EAP & Corpora: A fabulously nerdy day out

After a busy few weeks at my desk and two EAP weekends in a row, I’ve got a bit of a blog backlog,  so let me go back a bit first …

A couple of weekends ago, I went to a BALEAP event at Coventry University about EAP and corpora. I hesitated a bit about going, as I wasn’t speaking, I didn’t have any publisher funding, so it meant shelling out for the fee and the train fare from my own pocket. It just seemed too much up my street to miss though and in the end, it proved well worth it. It was a great day, with lots of interesting sessions and plenty of opportunities to chat to people between times. I came away feeling that my brain had been properly stretched and that I’d really learned some new stuff. 

These are just a few of my highlights …

Philip Durrant from Exeter University jumped right in with some fantastically-nerdy academic details in his opening plenary, looking at how we divide up academic disciplines and presenting results of his research into how disciplines map out if we look at them in terms of similarities (and differences) in vocabulary use (based on student writing in the BAWE corpus). He came up with some great “maps” showing how disciplines form into clusters with “hard subjects” (sciences; physics, chemistry, engineering) displaying similarities on one side, “soft subjects” (arts and humanities; English, history, philosophy) together on the other side, then various subjects, perhaps as you’d expect (social sciences; business, health) somewhere in the middle sharing aspects of both. This may feel fairly obvious, but it was the small details which came out that caught my attention. For example, when he broke down disciplines further into academic level, some displayed fairly similar vocabulary use at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and others showed quite a shift. Engineering, for instance was firmly in the hard science area of the map at undergraduate level, then moved into the centre ground alongside business at postgraduate level (reflecting a shift to a more applied approach). Although I spent a lot of the session coming up with questions and holes to pick in the research, I take that as a sign that I was really caught up in what he was saying! And I loved the visuals :) [A reference to his latest paper is here, but unfortunately, it’s a journal you need a subscription for, which I haven't got :( ]

I went to a really interesting session by Bella Reichard about using concordancers (corpus software) with students in an EAP context. One of the issues to come out of the session, and which continued a bit on Twitter afterwards, was the amount of time teachers have to invest in becoming familiar with concordancing software themselves so that they feel confident enough to use it in class. It got me thinking that perhaps we need to focus first on the benefits to teachers of using concordancers as a resource for themselves rather than jumping ahead to using them with students. Definitely a subject for a blog post … watch this space.

My final highlight was Hilary Nesi’s hands-on corpus session. Her focus, investigating the use of citation by students in different disciplines (using the BAWE corpus) was very interesting, but the best bit was just playing around with corpus searches, trying to find the best way to get what I wanted, alongside the likes of Hilary Nesi and Diane Schmitt. As a lowly, commercial corpus ‘hack’, it was quite nice to feel just as proficient as the academic corpus luminaries. Sometimes part of me would really like to do the PhD I contemplated a few years ago, to spend time playing around with corpora without the restrictive briefs or time pressures of the commercial world … but then, I know I just wouldn’t have the patience to do all that situating my research within the academic whatsisname! Still, it was fun to dip a toe in the academic water for a while…

Swapping hats

One of the things I love about my job is the variety. So after a long year working pretty solidly on Oxford EAP, I was keen to take on more of a mix of short projects. Inevitably, what I’d envisaged as a sequence of nice little jobs has ended up as a bit of a manic juggling act with everything getting busy at the same time!  I’m not complaining, because it’s good to be busy, but there are times when I start to feel like I’m running out of different compartments to file everything in my brain!

In the past week or so, I’ve worked on materials for low level Spanish teens, technical ESP, EAP and teacher training. I’ve done some editing and some rewriting, I’ve written workbook exercises, blog posts and an outline syllabus for a teacher training course. But it’s not the written stuff that’s the real challenge …

On Saturday I was in Oxford for an EAP event; a BALEAP PIM at Oxford Brookes University, giving a session on feedback on EAP writing. The whole day was really good and a great opportunity to catch up with EAP colleagues. But it was very niche and the audience were hardcore EAP folk – largely full-time EAP tutors at UK universities and serious academics. It’s a bit of a daunting gig, especially as something of an outsider (i.e. not a full-time EAP person attached to a university), but I think the session went down really well and people gave me lots of nice feedback afterwards.

Back at home today and I’ve been trying to switch my brain into a completely different mode to give a webinar (twice over the next couple of days) on a slightly different topic and to a very different audience; this time a much more general ELT crowd and drawn from right across the world. I generally enjoy presenting and I’ll happily talk away on almost any topic, but delivering two different presentations just a few days apart without getting them muddled up or forgetting anything is going to be a bit of a challenge.

Oh well, as my Mum puts it, I’ll just chat and wave my hands about and I’m sure it’ll be fine …

Why I hate editing!

Recently, I've been thinking about the process of editing written work in preparation for a talk I'm giving next month at an EAP event at Oxford Brookes University about Feedback in EAP (I'll be talking about what skills EAP teachers might learn from professional editors when they're giving feedback on student writing). And I remembered a blog post I put together way back at the start of the year. I decided not to post it at the time, because of the confidentiality issues that always surround publishing projects. Now the book in question, Oxford EAP Advanced/C1, is published and out there in the public domain though, I thought I'd share my thoughts on how the process was going back on a dark day in February ...

I’ve just been trying to put together some advice for EAP students about drafting, redrafting and editing a longer piece of written work, such as a research project or dissertation. As I sat back and read through what I’d written, I had to smile because the whole process is one that I’m rubbish at myself and absolutely hate! 

When I was at school, my essays would always come back covered in red pen, not because I was stupid or hadn’t answered the question, far from it, I would often get positive comments about my interesting and original ideas. It was in the edit that I fell down. However hard I tried, when I read back through what I’d thrown down on paper in a rush of inspiration and enthusiasm (I really enjoyed school on the whole), I just didn’t spot all the spelling errors and other silly mistakes. My teachers would despair of my “laziness”, but honestly, I don’t think it was for lack of effort or willingness to please, I was just a macro kinda girl who didn’t get on so well with the micro stuff.

Oddly, as an adult I developed something of an eye for detail, ending up in perhaps the most nit-picky of jobs as a lexicographer, where the tiniest micro-level details are all important.  How come? Well, I think I’ve come to realize that it’s about attention span. As a lexicographer, each entry is a little mini-project of its own – you can do the ‘big picture’, creative bit (pinning down the meaning of a word and dividing up the senses) AND the nitty gritty detailed bit all in one go, before you get bored and lose interest. Then you’re off onto a new word to play with.

Most of my early writing projects within ELT were also broken up into similarly small chunks. Moving from dictionaries, a lot of my initial writing jobs were around vocabulary and grammar practice activities, for workbooks, CDs, etc. I could take a run at each new activity and get it planned, researched, written and checked all before I got too bored with it. And coming from the meticulous world of lexicography, I was quite good at following a brief to the letter, putting it all in the right format, sticking to a strict wordlist for the level, etc. It was very satisfying to tick off a list of activities to be written and send them off as nice, neat little parcels.

Over the past year though, I’ve been trying to tackle an altogether more unruly beast, in co-authoring a whole coursebook. To an extent, the process has still been broken down into micro-tasks; units, modules and individual activities. As usual, I've thoroughly enjoyed the initial rush of enthusiasm researching a new topic and sketching out how to tackle it, then the challenge of deciding exactly how to make it work on the page. Leaving aside time pressures and the need to co-ordinate with co-author, editor, publisher etc., first drafts were fun. When it came to revisions and second drafts, I found myself dreading the prospect of going back to the manuscripts I’d already spent hours poring over and was already quite bored of. Thankfully, my tentative suggestion that I swap materials with my co-author and we revise each other’s drafts was accepted and I was able to attack the whole process with a fresh eye at least, if not quite the same energy levels.

But now we’re down to the dregs, going back over everything for the umpteenth time, pinning down details, making little tweaks and doing all the little fiddly bits to tie up the loose ends. I’m tired, I’ve run out of steam and part of me just wants to “hand it in” and be done with it! 

Everyone keeps telling me it’ll all be worth it in the end, when it’s finally published, all shiny and snazzy-looking, with my name on the cover … but late on a Friday afternoon after a long week of edits (and with many more to come), I’m feeling distinctly unconvinced!

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.

EAP: inspiration & confirmation

On Saturday, I spent the day at a BALEAP PIM at Bristol University - a kind of one-day mini-conference for EAP teachers. It was a good opportunity to catch up with colleagues and to meet some new people too. The various presentations also provided both some new ideas and confirmation of some of the things I'd been thinking and doing myself recently, which is always nice.

The overarching theme of the day was teaching EAP to lower level learners and Debbie Mann's mini-presentation came up with some really neat ideas for putting across important academic concepts to lower level learners using simple, strikingly designed materials. Another talk from which I'll definitely steal ideas for my pre-sessional teaching in the summer, was from Elizabeth Long who presented lots of practical ideas for helping new students adapt to a British academic context.

I also found Neil Harris's session about using the AWL (academic word list) with lower level learners really interesting, because a lot of what he talked about crossed over so much with my own recent work on the Collins COBUILD Key Words for IELTS books, trying to spread the vocabulary from the AWL across three books aimed at different levels. He pointed out that while the AWL is divided into sublists, with the most frequent words in list 1, going through to the least frequent in list 10, because the words are grouped into word families, you often find more frequent and less frequent items within the same list. So, whilst you might want to teach individual, a sublist 1 word, fairly early on and you might link that to individually, you probably won't want to confuse a lower level learner by throwing in individuality, individualism, individualist and individualistic at the same time.

When compiling the headword lists for the Key Words for IELTS books, we started off with the idea of including the most frequent AWL sublists in the lower level book and working our way up, but soon found that we had to consider individual words within word families separately, based on their individual frequencies. At the same time though, we didn't want to lose the important links between words from the same family/root. A key skill for EAP students is being able to play with different forms of a word to see what fits best in a particular context. We got around this by including an element of repetition and building, so for example we dealt with the sublist 1 word family significant as follows:
Book 1 (Starter level): significant (single basic sense)
Book 2 (Improver level): significant (two senses) + significantly + significance and insignificant
Book 3 (Advanced level): signify

It had seemed like the most logical way to deal with the problem at the time, but it's really nice to have someone else independently talk about a similar way of tackling the AWL.

Thanks to everyone involved for an enjoyable and stimulating day!