B2 Ready has arrived! – Materials Design Training in Tashkent

300booksFB After a year of work, B2 Ready is printed and ready to launch. The book will be officially launched 12 April 2016 on the new campus of Uzbekistan State World Languages University in Tashkent. Designers will be on hand to speak about their experience writing the book.

The year has been an exciting exploration of new ideas and new knowledge and the designers look forward to sharing the information they’ve learned with their colleagues and to producing new books that will effectively raise the language levels of learners while maintaining international standards for academic integrity.

A pre-launch, low resolution copy of B2 Ready is available for download. Sign up for our email list to receive your download link.

ESP Materials Design Partnership Project

This project was a joint effort of the Republican Scientific-Practical Center for Developing Innovative Methods for Teaching Foreign Languages under the Uzbek State University of World Languages and the U.S. English Language Specialist Program in 2015-2016. The project, based in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, offered intensive training in ESP materials design.

The project aimed to train all interested educators in the fundamentals of materials design for second language acquisition in 3 stages:

1. Foundational training in materials design with input regarding conditions and cultural constraints from Uzbekistan's educators.

2. Intensive workshops with stage 1 trained designers to culminate in a working draft of an ESP textbook that now serves as a template for independent designers.

3. Support for independent designers in using the template to produce ESP textbooks in their own fields.

Our goal was to train materials designers to produce textbooks that effectively raise the English language proficiency of entering university students to levels that allow them to access materials and lessons already published in English in their chosen fields of study.