Tech tools in EAP: an #EAPchat contribution

The topic for next Monday's #EAPchat is:

"What tech is good tech for EAP?"

As I'm going to be away and will miss the chat, I thought I'd share my contribution in advance here instead. To be honest, on the very short, intensive, pre-sessional courses I teach on, I don't get much chance to play around with all the tech stuff I'd really like to, but below are a few things I have managed to squeeze in successfully in the past:

Online dictionaries: Perhaps unsurprisingly with my lexicography background, I'm keen on teaching/ encouraging dictionary skills and I think for EAP, that element of independent learning is even more important, so I use dictionaries a lot in class. Having them up on screen means I can more easily highlight useful features like collocations in examples and specialist senses (which are often the ones relevant in EAP and which students often miss down at the bottom of an entry). I tend to swap between the different online learner's dictionaries available to demo what's available to students:

OUP:  http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/ 
CUP: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/
Macmillan:  http://www.macmillandictionary.com/

Vocabulary Profiler: I try to demo the Compleat Lexical Tutor vocab profiler at least once with each class when I'm talking about the nature of academic language and the AWL. I put a text we've been working with through it to highlight the AWL words and show the breakdown of vocabulary (top 2000, AWL and 'specialist'). I don't generally make a big thing of the AWL (there isn't time on such a short course), but I find it helps students get a feel for academic vocabulary and style. Some students, especially from science and engineering tend to like the statistical/mathematical element of it and in my last group, a couple of students (one engineering and the other seismology) independently put their own writing through it and brought me the results. One lad consciously worked on getting his AWL 'score' up to 15% and I have to say, his writing style did noticeably improve! It's probably not an approach I'd actively promote, but if it works for some students ...

Corpora:  I also try to demo a corpus search at least once with a group and again, it depends on the type of students as to whether they latch onto it or not. (I don't push it if it doesn't get a good reaction.) A few years ago, I had a group of mostly Taiwanese English teachers preparing for an MA TESOL who were very into language and loved it. I try to introduce it when a language query has cropped up in class or in feedback on a writing task. I probably wouldn't risk doing a live off-the-cuff search as a first demo (in case it turns out to be messy and more confusing than helpful), instead I'll trial it at home first and if it's looking good, I'll repeat it in class. Patterns following a particular word (following prepositions or verb forms) work particularly well as they show up really clearly on screen (search for the key word then sort right and the patterns appear as if by magic!). Nowadays, I tend to use the BAWE corpus, made up of student writing, because it's the most relevant to what my students are aiming to produce. I know it's available on various platforms, but I access it via Sketch Engine: https://the.sketchengine.co.uk/open/ 

Whenever I use a tool or website in class, I put the link and some basic instructions on Blackboard (the university's online platform on which each class has its own space), so that students can follow up for themselves if they want. I'd love to experiment with other things, but on an intensive course there are so many competing priorities and things to fit in, I'm just pleased with whatever I can squeeze in and even more happy when it turns out to be just the thing to pique some students' interest.

Sorry I won't be able to join in on Monday, but I'll look forward to catching up on all your tips and links after the event ...

Twitter versus the bean seeds: the pressures of keeping across everything

A blog post I read this morning about the importance of editors keeping up-to-date with the latest trends in publishing (What Do Editors Need To Know Now? via White Ink Limited) got me thinking again about how good I am at keeping my finger on the professional pulse – not just of publishing trends, but also of all the ideas relevant to what I do in ELT, EAP, corpora, lexicography and just language trends generally. It seems that since the explosion of social media, there’s so much potentially relevant stuff being flagged up and available out there to check out, I could easily spend more time on ‘professional development’ than I do on actually getting on with work! Facebook and Twitter both seem to daily throw up links to interesting blog posts and online articles, then there’re Twitter chats (like #EAPchat) and Facebook threads. There are webinars and videos of talks to watch, either live or recorded, and of course, I also hear about more ‘real-life’ events worth attending too. A lot of it’s really useful, and often inspiring, stuff, but it just eats time!

And even then, when I meet up with colleagues, I still find myself embarrassingly ill-informed in comparison – whether that’s academic research that my EAP colleagues bandy around or the latest edtech that my techier pals slip nonchalantly into conversation (notice I’m at least picking up some of the jargon though!). Of course, I like to reassure myself that I’m not actually less informed, it’s just that we all tend to focus on different things. Although having a finger in lots of pies, I do sometimes feel like I just skim lots of things and don’t really spend enough time on any of them.

It seems amazing now that I spent the first 10 years or so of my freelancing career relying on not much more than a yearly visit to the IATEFL conference and the odd article in the IATEFL magazine to keep up-to-date with what was going on beyond what I was immediately working on. It makes me wonder ...

• were we all just less-informed and narrower in outlook back then?
• does having all this extra information make us better at what we do?
• is a lot of what’s out there just an unnecessary waste of time? (I do find that I read a lot that goes over the same old ground and it’s only occasionally that I pick out a genuinely useful, informative nugget)
• and if so, what’s the best way to filter out all the ‘noise’ and focus on the genuinely useful stuff?

On that last point, I do feel a bit of an undercurrent, especially on Twitter, of having to be seen to keep up with the right stuff and also of taking a supportive interest in what people you ‘know’ (in the loosest, social media sense of the word) are doing, even when it’s only on the periphery of your own interests. It’s a pressure I try to resist, but definitely one that’s difficult to ignore completely.

I guess everyone has to find their own balance and way of getting what they want from social media and the "information age" generally, and we all go through phases of being more or less connected, and more or less concerned about the pressure to be across everything all the time. Personally, with the coming of spring (at long last!), I think I’m going to be prioritizing time spent in my garden over time in front of my computer over the next few months … and I’m going to try really hard not to feel guilty or out-of-touch as a result!

Daily updates on the progress of my beans!

IATEFL light

I’m on a train on my way back from Liverpool, reflecting on what I think is probably my 13^th IATEFL conference.  I nearly didn’t make it this year, but I’m very glad I did, even though it was a slightly different IATEFL experience from usual. I usually go for the whole week; going to talks, meeting up with folks and just generally soaking up the vibe. As a freelancer, it’s way of keeping in touch with the industry, what’s new, who’s doing what, but it’s also an invaluable source of contacts. All my work comes via contacts and many of them I meet, or reconnect with, during that one week in April each year. 

After a year spent writing for royalties though, this year the coffers were empty and, with no talk for a publisher lined up, I decided I just couldn’t afford to shell out for registration, travel and accommodation for the week. As the conference got nearer though and people kept asking me if I was going, I started to think that I couldn’t afford not to go. So this year, I did IATEFL on a budget. I booked a cheap hotel for a couple of nights (which turned out to be really central and absolutely fine) and went along to the conference without registering. That, of course, meant I couldn’t go to any of the sessions, but I was still able to schmooze around the exhibition hall and arrange to meet up for endless cups of coffee with friends, colleagues and useful contacts, both old and new. It was a bit odd not having a programme of talks to go to and I did feel a bit left out when people kept asking “Did you go to … ?”, but it was still a pretty packed and productive day and a half.

This year’s highlights, from my rather limited viewpoint, included the buzz around getting more people involved in materials writing. With the major publishers and the publishing industry generally clearly in the middle of a huge upheaval at the moment - with the spread of digital content and the challenge of how to make money out of it - it was nice amongst all the uncertainty to also get a feeling that something new, exciting and less exclusive may emerge from it all. Initiatives like ELT Teacher 2 Writer, Nick Robinson’s agency for ELT writers and the round are starting to help new writers become involved in writing good quality materials, either through the traditional publishing channels or in new ways through e-publishing, self-publishing or more local projects. And the launch of the new IATEFL Materials Writing SIG (MaWSIG) seems to signal more interest in sharing skills and best practice. I was lucky enough to be taken on fresh from my MA and trained in-house (at CUP) as a lexicographer. I actually only spent a relatively short time in-house before I went freelance, but it gave me not only a really solid grounding in lexicography and corpus research, but also an insight into how the whole publishing process works and some invaluable contacts to get me started. For new people wanting to make that shift from teaching to publishing now though, the opportunities to learn the ropes seem much more limited. With tight deadlines and even tighter budgets, publishers are often looking for experienced, reliable people (writers, editors, etc.) who can ‘hit the ground running’. So it looks like if we’re going to bring new talent through and keep standards high, then it’s perhaps going to be through sharing skills and experience. I’m definitely looking forward to being involved in some way.

The other novelty for me was meeting people face-to-face who I’ve got to know through social media. I had the odd experience of going up to people I’d never actually met before all smiles and instantly friendly chat, because they’ve become so familiar via my computer screen! I met several other freelancers who I’ve got to know through Facebook and even a fellow #EAPchat regular from Canada, which was great and lovely to put not just a face, but a voice to a name!

I’m heading home with a pile of new business cards, feeling again like I’m part of a community rather than a lone freelancer working away on my own, and also feeling pretty positive about the possibilities ahead … after that is, a well-earned holiday next week ...

Google, Wikipedia and the journey from ‘information’ to ‘knowledge’

I watched a fascinating programme on TV last night, Google and the World Brain (available on BBC iPlayer for the next few days for those in the UK) about the whole Google Books project.  It was a story I already knew a little about, but the programme brought lots of different ideas and perspectives together in a very interesting and very watchable way. For those of you not familiar with Google Books, it's an attempt by Google to scan/digitize all the world’s books and make them available online, rather like a huge public library. At first, it sounds like an exciting idea, making ‘knowledge’ available to everyone, but of course, it actually raises lots of important questions; among others about copyright and intellectual property (which I may return to in a later post), but also about access to, dissemination of and mediation of information. For me, it also raised lots of questions about the difference between ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’, which a lot of the proponents of Google Books on last night’s programme seemed to use interchangeably.

The proponents of Google Books, and the whole Google project in general, suggest that by collecting all the world’s information in one place, it will allow everyone to access ‘knowledge’ instantly; a kind of ‘world brain’ (an allusion to HG Wells). They put forward the example of a computer that was able to win Jeopardy, a TV general knowledge quiz. And yes, I can see how a clever search algorithm might quickly and easily come up with ‘correct’ answers to simple quiz questions; the capital of Bolivia or the chemical symbol for iron or the year when John Lennon was shot. But is that really ‘knowledge’? It seems to me, there’s a very long and blurry line from uncontested ‘facts’ to ‘information’ to real ‘knowledge’. And crucially, how you navigate your way through the ‘facts’ and ‘information’ determines what ‘knowledge’ you come out with at the end. Until now, that journey has been influenced by your access to information (which in turn is determined by your access to education,  your wealth and status, your gender, your geographical location, etc.) and how the information is presented to you, how it is mediated. Few of us, outside of the most elite academic circles, receive our information first-hand from primary sources; we read about things in books, newspapers, or magazines, we hear things on TV and radio, from our friends, teachers and colleagues. And of course, all of that is mediated by culture, by politics, by our world view. Do we want all our information to be mediated by Google, an American commercial giant? Do we want what we learn about any given topic to be determined by an algorithm written from a particular perspective?  Do we want a search engine that learns what we ‘like’ and only presents us with what it thinks we want to read? Or, to widen things out beyond Google, do we want ‘facts’ to be determined by consensus? Do we want “Wikiality” where if enough people support a statement on Wikipedia, it becomes ‘the truth’? (Thanks to Tyson Seburn for the link to this article containing this great term coined by satirist Stephen Colbert). For me, the apparent ‘democratization of information’ that has come with the internet, Web 2.0, crowdsourcing and the like comes with a lot of caveats.

As an EAP teacher over the past 7 or 8 years, the importance of teaching students how to assess the information they come across has grown immeasurably. The rather dismissive, “stick to what’s in the university library and Wikipedia is banned” position is no longer tenable. Students do and will expect to find most of their information online, so we have no choice as teachers but to help them navigate the best path through. It’s a pressing issue for all educators, but with such a large proportion of the information out there online in English, I think it’s particularly relevant to ELT teachers, and not just in academic circles. With students from different cultural backgrounds and with different levels of digital literacy, on top of the blurring effect that working in a second language can have (grasping basic meanings, but sometimes missing the subtle details), giving our students the skills to make informed judgments about what they read is an essential part of being a language teacher in the modern world.

For many of us, myself included, up until now this has probably been rather patchy and ad hoc, based on our own experiences. Presented with a range of dictionary websites, I can pretty quickly pick out the good from the not-so-good and the downright rubbish, because it’s my area of expertise and I know what to look out for. But when an Engineering student hands in a piece of writing with a reference to a science website, I can go to the website and, aside from a few obvious clues in one direction or the other, I’m really not in a position to accurately judge its reliability. So my resolution for my summer teaching stint this year is to become better informed and more organized in the way I teach my students the skills they need to become more discerning consumers of the information that’s out there, in the hope that they might do a better job of translating that ‘information’ into rich and meaningful ‘knowledge’.

A year in the Twittersphere

I've been having so much fun on Twitter over the past couple of days (I'll explain why later!) that this afternoon I started mulling over a blog post about my experience. Then when I checked, it turned out that I actually joined Twitter exactly a year ago today … now that's what you call serendipity and this post just had to be written!

I actually first ventured into the Twittersphere because my local baker, the lovely Laura Hart, had had to close up shop and suggested I follow her on Twitter as she looked for new premises. In the 12 months since, I have managed to grab the odd one of her delicious custard tarts when she's tweeted that she's selling them somewhere, and now it seems that she's finally found a new permanent home for her bakery – hooray! Sadly, it's on the other side of town, but I'm still looking forward to visiting when she opens. My Twitter experience hasn't all been about patisserie however …

I decided early on that I wasn't interested in celebrity gossip or what Stephen Fry had had for lunch, so decided to restrict my Twitter activity to work-related topics and ‘professional development’. I started off by following a few of the obvious ELT names and a couple of publishers. Then I ventured into the discussion thread, #ELTchat, partly as it's moderated by a very old friend of mine, Shaun Wilden. The first couple of times I ‘tuned in’, it was all just a bit overwhelming, but I slowly got the hang of it. And once I'd been introduced to Hootsuite, and was able to separate out different ‘streams’ on screen, the confusing babble started to make more sense and I got up the courage to start joining in. Although reading the chat and comments from teachers all over the world was a fascinating experience, I soon found that I often had to plough through a lot of stuff that I wasn't really interested in, just to come away with couple of, more or less, interesting points. I still keep an eye on what topics come up, but only dip in if it's something I'm particularly interested in.

Next, I came across #EAPchat, my area of special interest at the moment, which seemed more promising. When I tuned in for my first session though, it turned out to be a slightly stilted ‘conversation’ between myself and just one other teacher! Thankfully, @sharonzspace (aka Sharon Turner, an EAP teacher working in Turkey) piqued my interest just enough to encourage me to come back! As a much newer and more niche chat, #EAPchat (1^st and 3^rd Mondays of the month at 6pm UK time) still generally only attracts a handful of active participants, but on a good day, there are enough of us to get a decent discussion going now. The main frustration I come up against is in trying to discuss what are often quite complex issues condensed down into just a few words. You often find that you'll put out a comment, somebody else will come back with a critique, and you'll then spend your next few tweets trying to explain why they've misunderstood what you really intended! To me, it seems that Twitter comes into its own perhaps less as a space in which to fully discuss ideas, but as a place to get things started, then for sharing links to blogs etc. where there's more space for those discussions. Through Twitter and the EAPchat hashtag, I've come across all sorts of interesting resources, blogs and discussions, and got involved in commenting and discussing all kinds of topics at more length.

Perhaps one of the most interesting, and for me unexpected, benefits of Twitter has been building what's known in the jargon as a PLN, a network of contacts made up of people interested in the same stuff as you. It's something that’s still building gradually, but there are definitely a few folks out there who I now come across regularly and who are starting to feel ‘familiar’. But then I suppose that's what social (or professional?) networking is meant to be all about, isn't it?

And what have I been having so much fun with in the Twittersphere lately? Well, yesterday I came across the Twitter Fiction Festival - in that social media kind of way, I can't remember exactly how I found it, possibly through a post on Facebook that linked to an article in the Guardian? Anyway, I started following #twitterfiction. As with a lot on Twitter, it took me a while to wade through all the ‘noise’ and actually, quite a lot of content in other languages too, but I gradually started picking out little gems of sharp, witty, teeny-weeny fiction. I soon latched on to the #litmash thread, attempts to mash up different combinations of literary genres; so yesterday there was some hilarious Edgar Allan Poe versus Dr Seuss (check out a summary of some of the best here) and today I've been laughing out loud at Cold War fairy tales and Sex in a Dystopian City! If you're on Twitter and understand what I've been talking about, then it's well worth checking out, LOL!

A foot in both camps

At the weekend, I was at an EAP event in Durham; a BALEAP PIM (that's a professional issues meeting, not a summer cocktail!). The main theme of the day was professional development for EAP teachers and I went along to speak about my experiences with webinars as a means of providing professional development opportunities to current, new and potential EAP teachers across the world. I've been to a couple of PIMs before and found them pretty daunting affairs with people who all seemed to know each other talking in acronyms and terminology I didn't understand! Even though I've been involved in EAP as a teacher for some six years, as a temporary summer tutor at Bristol University who just flits in and out for a few weeks every summer, I've never really been fully inducted into the world of academic English teaching.

I've been particularly immersed in EAP for the past few months as part of the Oxford EAP writing team, so I was feeling, at least, a bit more up to speed with some of the jargon this time. I still immediately came across the phenomenon though of people's opening remark being "So, where are you?" ... I started the day with the long answer "Well, actually I'm a freelance materials writer, but I do some teaching at Bristol ...", but soon gave in and just replied "Bristol". Then came the name-dropping. As soon as I got chatting on any topic, there'd be "Well, you know so-and-so at Nottingham's stuff on ..." and 9 times out of 10, I didn't!

So it made me smile rather when in her plenary, Prof Julie King was talking about "communities of practice" and how EAP teachers often feel misunderstood by both the academic community on one side and the more general EFL community on the other (you can read more in her pre-talk blog post here). As someone who feels quite comfortably part of the EFL community, I couldn't help thinking that the EAP community aren't always perhaps as welcoming and inclusive as they could be ...

Having said that though, as the day went on and I found myself in sessions about more practical, concrete teaching issues, I felt I was on more familiar ground. People started talking my language and I found myself in lots of interesting discussions about EAP teaching, teachers and teacher development with some very friendly, interesting, and interested people. So, by the time I got to my session in the afternoon, I felt comfortable enough to raise the issue of making EAP more accessible to a wider audience of teachers globally and perhaps raising the profile of EAP on social media like Twitter and Facebook as a way of reaching out. Although, to be fair, Steve Kirk, the organiser of the event was already thinking along the same lines and was tweeting from many of the sessions (using the hashtags #ELTchat and #EAPchat).

The feeling I took away from the whole day is that as EAP grows, both in the UK with rapidly expanding pre-sessional programs and globally with more demand for English-medium universities worldwide, the EAP profession can - and needs to - become more approachable, more visible, less confusing and less intimidating without dumbing down and, crucially, without losing credibility amongst the academic community either.

I was also encouraged by a few people eager to spread the EAP word and came away with some new links and contacts to explore.  Looking forward to the next #EAPchat and just generally more EAP-related discussion, blogging and sharing online.