Candidate Profile
Candidates will normally have had at least two years (or 1200 hours) recent experience of teaching EFL, and at least one of the following qualifications:
Course length and content*
* In most BALEAP universities, particularly those running pre-sessional programmes during the summer period, an element of staff training and development is integral to course planning and delivery, and already includes observation of teaching staff. Particularly where DELTA holders are employed as tutors, the Training Course could in principle be integrated into their existing teaching commitments.
Course delivery
Course delivery should be by university language units with
The draft syllabus outline that follows is based on a number of principles and assumptions:
1. It is principally addressed to the teaching of English for Academic Purposes (hereafter EAP) at the tertiary level, since that is the context where the majority of such teaching takes place. It could be adapted, however, for teachers who envisage their main professional activity to be within the school system, particularly where that includes technical schools and colleges.
2. It is committed to 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. For this reason it envisages that the Training Course will ideally be run where there is direct access to that environment.
3. It acknowledges that EAP is a worldwide profession, and therefore that its outcomes should be ‘portable’ to a wide range of teaching situations. In an L1 or ESL context this may well involve a broader base of academic language skills, for example, than where English is a foreign language, but the major underlying principles are held in common.
4. It assumes that an extension format with the possibility of free-standing delivery would be more appropriate than a full Diploma, and therefore this Training Course would be principally addressed to holders of diploma level qualifications.
The following areas of syllabus content are proposed:
1. The nature of EAP provision
1.1 ELT and EAP: similarities and differences
1.2 The development of EAP principle and practice
1.3 The range of EAP contexts and courses
1.4 The EAP student: a profile of diversity
2. The institutional context of EAP
2.1 Describing the academy: types of institution
2.2 Boundaries: the role of the EAP staff within the institution
2.3 How others see us: the views of subject tutors on English language
2.4 Academic conventions and expectations
3. Designing courses in EAP
3.1 General and specific-purpose EAP: the role of needs analysis and source data
3.2 Liaising with the departments
3.3 The importance of ‘skills’ in EAP: study skills and language skills
3.4 The range of available EAP published materials
3.5 Writing materials and creating classroom activities
3.6 Learner autonomy and the role of self-access resources
4. Dealing with language
4.1 An overview of approaches to language description in EAP
4.2 The role of genre studies
4.3 Using primary texts in the EAP class
5. Assessment and evaluation in EAP
5.1 Formative and summative assessment of EAP students: appropriate outcomes
5.2 Language and subject knowledge: some problems in student evaluation and approaches to marking scripts
5.3 Who needs to know? Tracking studies after the EAP course
5.4 Entry to the academy: major public examinations (IELTS, TOEFL)
6. Professional development
6.1 Professional associations, national and international
6.2 Sources of information about EAP and professional journals
6.3 The current research base and future developments
6.4 The role of the EAP teacher
It will be clear from the syllabus outline that the EAP proposal both dovetails and diverges from the existing DELTA syllabus. Essentially, DELTA is to be seen as providing a strong and broad foundation for the understanding of the particular knowledge and skills required by an EAP professional, particularly but not only in respect of language awareness and methodology. The following is a summary of the main points of commonality, divergence and extension. ‘D’ before a number indicates pp 4 & 5 in the DELTA syllabus guidelines (May 1998); otherwise numbering refers to this draft syllabus.
To be regarded as already covered
To be regarded as covered in general but to be further built on
Additional elements for an EAP Diploma-level award
Assessment
The current draft does not include assessment for the Diploma/extension, which will need to be discussed in detail at a later stage. However, it should at least include (a) some small-scale practice in materials writing and (b) where possible, a small case-study of an EAP student or of a subject department within the institution.