[00:00:56] Laura Richards (she/her): Hi, I am so happy to be here with three fantastic EAP practitioners this morning. We have Jen, Katrien and Millie, who are all here to talk about the challenges in EAP materials design. So can I ask you very quickly to introduce yourself to the audience?
Jen, can I come to you first?
[00:01:17] Jennifer MacDougall (she/her): Okay, thank you. My name's Jen or Jennifer McDougall and I work for the University of Glasgow in the school of Engineering. And I specifically work in transnational education. Our organization is called Glasgow College in Chengdu and in Hainan in China. My role is English Language Quality Lead , I suppose I look after three different areas. Curriculum design, professional development, working with the English language teachers who are mainly early career EAP practitioners and , assessment design. In terms of materials, I suppose they cover both assessment and curriculum design. I've worked with materials for many, , years. But in this context, I was tasked with redesigning a curriculum, and so with another colleague, we wrote all the materials for our curriculum, basically.
It took us about two years. And just as we were implementing , the new curriculum and syllabus COVID struck, so we had to redesign a lot of materials for online delivery,
On a week to week basis. So I guess that's my context.
[00:02:46] Laura Richards (she/her): Thank you very much, Jen.
[00:02:48] Katrien Deroey (she/her): Yes. Hi. Thanks, Laura. I'm Katrien Dereoy and I hail from a little town or city called Bruge in Belgium, but I currently work at the University of Luxembourg in the Grand Dutchy of Luxembourg where I'm a professor of applied linguistics and language teaching. So I've got a dual kind of role in my job. I'm a linguistics lecturer, but I'm also an EAP practitioner. And as EAP practitioner, I'm also the head of the Language Centre, the university language centre.
So I lead a team of adjunct lecturers. I've mostly researched materials and materials development for academic listening and research article writing, but also course development for EMI, lecturer training. In my role as a teacher of EAPI mostly teach doctoral students, so I'm aware that's quite a specific context. I should mention my research.
[00:03:42] Laura Richards (she/her): please do. Please do 
[00:03:43] Katrien Deroey (she/her): my research is mostly on lecture discourse.
 and but the lecture discourse informing materials development and
training.
[00:03:53] Laura Richards (she/her): Okay, great. Thank you so much, Katrien. Millie, can I come to you finally?
[00:03:57] Milada Walkova (she/her): Yeah, thanks. So, hello everyone. My full name is Milada Walkova, but people call me Millie. I'm an associate professor in English for academic purposes at University of Leeds. And interestingly, like Katrien, most of my teaching is to doctoral students. And how I'm interested in materials is because as an EAP practitioner. I develop materials for, for my students. So that's also our institutional culture. I would say that we prefer to develop in-house materials than use textbooks off the shelf. And my area of expertise is using theory and research to inform pedagogy. some of the materials I've developed can be seen in my book teaching academic writing for EAP. And currently I'm working with Nigel Harwood, who's a professor in Applied Linguistics at the University of Sheffield. And we are working on two edited volumes on materials in EAP. So one of these will look at materials at the level of lesson, and the other one will be looking at the materials at the level of a whole textbook course, book and syllabus.
[00:05:17] Laura Richards (she/her): Brilliant, thank you. I want to start by talking about what some of the challenges are at the moment within EAP, not just within the uk, although I know that Millie and Jen you are working within the UK context, but more generally within EAP. The challenges around EAP materials themselves and how we design effective materials.
So, Jen, could I come to you first?
[00:05:42] Jennifer MacDougall (she/her): So I'd say it probably, I'm not working so much in the UK context although obviously it's informed by the UK context. So there's kind of strange situation there because I think that's one of the challenges , is creating materials that fit your context. Context is everything. Whether that's the subject the students are going to be working within, their discipline. That's part of the context, the country , they work in and their background. . So I think context is really important. I think I've written down four key challenges that I would say in terms of developing materials. So the first thing is who are the people who are using these materials? And that includes both the teachers and the practitioners. That I think is a key challenge.
Something which I think is hugely challenging is related to time. And this is time to develop materials, but it's also thinking about how much time people have when they're using materials. Because as a writer of materials, you sometimes have your own vision of how you would exploit materials. That doesn't mean that can happen in practice. Finding appropriate materials for your context is obviously a challenge. Millie and Katrien said that they work with doctoral students, but I work with students who've just left high school. So it's very different in that context. The last point I put down as a key challenge is developing materials and activities, which have intrinsic interest , , how do you make sure they're engaging and interesting to the body of students , and the, practitioners who are going to use them.
[00:07:32] Laura Richards (she/her): I just wonder with this last one the intrinsic interest, did this come to you because you have encountered materials that are intrinsically boring ?
[00:07:39] Jennifer MacDougall (she/her): I think we, as writers of materials, we do have our own style and our own way of thinking about things that maybe what we find intrinsically interesting. I might find a text and think, oh, this is great, you know, it's got a great narrative within it that I can see that I want to read this, but I do have to consider other people. One of the things that I, I feel about that is how we use feedback to inform new iterations of materials . 
[00:08:13] Milada Walkova (she/her): Thanks. I think it's really interesting that the breadth of the challenges that you've highlighted there. I wonder Millie or Katrien, have you got other challenges that you would add? to Jen's list?Yeah, so I think it's also a lack of training that most EAP practitioners don't have training, so therefore they might lack confidence. And one important implication of that is when they look at published textbooks, they might think, oh, this, this must be good because it has been published. So they might believe that materials that are published will be superior to whatever they can produce. But there is research that shows that's not necessarily the case. For example, Katrien's paper on lecture listening course books shows that textbooks are often not informed by theory. When people lack training and confidence, they can think that they can't do it. And it's also very time consuming. So if they don't have the time in their workload to develop materials from scratch, they might choose to use somebody else's materials.
[00:09:20] Laura Richards (she/her): That's a really good point and I wonder then there is a responsibility from institutions who are committed to high quality teaching and high quality materials to provide that time and that support to practitioners. And I'm sure this is something that has come up in all of your institutions at some point but feeling like you don't have enough time, particularly practitioners who are newer to institutions who might have higher teaching loads less time, that they're not supported in developing those essential skills in order to create effective materials. Katrien, is there anything that you would like to add to that list?
[00:10:00] Katrien Deroey (she/her): Yes, all of the above. I think for me it's how you incorporate research like research literature to inform your materials own data analysis of corpora,
of students output, and allow for personalization when you're teaching a heterogeneous audience. So I, for example, teach research article writing to always disciplinary heterogeneous group. And, and this means that although I've written materials that I can use time I've written them in such a way that I get student output and input, that allows me to personalize the workshops that go with them. But that means it's always a race against time to adapt the materials to that particular cohort. And I think also , what I've seen , from my team and from other people who develop materials , it can be a challenge because many of us are linguists, have some kind of linguistic background. And so in our materials and our teaching we may be using terms that we don't necessarily need to use when, for example, teaching engineers.
So it's kind of simplifying complexity of our linguistic toolkit in teaching , and applying that. The issue of, as Jen said, to provide materials that are intrinsically interesting and motivating. That's become even more important in this era of AI, where you really have to look at how you can develop tasks and content that kind of incorporates AI, allows them to, use ai while kind of circumventing some of the pitfalls that come, with that. And if you are developing materials for people on the team, they've got to be usable by other teachers with minimal explanation. So they've got to be really clear. Also to come back to the point that Jen made earlier as well, we want to actually teach more than we have the time to cover in any course or that the students have time to process. So I think those for me are some of the challenges. 
[00:12:14] Laura Richards (she/her): And I wondered if we could talk about what informs your own personal approaches to material design. 
[00:12:22] Jennifer MacDougall (she/her): I kind of wanted to pick up the points about writing for other people, not writing materials that you're using yourself, because, Katrien mentioned, you want to have materials which don't need that much explanation in a way but actually in my context, I've found that a lot of my teaching guide for the materials has almost been methodological training as well as the actual materials, because there often has to be a kind of explanation of why things are being done in the way they're being done especially people who are new to EAP so you're almost building training in with the materials that you're developing. So, that's another challenge, but that informs my approach.
When you look at people like Tomlinson and his kind of exposition of different principles that we should be looking at, I think these kind of help a lot. another thing that informs my approach is thinking about equality, diversity, and inclusion. Something that is underpinning the types of materials I'm using who is available or represented in those materials so that the viewpoints that the students are seeing represent diverse communities.
[00:13:50] Laura Richards (she/her): It's important also to consider how our backgrounds can influence our approach to materials design and these other things because it doesn't happen in isolation. These other things all play a part in how we approach this. So Katrien, would you like to share what informs your approach and your process in materials design?
[00:14:12] Katrien Deroey (she/her): First, I find it really interesting how much overlap there is between what we're saying. 'cause I could repeat most of what Jen said. For me, I think first and foremost, it's about what students need to do with what we're teaching them so that our materials and tasks a representative of what they need the training for. Another one for me, is and it goes hand in hand with the rep being representative is personalization because everybody's needs will be different . And that's my first principle I think my priority. And the second priority is to look at the relationship between the materials and what you do with them in the classroom or don't do with them in the classroom. So for me, I try to limit classroom time with doctoral students because they've got so many competing demands on their time. and so it's all about the added value of the time you have together in the classroom, which is why I will talk about this later. I often use a flipped classroom approach. allowing for the materials to be used for independent study and continued learning.
[00:15:28] Laura Richards (she/her): So maximizing not just the value of the time that you have in the classroom, but the value of the materials outside of the classroom as well,
[00:15:35] Katrien Deroey (she/her): yes, that's
[00:15:36] Laura Richards (she/her): which goes back to, I guess, the challenge that we identified earlier, which was lack of time for everybody. Lack of time with the students, lack of time for ourselves in being able to work with them. 
Millie, you mentioned earlier that, part of your interest in materials design is the lack of theoretical underpinning. So how does this play into your own approach to materials design?
[00:16:01] Milada Walkova (she/her): Yeah. So I would say that in my approach I think about three things, content, level and format or activities. And in terms of content, I, do my best to make sure that my materials are informed by linguistic and educational research and theory. So for example, last week I was developing materials where we looked at complex language. for that I used, , my knowledge of research which talks about, okay, what is complexity in an academic written discourse? What structures are used and how do students develop their knowledge? Because it's not like they go from one stage to another, but they go through several stages. and you have to kind of think, okay, where can they be and how can I help them to get to the next stage? at the same time, acknowledging that they will be at different stages. as Katrien mentioned before, there's a lot we need to know, but we don't necessarily need to tell all this to students.
So we use it to inform the materials, but we have to be mindful how much of that theory do we need to make explicit? So I make sure I don't use technical terms, but I use student Language to help them understand concepts. When you are developing materials, there's much more you need to know than what can be shown from the materials as a product. And that's why I don't like using someone else's materials and I don't like producing materials for others because we can come to the same learning outcomes using different theories.
[00:17:48] Laura Richards (she/her): Yeah, that's a really good point.
[00:17:49] Jennifer MacDougall (she/her): Millie was saying about, the idea of having an, informed approach to , what you're doing. I think that is actually one of the difficulties for people who are at the start of that journey with writing materials actually is sometimes they want to tell everything that they know about something when that's not the point really. And you need to strip that out because that's not what the students need to learn, depending on their context again. However, you do have to build in this idea of rationale for why students are doing things, but that's different than using a lot of metalanguage and technical terms.
[00:18:30] Laura Richards (she/her): Yeah. If you've come off the back of a master's or a diploma level training course, and you are very keen to show what you know. It's hard to exercise restraint. But yeah, that restraint is necessary, I think, to prevent the students from feeling overloaded and unnecessarily derailing classes and going in the wrong direction. 
[00:18:49] Katrien Deroey (she/her): Yeah. So just to come back to two of the points that've just been mentioned, I think indeed enough room needs to be left for application.
[00:18:58] Laura Richards (she/her): Mm-hmm.
[00:18:58] Katrien Deroey (she/her): always when I'm writing materials as well, it's like, okay, well I've got the theoretical background that I want to, convey and include in my materials.
But really students learn by , not by being told things, but by being made to do things. So there needs to be enough space for them to apply it to their own tasks or texts or whatever. And the second thing, I think what Millie said as well about teaching with other people's materials. In a way it's so enriching to research your own materials. And when you teach with your own materials, I think it makes you a better teacher as well because you've got a wealth of knowledge that you have gained from doing the research, which is not necessarily in the materials. And that's something you cannot really pass on to somebody else who teaches with your materials.
[00:19:50] Jennifer MacDougall (she/her): I think that's very true, another complexity is that, I can talk about my own context in, TNE where we have, ,, 500, a thousand students all on the same course. We do need to have a level of consistency in what the students, are taught in order for it, totally agree with Millie and Katrien that there are different ways of doing that, but that does come with experience , and there is that kind of support mechanism that providing materials can give what there needs to be, and I've learned over the years that I've been working in China, is that actually our materials need to have more flexibility in them to allow people to then adapt maybe having something as a base because starting off from nothing is actually quite complex as well. I, guess another context for that is, on pre-sessional courses where you have very short courses with very specific outcomes, it is hard for people to be creating all their own materials and at least when we create in-house materials, they are specific to the context that we have, which is different, than published course books, which tend to have that global, perhaps not that useful feel to them.
[00:21:18] Laura Richards (she/her): So, it is challenging when you have larger cohorts of teachers and of students to create materials that work across the programs. When I personally work with quite a large cohort of students, I teach the same lessons with them multiple times, and they are always realized differently through the materials.
But what can we do to acknowledge this in our materials design if we are teaching large cohorts?
[00:21:47] Jennifer MacDougall (she/her): For example, we give answer keys, they're not answer keys. They're, sample answers, or they are, potential answers
With that caveat that there will be many different answers coming into the room and that you should work with those. So I think making that explicit there, there isn't an, well, sometimes there's a right and a wrong, but often, as you said, there's a realization. It changes depending on who's in the room, what is said, because a lot of it is discursive. . Something else that we, do is through our professional development work. We have one week each semester that we work with the teachers. And for example, when we're inputting any new material, we actually get the teachers to try out the experiments or try out the tasks and that can inform what happens in the classroom then, because they can see it really in action in a group.
[00:22:50] Laura Richards (she/her): I think it's a really interesting idea. So do the teachers really see the value of this?
[00:22:55] Jennifer MacDougall (she/her): Yeah, I think they do because they also get the chance to input on, what they have done in the classroom and what has actually happened. It gives it its own space and therefore people can really engage with each other, try out things, have ideas about how they may have used the material in a different way and what the outcome was trying different things with it.
[00:23:21] Laura Richards (she/her): Great. It sounds like it's definitely worked for you and that you've been able to integrate this into your practice.
 
[00:23:29] Laura Richards (she/her): So I wanted to focus in on something that we've touched on a little bit, which is how we design materials for different students.
How do you design for different students within single cohorts where there are different disciplines, different backgrounds, potentially even different levels.
[00:23:50] Katrien Deroey (she/her): I've written the ebook for the course with different chapters and a week before we have a workshop, they have to submit, tasks from a particular chapter that we're going to deal with in the workshop. So they read through the theory, then they do tasks which are applied.
For some of them there is a key but for many of them it's actually asking them to apply it to their own writing. At the end of each chapter of reading, they have to give me feedback on the usefulness of the materials. I think that's an important way, it's been an interesting way to find out how useful, what's missing, what's particularly useful. I ask them to tell me what was unclear and what in particular they would like me to explain again and any other questions they've got about the topic. This really allows me to personalize. So in the workshop, I don't actually go through all the theory from A to Z.
Again, I just highlight the main points. I illustrate it for with samples from students writing, and then we can also deal and discuss with any questions that have arisen . I must say that from student evaluations of the course, , this level of personalization and really working with their output and allowing them to learn at their own pace from reading through the theory. Is extremely valuable to students. Also as a corpus linguist I am encouraged 'em to create their own corpus with Ancon Maggie Charles has written at length
[00:25:19] Laura Richards (she/her): Yeah.
[00:25:20] Katrien Deroey (she/her): And Tatyana Karpenko-Seccombe. has also written a book about working with corpora in, EAP for academic writing. And so this also gives them the tools to explore their own discipline, , their own genres and also to continue learning. 
[00:25:36] Laura Richards (she/her): Great. Thanks Katrien. Millie, how do you cope with the challenges of working with different student characteristics in your teaching? 
[00:25:46] Milada Walkova (she/her): So I think I've tried to look at what, what might they have in common? In terms of their knowledge. So when I'm developing materials, I'm asking myself what are they likely to know already and what are they likely to struggle with and what misconceptions are they likely to have, even though told them before, someone else has taught them before. What works for me is to know the kinds of cohorts. Because when you have experience of teaching particular cohorts, then you can kind of assume and expect what they're likely to know and struggle with. And it's much more difficult when you are developing materials for a new type of cohort and especially new students that you haven't met before. And, jen mentioned at the beginning the importance of context. So for me, that's also an important consideration. So for example, I'm asking myself, am I developing materials for a standalone workshop or materials that are part of a course? And if it's part of a course, then I feel it should be embedded within the course.
So, for example, instead of introducing yet another text, I try to reuse text we've looked at before. So that means when we recycle the text for a different type of activity for looking at different aspects academic language, then the students are not distracted by the content of the text because they're familiar with it. And we can go straight into working with the language. Now, if it's a standalone workshop, this is much more difficult, because you also need to choose a text to start with. And Jen talks about how it needs to be interesting and relevant to the students, not just to you. And for me, the difficulty is that I teach EGAP classes and I always get feedback from students, oh, we want to read something from our discipline. But then I ask them, okay, you are in engineering. Would you like to read about design? You are in design. Would you like to read about engineering? You see where we are in this class together, so we can't read all texts from your discipline. So what I try to do is to select texts whose content will be relevant to everyone.
It's not always immediately obvious to the students because they're so focused on, oh, I just want to read about my discipline. But for this week I developed materials using articles from Plos One, which is an interdisciplinary journal. Some of the papers are really accessible and interesting to why audiences. So for example, we looked at a paper that talks about , whether tweeting increases citation counts, so something that will be very relevant to doctoral students who will publish research.
[00:28:52] Katrien Deroey (she/her): I think something that you said Laura earlier about teaching the same thing to
[00:28:57] Laura Richards (she/her): oh, yes.
[00:28:58] Katrien Deroey (she/her): I've done that as well in the past, in the same week, like teach the same thing six times. And what I've learned from that is not to immediately ditch your materials when they don't work.
[00:29:08] Laura Richards (she/her): Yeah.
[00:29:09] Katrien Deroey (she/her): One group. 'cause then you go on to another group and say, oh, works in this group. And that's something to do with group dynamics so trust your materials and don't just kind of bin them, have to change them straight away if they haven't worked once. I think to, to come back to the point of it's interesting when Millie talked about thinking about what your student needs are and how we use our intuition and our experience for that. One thing experience has taught me unfortunately, is when I used to ask doctoral students in the first session or in the pre-course survey about their needs there was very little awareness about what the real needs were. They'd come up with surface things like vocabulary and improve my whatever , for writing. another thing that I haven't mentioned that I think perhaps is an important part of how I develop materials is that I, how I teach that things are activity driven. So I try not to present any theory that the students could come to themselves through doing an activity.
[00:30:12] Jennifer MacDougall (she/her): Can I just add something there about working with different students, different materials , different disciplines. For me, being embedded , within a school, which is related to , the degree programs that I am working with, has been immensely helpful in terms of having access , , the subject lecturers and being able to talk to them about the issues they see, but also being able to kind of deep dive into what it is they use and how they use things. Because sometimes, and I think this comes back to Katrien's work on lectures sometimes what's in materials. So for example, what they say is the way that a lab report is, is written, is not actually how it realizes itself in what the students are given to produce in their discipline. having that ability to collaborate and glean information from the subject area is immensely helpful in how you design those materials.
[00:31:14] Katrien Deroey (she/her): Yes. I think that's important, Jen. It reminds me of, that's always the first step when I'm developing a new course for doctoral students for, their pronunciation. They've been referred on to me by their supervisors and the first thing is , I talk to their supervisors. I try to talk to the people who referred them or if a new course needs to be designed by one of the adjunct lecturers or myself, they get in touch with the program director. This collaboration with people who can be informants.
[00:31:44] Laura Richards (she/her): there are so many things that you have given me cause to think about as we've been having these discussions and, sadly, we're not gonna have time to cover all of them. Some of the things that sprung to mind were obviously the ubiquity of AI and how this will have an impact and how we design our materials. But also the continued discussions around how we support neurodivergent students, students with accessibility and disability issues. And, and even particularly in the UK at the moment, decolonization of our curricula. that we'll put a pin in those for now, not because they're not important, but because we want to do those justice and we'll definitely have more discussions about those in the context of materials design in the future. So the last thing I want to do is to ask each of you to in your wisdom pass on some advice. I'm gonna jump on the trend of what advice would you give to EAP practitioners designing materials if you weren't afraid to hurt their feelings.
[00:32:43] Jennifer MacDougall (she/her): Okay. Don't be afraid of criticism. That's my first comment. Writing materials is an iterative process. And so you can't be too precious about something that you think is brilliant, especially if you're writing for other people. They will tell you, you need to let other people see your materials. You need to get feedback, you need to be willing to change things. Find ideas from everywhere. Another piece of advice is, if you can think about taking some additional training, because I did a TEAP course where I had the chance to really deep dive into some types of materials and open them up and look at what I thought was the way that a genre was written, you know, was created, or what the language surrounding that was. I found out lots of really interesting things that have helped inform me.
[00:33:37] Laura Richards (she/her): Strongly agree with that, Jen.
[00:33:38] Katrien Deroey (she/her): If I can pick up on that indeed and, get student feedback, which can be critical. And also input and incorporate it to enrich your teaching and your materials. that's the first point and the second point John Sinclair said, trust the text. But when it comes to textbooks, don't trust the textbook. As Millie also says, do your research. Read the preface or think how, how did they come to this content? Is this representative? Is this really what's gonna be useful for my students? also, don't just go on your own gut feeling or your intuition about what you should be doing or should not be doing, and what the proper way is to go about it. Do your research.
[00:34:20] Laura Richards (she/her): What's your advice?
[00:34:22] Milada Walkova (she/her): So I would like to start by reiterating, as Katrien said, don't trust published materials, but be critical of them. Evaluate them. Are these particular materials good? Why are they good and why not are they good for your particular group of students? So trust yourself over publish materials do your research as Catherine said, and as Jen said, try to learn.
And if you don't have access to a course say use literature. I would recommend Brian Tomlinson's books and the Book by Freda Mishan and Ivor Timmis. they are not EAP, they are ELT, these books. but you can still learn a lot when you think about, okay, how does material design become principled? What principles do I need to think about when I'm developing materials? I would also say start slow. So start by adapting, which probably most people do anyway, then add an activity here and there. Gradually collaborate with others. If it's time consuming, you can consider collaborating with people from other institutions so that the same materials can be used in, more than one place. And then evaluate how they worked. So get feedback from colleagues, from students, see how your materials worked, so next time I produce a different set of materials. What have I learned from this to improve, my materials for a different class .
[00:36:03] Laura Richards (she/her): Thank you so much, Millie. That brings us to the end of our very rich, very enlightening discussion. I want to say thank you to Jen, Katrien and Millie. It's been a brilliant discussion. And it's only the beginning for our discussions around materials design.
 Thank you so much for listening to this episode We really hope you've enjoyed it and that you've found something interesting or useful in it, and we hope that you can join us for the next episode. So if you'd like to share a comment, suggestion or an insight into something that we've talked about, please send us an email or voice note at podcast@baleap.org. You can also get in touch through our YouTube channel, @AllThingsEAP.
Take care. Bye-bye.