(1), 101223. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2023.101223 Herington, R. (2020). Observation as a tool to facilitate the professional development of teaching faculty involved in English as a Medium of Instruction: trainer and trainee perspectives. In M. L. Carrió-Pasto (Ed.), Internationalising Learning in Higher Education (pp. 65-82). IGI Global.4. Quality educatio

Designing personalized, interactive materials for presentation skills

In this talk I demonstrate how we can design and adapt materials for presentation skills to build on students’ individual needs and disciplinary backgrounds in an interactive way. The context for this is a conference skills course I’ve designed and successfully taught for several years. The PhD students on this course vary greatly in their presentation skills, experience and disciplinary background. After an overview of the course content and format, I illustrate how students’ own presentations and research can be integrated so as to enhance personal relevance and interactivity. Aspects of this personalized, interactive course design include filming student presentations, structured peer feedback and reflection, a pre-course questionnaire, and tasks requiring them to work with their conference calls, research, texts, visuals and experiences. I conclude with a summary of course feedback, highlighting what students reported as being particularly useful and what they would add or change

A comprehensive survey of English medium instruction lecturer training programmes: content, delivery, ways forward

This paper surveys English medium instruction (EMI) lecturer training worldwide in order to inform decisions by practitioners tasked with its design and delivery. The survey encompasses 25 published initiatives from 18 countries. These were analysed for their content components and delivery methods as well as training challenges and recommendations. This analysis revealed four main components: language, communication, pedagogy and EMI awareness. Most programmes were delivered face to face but some were blended with a substantial amount of online and independent work. Delivery methods could broadly be classified into group classes, individual support and peer learning. Microteaching with reflection, feedback and observation was a widely recurring and highly rated activity. Programmes were typically developed in-house by English language professionals. Recurring challenges were contextualisation, group heterogeneity, lecturer confidence and the lack of incentivisation. The paper concludes with pedagogical recommendations for the development of EMI lecturer training programmes

Markers of lesser importance in lecture discourse

This paper surveys how less important lecture discourse is marked lexicogrammatically in the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus (Deroey and Taverniers, 2012; Deroey, 2014). Such interpersonal, metadiscursive devices combine discourse organization with evaluation along a ‘parameter of importance or relevance’ (Thompson and Hunston, 2000: 24). They can help students discern the relative importance of points and so may aid lecture comprehension, note-taking and retention. The markers were first retrieved manually from 40 lectures and then using Sketch Engine from all 160 lectures. They fell into five categories: (i) message status markers (e.g. not pertinent, joke, anyway); (ii) topic treatment markers (e.g. briefly, not look at, for a moment); (iii) lecturer knowledge markers (e.g. not know, not remember); (iv) assessment markers (e.g. not examine, not learn); and (v) attention- and note-taking markers (e.g. ignore, not copy down). This study illustrates the challenge of identifying and quantifying pragmatic features in academic discourse. Few markers explicitly evaluated discourse as being unimportant (e.g. not pertinent) and few had an inherent meaning of lesser importance (e.g. incidentally). Instead, they depended rather heavily on pragmatic interpretation to achieve their effect and could generally be viewed as ‘muted signals’ (Swales and Burke, 2003: 17), expressing importance implicitly or cumulatively (cf. Hunston, 2011). Hence, Hunston’s observation that ‘much evaluative meaning is not obviously identifiable, as it appears to depend on immediate context and on reader assumptions about value’ (2004: 157) is particularly pertinent here. References Deroey, K. L. B. (2014). ‘Anyway, the point I'm making is’: Lexicogrammatical relevance marking in lectures. In L. Vandelanotte, D. Kristin, G. Caroline, & K. Ditte (Eds.), Recent Advances in Corpus Linguistics: Developing and Exploiting Corpora (pp. 265-291). Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Deroey, K. L. B., & Taverniers, M. (2012). ‘Ignore that' cause it's totally irrelevant’: Marking lesser relevance in lectures. Journal of Pragmatics, 44(14), 2085-2099. Hunston, S. (2004). Counting the uncountable: Problems of identifying evaluation in a text and in a corpus. In A. Partington, J. Morley, & L. Haarman (Eds.), Corpora and discourse (pp. 157-188). Bern: Peter Lang. Hunston, S. (2011). Corpus approaches to evaluation: phraseology and evaluative language (Vol. 13). New York: Routledge. Swales, J. M., & Burke, A. (2003). " Its really fascinating work": Differences in Evaluative Adjectives across Academic Registers. Language and Computers, 46(1), 1-18.  Thompson, G., & Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: An introduction. In Hunston, S., & Thompson, G. (Eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 1-27). Oxford: OUP

Designing EMI lecturer training programmes: what and how?

peer reviewedThis workshop aims to provide insights into the complex task of designing and delivering EMI lecturer training programmes. Through a review of current initiatives worldwide (Deroey, 2023), groupwork and exchanges of experiences, participants will become more aware of the factors that need to be considered when tasked with EMI lecturer training and have a basic framework for tackling this task. The efficient design and delivery of EMI lecturer training and support is a complex challenge. First, the EMI context is very varied (Dafouz et al., 2020) and initiatives should be adapted to the local cultural, educational, linguistic and institutional contexts (Herington, 2020; Pagèze & Lasagbaster, 2017; Tuomainen, 2018). Second, most literature reports the need for language, pedagogical and intercultural components, suggesting interdisciplinary collaboration is desirable. Third, we need to be sensitive to lecturers’ attitudes towards EMI and EMI training (Perez Cañado, 2020; Tsui, 2018; Westbrook & Henriksen, 2011). Fourth, there are practical considerations such as the timely provision of support (Guarda & Helm, 2017), promoting participation, facilitating learning transfer to lectures, and optimizing the support in view of what are often heterogeneous participant groups in terms of English proficiency, (EMI) lecturing experience and discipline (Ball & Lindsay, 2013). Finally, the design of these programmes typically needs to happen with limited institutional resources. Workshop outline -Introduction to findings from the literature on EMI lecturer training programmes worldwide -Presentation of an EMI lecturer support brief used as the basis for group work -Small group brainstorming on the needs analysis, components and format for EMI support appropriate to the brief -Whole group discussion of the proposals and experiences with designing and delivering EMI lecturer support References Ball, P., & Lindsay, D. (2013). Language demands and support for English-medium instruction in tertiary education. Learning from a specific context In A. Doiz, D. Lasagabaster, & J. M. Sierra (Eds.), English-medium instruction at universities: Global challenges (pp. 44-61). Multilingual Matters. Dafouz, E., Haines, K., & Pagèze, J. (2020). Supporting educational developers in the era of internationalised higher education: insights from a European project. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 23(3), 326-339. Deroey, K. L. B. (2023). English medium instruction lecturer training programmes: content, delivery, ways forward. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 62(101223), 1-16. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2023.101223 Guarda, M., & Helm, F. (2017). A survey of lecturers’ needs and feedback on EMI training. In K. Ackerley, M. Guarda, & F. Helm (Eds.), Sharing perspectives on English-medium instruction (pp. 167-194). Peter Lang. Herington, R. (2020). Observation as a tool to facilitate the professional development of teaching faculty involved in English as a Medium of Instruction: trainer and trainee perspectives. In M. L. Carrió-Pasto (Ed.), Internationalising Learning in Higher Education (pp. 65-82). IGI Global. Macaro, E. (2020). Exploring the role of language in English medium instruction. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 23(3), 263-276. Pagèze, J., & Lasagabaster, D. (2017). Teacher development for teaching and learning in English in a French higher education context. L’Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria, 25, 289–310. Perez Cañado, M. L. (2020). Addressing the research gap in teacher training for EMI: An evidence-based teacher education proposal in monolingual contexts. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 48, 1–22. Tsui, C. (2018). Teacher efficacy: a case study of faculty beliefs in an English-medium instruction teacher training program. Taiwan Journal of TESOL, 15(1), 101-128. Tuomainen, S. (2018). Supporting non-native university lecturers with English-medium instruction. Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education, 10(3), 230-242. Westbrook, P. N., & Henriksen, B. (2011). Bridging the linguistic and affective gaps: The impact of a short, tailor-made language course on a Danish university lecturer’s ability to lecture with confidence in English. In R. Cancino, L. Dam, & K. Jæger (Eds.), Policies, principles, practices: New directions in foreign language education in the era of educational globalization (pp. 188–212). Cambridge Scholars Press.4. Quality educatio

Constructing effective and efficient EAP curricula

In this talk I will sketch the development of an EAP curriculum at the University of Luxembourg Language Centre that takes into account multilingualism, needs analysis, insights into EAP teaching and materials, discussions with stakeholders, and human resources. I will argue for an EAP curriculum approach that trains a set of core skills and enables discipline-specific genre and language learning through awareness-raising activities and corpus search tools. In this view, English for Specific Academic Purposes is not the teaching of disciplinary vocabulary. Instead, teachers use their EAP expertise to ascertain disciplinary needs, compose or evaluate materials, set tasks in line with disciplinary activities, and –importantly- provide the skills and tools to continue (discipline-specific) learning beyond the course. I will draw on examples of EAP course design from my own practice as well as on findings from my published research into EAP coursebook authenticity and multilingual course design