ELT Experiences

Experiences of an English Language Teacher

Tag: Teaching EAP

Six Websites for EAP Teachers

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When I first started teaching English for Academic Purposes (EAP), I was unfamiliar with any resources, websites or activities. My first year of teaching EAP involved being supported and shadowed by others. After a period of time, I found myself becoming more and more comfortable teaching and planning EAP tasks and lessons. In this post/video, I will share a variety of websites which could aid potential or current EAP teachers access resources and information which will help them prepare and plan lessons for their students.

When considering potential material or planning your EAP lessons, it is important to consider the role of the EAP teacher. It took a while for me to learn that the role of the EAP teacher is essentially there as a facilitator: to guide students towards best or expected academic practice (depending upon their department or specialism), develop the necessary study skills in preparation for their courses (especially during pre-sessional courses), or to provide students with the skills to tackle reading for their courses. The recommended websites below are those that I have accessed and suggested students to access for self-study, and I hope this helps you.

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How I Got Involved in Teaching English for Academic Purposes

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I have been very fortunate to be involved in an area of English teaching for the last few years which I find incredibly fascinating and extremely rewarding, especially when you see the progress that undergraduate and post-graduate international students make within a period of time. In this post and video, I share my experiences of how I got involved in the teaching of English for Academic Purposes (also known as EAP).

Before I share how I discovered this element of academic English and EAP, I really need to focus on what started my journey within the field of English language teaching. I first discovered the English teaching profession by chance when I moved to South Korea to teach English to young learners at a small private after-school institute. It was this that ignited my passion within English teaching and motivated me enough to undertake an initial teacher training certificate – the CELTA – after a year of teaching to these wonderful young learners.

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Top Six Reading Activities for EAP Teachers

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I recently read a really interesting and inspiring blog post on ELT Planning – about 23 ways to use a text in the classroom. It was very interesting to see what was suggested and it got me thinking about EAP-related tasks which could be used by teachers and students for their academic reading skills.

In academic writing and skills development, reading is crucial for any undergraduate or post-graduate student, with English being their second language. For the vast majority of EAP students, they have difficulty comprehending academic language, so in this blog post, I am sharing my six favourite reading activities for EAP students.

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Week 3 of an Online Pre-Sessional Course

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In my last blog post, I share my experiences of my second week on an eight-week pre-sessional course. However, in today’s blog post, I will be sharing week three of the online course and what things I covered during the week.

The pressure has now hit home with many of the students. They realise that they actually need to do some work and submit an annotated bibliography and sentence outline, in order to prepare for their essays. The previous Friday, I shared Essay Titles with my students and told them to consider a relevant essay title which connects to their subject of academic study. The majority of my students are going to be studying a business-related post-graduate degree from September, so the majority of the students chose similar essays. There was some emailing and responding to student queries in relation to their essays, with much of the catch-up sessions via Zoom explaining the expectation with an annotated bibliography and sentence outline.

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Week Two of an Online Pre-Sessional Course

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Last week, I blogged about my first week with the online pre-sessional course that I am involved with, and this post continues with my second week of remote teaching.

I started the first day by emailing students of all necessary schedules for their course, highlighting important deadlines and times of live Zoom sessions. I also scheduled individual students for an allocated time of their one-to-one tutorial, spread over two days. One reason I wanted to spread the tutorial over two days was that when I decided to have the tutorials over one day, I felt exhausted and had little time to respond to issues as they emerged. The benefit I found of holding half the tutorials over a day was that I were able to spend time responding to issues by emailing students or providing further information.

Anyhow, the first day I prepared the necessary PPT for the following day, listened to the student self-study input sessions, and also reminded students to submit their newspaper article in preparation for this week’s tutorial. I find myself having to motivate students to complete and engage with tasks, when particular students are not so intrinsically motivated to complete their autonomous self-study tasks. Perhaps I over-analyse or expect too much from my students but I do understand that the course is very similar to what students encounter when they undertake their courses at university.

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