Materials development working group – notes and outputs

Overview

These are some outputs from the series of meetings held as part of the STEM SIG working group on materials development.

The outputs are grouped under the following headings:

Pre-meeting planning for the 3 meetings

Notes following the 3 meetings

Example of individual planned project for needs analysis for materials development

References for useful resources for materials development

Pre-meeting planning

Pre-meeting 1: Needs Analysis

Opening in the main room

1. Introduce contexts of practice – levels, discipline and breadth of discipline.

2. Introduce access to materials – how much/ little and how to gain access.

Break out room tasks

1. What approaches to needs analysis are you able to take given the parameters of your EAP practice? Ie breadth of discipline, CEFR levels.

2. Can you share an aspect of your needs analysis that has informed your practice and syllabus, lesson or task design?

3. How is your needs analysis developing due to other factors within HE? Ie generative AI, interdisciplinary focus and discourses?

Main room

Can we collate our discussion/ practice into a resource page for practitioners who may not have exemplar student texts, access to content lecturers and/ or broad range of content lecturers.

Pre-meeting 2: Text Analysis

1. Which approach/es to text analysis did you take?

A genre analysis/ ESP style move analysis
An SFL approach to genre analysis – did you isolate any parts of an SFL style analysis?
A social/ cognitive genre approach (Bruce, 2008)
A linguistic/ grammatical complexity approach (Biber and Gray, 2016) with or without the use of corpora?
A corpus approach to reveal lexical patterns
A metadiscourse approach focusing on the interactive or interactional model of metadiscourse (Hyand, 2005).
An LCT approach of semantic wave patterns? (Maton and Doran, 2017).
Any other approach?

2. What was your rationale for the approach/es you took? What has influenced your approach to text analysis?

3. What teaching tasks could you design to encourage the noticing or realisation of a text or linguistic feature? Could you design any tasks to encourage an evaluation of a text or linguistic feature?

4. What teaching tasks could you design to support the production of this text? Do these tasks take a genre-based approach in your pedagogy or an ac-literacy framed pedagogy? Or neither?

Pre-meeting 3: Task Design

1. A review of notes from meeting 2

2. A reminder of the text and context we’re using to develop our resource planning and designing.

3. Consideration of task design – what makes a good task or task sequence? What has informed your approach to task design?

4. Can we collectively design tasks around the ‘wake steering text’

5. AOB? Plans?

6. I’d really like to share the collective tasks we design this time on the BALEAP STEM SIG website this time so remind me to record and have a shared document for us to work from!

Notes following meetings

Notes following meeting 1: Needs Analysis

We started with our context and how that informs our needs analysis.

One aspect was language level and addressing the needs of B1/ B2 leaners and how to source or create materials at the right language level while maintaining ‘substance’ and subject-specific content. Present learning situation.

Another aspect was standalone or commissioned workshops linked to assessment genres and linking to the target learning situations. The source for these workshops can be marking criteria, task briefs and exemplars and written feedback or time with the subject lecturers.

In my context, where I am seconded to the Schools I teach, a large part of my role is to learn the discourse features in both learning and assessment genres. I have access but discipline discourse knowledge of these schools takes time to master and the disciplines may be changing due to HE practices ie interdisciplinary courses and research focus.

We discussed how we very rarely manage to triangulate our needs analysis with students, texts and content lecturers. There is very rarely access to all three before the session or course development.

So we moved towards how can we create opportunities to have an ongoing needs analysis in our practice – how can we create dialogue within our sessions and reverse-engineer discourse understanding (Orit’s words/ phrase) from the texts we use or the texts students bring. We could share tasks on dialogue in our task design meeting?

We stated that our materials can use an exemplar or extracts from an exemplar to model a language, discourse or genre feature and then ask students to locate these features in a text they bring to the sessions to allow for specificity among broad subject groups. It may be good to work and recycle the same text to allow a focus on language rather than the concepts or terms.

Specific tasks and how to grade the task for level and depth could link to our third meeting and how to develop a toolkit.

We also explored the varied needs of L1 and multilingual learners and how we can ascertain shared needs and additional needs or considerations for learners with an L2 or lack of confidence with academic language or writing. How can we differentiate? Is it through labelling of sessions, tasks within the session or self study follow up material? Could we pick this up again in our text analysis meeting and then again in the task design meeting?

We talked about the ethics behind extracts and exemplars and how we would like to work within ethical practices of asking for consent for shared use of student exemplars. We then could work towards a template for working with exemplars from the meeting 2 on text analysis and meeting 3 on task design

The following book was cited as a good resource : Science Research Writing: For Non-Native Speakers of English (271 Pages) (despite the title, which may or may not have been in the author’s control).

Our next session will focus on a target learning situation and an assessment genre – the primary research report. We’ll independently analyse the text together and consider what has informed our analysis.

We’re using a published paper, and the module specifications for a new suite of materials for engineering students.

I’ll share some texts in advance to focus text analysis like this meeting and then we’ll come together and discuss what we think would be salient features of the text and what we could exploit.

Possible scholarship and collaborations – EAP may need a refresh in needs analysis guidance and literature and perhaps we should do a project exploring this?

Notes following meeting 2: Text Analysis

Insights into the process of text analysis

Text analysis is informed by the marking criteria.

Which part of the marking criteria relates to language and communication? How much weight is given to language and communication?

Communication criterion?
Critical evaluation
Coherence and cohesion
Paragraph level organisation

The role of genre – audience and purpose of the text.

– headings – do they evidence criticality? Logical organisation?
– is there evidence of synthesis? Are there threads within the piece to make it coherent and critical?
– How does the text move from claims to conclusions?

Analyse the script section by section and look for move step analysis.
Use the product as an insight into the process and the steps taken to produce the text.
The use of Co-Pilot for SFL metafunction analysis particularly the ideational field.
Exploring the role of source use and integral and non-integral citation practices.
The data/ figures in focus.
We discussed the parameters to our sessions and having achievable learning outcomes and one suggestion was communicating criticality through flow.

Choice of extract

The choices involve how representative the sample is? But the question remain – what knowledge are we bringing into that decision?

How good for the student would it be to see the sample?

When we edit extracts, why are we editing? And again, what is leading us to edit?

This would be a good scholarship project/ interest I feel! How could we help the EAP community with this?

Notes and outputs following meeting 3: Task Design

Themes arising from meeting 3

1. We like the scaffolding and sequencing to TBLT but does EAP need a slightly different version to suit certain contexts we have? One off workshops? In-sessional teaching?

2. EAP traps – how to not spend too long on something which does not serve our aims? How can we account for how long reading processes can take? Do we always have to do macro level text tasks before closer inspection of paragraph/ language analysis.

3. ILO language needs to meet the aims of the students – more transactional and potentially less language focussed. ie notice – reverse engineer.

Notes on example activity

Example of individual planned project for needs analysis for materials development

Context

I am an Academic and Study Skills tutor at a regional university situated within the ‘Study Skills’ team, which is part of student services (although my background is EAP). Half of my role involves providing elements of our central provision, which includes delivering central workshops, short courses and 1-1 appointments, all of which are bookable by students. For the other half of my role, I am attached to the faculty of Science and Engineering and academic staff from the faculty get in touch to request myself or my colleague come in to do individual sessions or a series of sessions to support students with the more skills/language-based aspects of their assessment.

The project

After over a year in the role, I’ve grown somewhat frustrated with the generic nature of these sessions. Sometimes, they are regarded as ‘add on’ and are not truly embedded into the modules, and the perceived (and often actual) lack of relevance to students’ work in their own discipline means that engagement and attendance can be poor. Although we work with both domestic and international students, reducing the awarding gap between these two cohorts is a key focus of university strategy and as a result, I have been approved to embark on an ‘innovation scholar project’ to try and look at specific strategies to support international students on a given programme.

The module that I am going to work with is the Individual Research Project module which has a majority of international students. Students on the following MSc programmes all take the module: DIGITAL DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING, ENGINEERING PROJECT MANAGEMENT, and MSC ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION. Between November and April students the following sessions are provided for students: ‘Writing a proposal’, ‘Reading and critical analysis’, ‘Writing a literature review’, ‘Progress presentation preparation’. Scientific communication skills’ ,‘Thesis structure + Report writing and data presentation’, Thesis report writing (abstract, intro, methods, discussion)’ Students are expected to deliver progress presentations in June and submit written reports in September

Challenges

Some specific challenges arising in relation to this module are:

the lack of information about the written reports (other than the assignment brief)
the timing of sessions in relation to what students are likely to be working on specific areas of their report
as the module covers three distinct programmes, students are likely to be working on different projects

However, contact time with students is guaranteed (provided they attend) and there is scope and rationale for a needs analysis to improve the sessions I do with them!

My Aim

My aim is to develop a needs analysis, made up of

student questionnaires about their prior experience and perceptions of need on the module
supervisor perceptions around language conventions in their area of engineering and their confidence with both teaching and marking these aspects of the written report
textual analysis of engineering papers, ideally reports previously submitted on the module

This needs analysis will inform the sessions I deliver and I hope to develop a ‘toolkit’ for this kind of work in future in order for my colleagues to adopt a more research informed and strategic approach to our work. Whilst I am excited to try and achieve something meaningful with the project, this type of work is not yet widely recognised or prioritised at my institution, so I am feeling a little bit out on my own with it.

I am delighted to have the opportunity to share this with members of the BALEAP STEM SIG and perhaps work with you on some of the aspects involved. I hope it can perhaps serve us as a useful case study. I have shared the assessment brief and report template for context, and will make inquiries about getting informed consent to use one or two reports from the previous cohort (started in Jan 25) who will submit their final work on 10^th December.

Useful references relevant to resource development

Biber D, Gray B. 2016. Grammatical Complexity in Academic English: Linguistic Change in Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bloor, T., & Bloor, M. 2004. The Functional Analysis of English. London: Hodder Arnold.

Bruce, I. 2011. Theory and concepts of English for academic purposes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Hyland, K. 2005. Metadiscourse: exploring interaction in writing. London: Continuum.

Maton, K., and Doran, Y. J. 2017. Semantic density: A translation device for revealing complexity of knowledge practices in discourse, part 1—wording, Onomázein (NE II), Número Especial II: Lingüística Sistémico Funcional. 2. pp 46 – 76.

Wingate, U. & Tribble, C. 2011. The best of both worlds? Towards an English for Academic Purposes/Academic Literacies writing pedagogy. Studies in Higher Education. 37 (4). pp 481 –495.