B2 Ready and ESP – Materials Design Training in Tashkent

Just after the B2 Ready launch, Fled.uz asked for a video-taped interview for a conference they’d be holding. They asked about our approach to ESP:

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.