2 years experience of EFL and DELTA course – what teachers most often have
Overview of what EFL/ESL teachers usually bring with them to in-service training courses, and what they achieve as a result of these courses:
These activities are, for successful candidates, underlain by sound language analysis and some idea of how people read, listen, write and engage in conversation.
What comes through very forcibly is the point that EFL training is mostly about activities and underlying language and communication theory.
What seems to be missing is sufficient attention to learners and learning.
DELTA courses (though not CELTA) do lay some emphasis on theories of language learning and there are usually sessions on psychological theories, psycholinguistics, historical methodology and its underpinnings and so on. It is also true that candidates on DELTA courses have to provide rationales for their teaching ideas and have to profile a learner as a major component of their assessment.
But still what comes out of DELTA courses and seems to typify EFL teachers is an activities driven, teaching-centred approach. The rationales I have mentioned rarely run to profound examination of how learners learn; the learner profiles are often superficial and pay lip-service to learning theory; candidates very often run excellent student-centred activities which are nevertheless teaching centred in that it is the teacher, or more often the course book, who or which has made the relevant decisions. This overall approach seems to correspond appropriately to the kind of market that most teachers work for where learners come together to get some kind of grounding in English, without a specific or particular purpose in mind very often and, most importantly, from different cultural and learning backgrounds – there may be vast differences in age, in learning styles, in educational background etc. Under these circumstances, a teaching-centred approach is viable and expeditious.
a conceptualisation of EAP that is embedded in the broader context of academic study. In other words, EAP needs to be understood in terms of the educational environment in which it is required, and is not simply a set of trainable skills.
Defining the educational environment:
1. My reading of this statement includes our students as the most important element in the educational environment. They are engaged in an overall process of education, and so are already set apart from many students in EFL settings who are perhaps in a process of training or for whom their English classes are not part of any particular overall process.
2. My reading further assumes that English for academic purposes means working with learners in English-medium institutions, wherever they may be in the world, which means, at least for the moment, a common set of shared cultural norms which have to do with academic expectations such as originality in writing, reaching academic goals through particular processes involving independent study, team work, etc.
Teaching English to students outside this framework does not, in my opinion, constitute EAP.
A training course in EAP could certainly help teachers to transfer their knowledge and skills to the new environment: transmitting different language, in particular different discourse, presenting different texts, showing them model targets and helping them through the processes. But if it is to take broader context of academic study into consideration, then the training course must also address the cultural issue of helping students to understand and then enter the learning, study and production processes expected of them. And in order to do this, teachers need to be properly equipped to listen to and understand their learners, to find out what their expectations are, their learning habits, their study habits and their approach to spoken and written production – so that we can help them to change them or to complement them, if necessary.
But this would be to miss out on the central issue and not to capitalise. This means that a central EAP teaching challenge is to understand as much as possible about learners and their approaches, to understand the processes expected of them. to make them fit into the educational framework
This may already represent a shift, since processes are expected rather than products – it matters how you achieve what you achieve rather more than the product itself.
We have a proposed syllabus here, which I would like to gloss in the light of what I think ought to be the main priorities, leading on from what I have just outlined.
1.1. ELT and EAP: similarities and differences
Emphasis on homogeneity of EAP groups, the singleness of purpose, the cultural agenda.
1.2 The development of EAP principle and practice
Emphasis on teachers’ developing their practice in a principled way by referring to learner behaviour
1.4 The EAP student: a profile of diversity
Emphasis on tools for understanding different cultures; awareness of where the possible pitfalls and misunderstandings are; critical cross-cultural awareness, perhaps, with attention to the possible tensions and conflicts in trying to make learners fit into an alien cultural system.
2.4 Academic conventions and expectations
Candidates may need a lot of input in this area: the range and variety of surface conventions and expectations is boundless; the core conventions and expectations regarding, say, originality and plagiarism, team work, self-discipline and self-reliance, the process of critical assimilation – making knowledge ‘yours’, need to be examined carefully as they will form a major part of training students.
3.3 The importance of 'skills' in EAP: study skills and language skills
This may be the same as 2.4 – an analysis of the skills learners need in order to respect the academic conventions and to fulfill the expectations.
5. Assessment and evaluation in EAP
Diagnostic assessment seems to be missing from the list, unless you include it as either formative or summative. It is an essential teaching skill as it underpins anything we try to do. This is not simply a question of needs analysis, but of matching needs analysis to the skills level of the learner.
6.4 The role of the EAP teacher
This seems to be a very important syllabus item – the EAP teacher’s role seems to be a key one in HE: we are responsible for turning overseas students into home students.
The cultural agenda. Academic conventions and expectations
analysis of the skills learners need in order to respect the academic conventions
and to fulfill the expectations.
Teachers’ developing their practice
Tools for understanding different cultures
Critical cross-cultural awareness
Matching needs analysis to the skills level of the learner.
The proposal is for:
On the face of it, fifteen hours tuition and thirty-five reading and research would not be enough to respond to these needs. I would expect thirtyish hours of reading, research and assignments just to make sense of six hours teaching, which leaves no time for the other aspects of the syllabus.
Four hours observation of classes in other disciplines would require, again, a considerable amount of reading and research time to look at and analyse academic discourse learners will be exposed to and the possible difficulties involved.
A further element might be included in the list which could, admittedly, be brought into the assignments rubric but deserves to be highlighted. I would propose a few hours discussion with learners about cultural differences, learning styles, expectations, etc.
I have outlined my personal overview of the general state of EFL teaching as practised by a large number of DELTA-qualified teachers. I have tried to show how this practice might be deficient in terms of preparation for EAP teaching and I have had a brief, critical look at the proposed syllabus with the aim of seeing how these supposed deficiencies might be made up for.