Updated: November 20, 2003
Here are a few sample proposals submitted to TESOL 2000 that received AAA (Triple-Accept) ratings by that year's proposal readers/referees. Use these to guide your ESP proposal writing for future TESOL conferences.
PAPER (45 minutes)
Ten years of federally funded Workplace Literacy Programs recently came to a grinding halt. The National Workplace Literacy Program Office at the U.S. Department of Education closed its doors with the expectation that the funded programs and services would have served as models and become institutionalized. Yet, the Department did little to disseminate these models.
This paper reports the preliminary results of a project that is collecting and reviewing the final reports, including evaluation reports, of all the Workplace Literacy Programs that received federal funding during the final funding cycle and that addressed mainly ESL populations. It is anticipated that 11 areas will be addressed, including (1) introduction (historical overview of funding and legislation and program descriptions); (2) recruitment and retention (methods and materials used, typical problems and successes, % of programs that met their goals, typical program entrance criteria); (3) intake and assessment (pre-and post-test procedures and policies); (4) curriculum development (processes and materials used for initial development and for continual fine-tuning); (5) instruction (titles and types of classes offered, quality, hours); (6) support services available (counseling, child-care, transportation, etc.); (7) program structure and administration (staff and their qualifications and roles, management structure, problems and successes); (8) inter- and intra-agency collaboration (types of partnerships among employers, labor, educators, consultants, and others); (9) institutionalization (problems and successes becoming independent of federal funds); (10) program evaluation (approaches, results, methods, types of outcomes reported, impact, return on investment, etc.), and (11) conclusions (problems and success across programs and recommendations).
DEMONSTRATION (45 minutes)
The presenter will show ways of enhancing an IEP business English curriculum through the use of site visits to local businesses. The demonstration will begin with a rationale for using site visits and a discussion of effective and ineffective ways of enlisting companies' participation. The structure and schedule of various types of site visits will be shown, and the rationale and effectiveness of each will be given. The presenter will also demonstrate ways in which site visits have been integrated into the curriculum, including use of case studies, Internet research, instruction in writing business letters, question formation exercises, discussions of business etiquette, role plays, and informational interviews. Examples of class preparation and debriefing activities will be shown. Handouts will include guidelines for contacting companies along with a list of U.S. corporate resources, a list of student preparation and follow-up activities, student and institutional thank-you letters, and examples of corporate and student responses to the site visit program.
WORKSHOP (1 3/4 hours)
ESP program evaluation frequently deals only with issues at the superficial level of whether or not learners have acquired the language taught (Martin and El Tatawy 1999). Whether or not the language taught in the program was that designated by the needs analysis is not often evaluated. Whether or not the needs analysis accurately identified the language to be taught is even less frequently evaluated. And only rarely does an evaluation touch on the issue of whether or not the learners, after the course, can actually perform the real-life tasks identified by the needs analysis. The impact that the increased ability to perform these tasks has had on the learners' organizations and their companies is almost never touched on.
This workshop demonstrates how to evaluate not only whether learners have acquired language items, but also what impact an ESP course has had on learners' organizations and their communities, e.g. cost savings, increased productivity, additional income, better safety procedures. Impact surveys are effective evaluation tools and also answer questions frequently asked by funding organizations.
I. Brief description of an impact survey designed for a legal English training course in Egypt (10 minutes)
Groups will outline the design of impact surveys for various typical ESP programs. If several participants have experience in similar programs, they can use a real-life situation. Other participants can select from among the case studies provided by the workshop presenters: bank tellers in an Asian bank, hotel chambermaids in a U.S. resort, medical students in a Latin American university petroleum engineers in a Middle Eastern oil company, immigrant doctors preparing to work in Australia and post graduate students in a thesis-writing course.
III. Group reports to the larger group and discussion (30 minutes)
IV. Wrap-up (5 minutes)
V. Question and answer
By the end of the workshop, participants should possess the basic skills needed to design and conduct an impact survey as an evaluation tool.
Martin, W.& El Tatawy, M. Impact survey for an ESP Program. Paper presented at TESOL '99, New York, March 9-13, 1999.
PAPER (45 minutes)
In recent years, the need for ESL academic writing courses to include source-based writing has become evident. This point was clearly made by Leki and Carson (1997), who warn that ESL writing classes limited to personal writing do not effectively prepare students for the written work expected of them in U.S. higher education. They urge writing teachers and course developers to include assignments which require students to write with responsibility to source texts. While their recommendation is a welcome one, further investigation of how sources are used in various academic genres and disciplines is necessary so that instruction designed to develop students' facility with source-based writing will be relevant to their needs.
This paper investigates the use of sources in engineering thesis proposals, a genre central to the academic careers of graduate level engineering students. Twenty successful thesis proposals from engineering students serve as the basis for textual analysis. The paper outlines findings from this analysis, focusing specifically on the following information about source use: 1) the type of information included from source material, such as statistics, expert opinions, research findings, historical facts, 2) the purpose the source material serves (e.g., to provide a link between the proposed topic and established research), 3) the means for incorporating the source material into the text (quotation, paraphrase, or summary), and 4) the language used to lead into the source information. The paper closes by suggesting specific ways for teachers and materials developers to use these findings in graduate level writing courses for engineering students.
PAPER (45 minutes)
A Czech pilot, an American air traffic controller, and an ESP specialist use both personal experience and documented cases to analyze accidents caused by the use of incorrect or inappropriate aviation English by native and non-native speakers. Learning from these situations, they provide suggestions for improving training for ground and flight personnel.
Although much emphasis has been placed on the "inadequate" English training of non-native speakers of English, there are many examples of native speakers' hazardous use of daily English forms rather than the required aviation English forms. For example, one famous accident was caused when an air traffic controller used the ordinary phrasal verb "pull up" rather than the "climb" command mandated for use in aviation English.
Coupling the public cases with their own multinational training history and personal experiences, the presenters have been able to create new training processes and materials that address the linguistic causes of these accidents and other dangerous situations in terms of grammar, vocabulary, and pragmatics.
These training techniques and materials are designed for both pre-and in-service courses for ground and flight personnel. For example, the techniques and materials include simulations for native speakers dealing with non-native speakers from non-European backgrounds, increased attention to phrasal verbs in international training manuals, and comprehension checks for native and non-natives.
DEMONSTRATION (45 minutes)
A familiar challenge to most ESL professionals is finding writing assessments that are appropriate for their particular educational setting and their particular students. For teachers and program administrators specializing in Business English, the challenge is even greater.
Using off-the-shelf tests is less than satisfactory. These tests rarely fit one's curricular or program goals or the particular characteristics of one's students. Yet the alternative, preparing one's own assessment tools, can seem daunting: What kind of test task can I design that will fit my curriculum, my students, and my purpose for testing? Will the writing that my students do on the test reveal what I want to know about their business writing ability? How will I "score" this test? How should I evaluate my students' writing, particularly in light of research suggesting that English teachers and business professionals may value different things in business communication (Bremner 1999) and that different genres of business communication are judged by different standards (Louhiala-Salminen 1995)?
In this demonstration, we will provide a model for business writing instructors and ESP-Business program administrators to use to design business writing tests that are customized for their particular testing situation. Applying the model involves:
Bremner, Stephen (1999). Assessing students' business writing: looking for criteria. Perspectives: Working Papers, 11:1 (53-87). Hong Kong: Department of English, City University of Hong Kong.
Louhiala-Salminen, Leena (1999). From Business Correspondence to Message Exchange: What is Left? in Hewings, Martin and Nickerson, Catherine (eds.) Business English: Research into Practice. Longman/British Council English Language Teaching Review Series.