Stage 2 – The Learning Continues – Materials Design Training in Tashkent

Stage 2 continues with the first of six scheduled seminars. Designers returned to Tashkent on 23 October to increase their skills at recognizing salient forms in texts.

Noticing Form

The most important condition for second language acquisition is that learners have language input they can understand. As learners understand the messages in the input, they also begin to notice the forms that carry the messages. Materials designers can aid learners in noticing these forms through careful design.

The first seminar of Stage 2 was designed to further increase the language awareness of our designers so that they can more effectively identify salient forms in texts. This skill will help designers more effectively edit texts for level and length and help them to create tasks based on those texts. In this full-day seminar, designers analyzed a number of texts for key forms and began to develop ideas for task creation. Designers will continue in the next few weeks before our second seminar to design tasks for the project’s new textbook.

Stage 2 Textbook

Stage 2 designers will create a textbook together that will raise the proficiency level of English language learners in an EAP setting. The textbook is intended as a model to help future designers create task designs that adhere to second language acquisition principles. The textbook will be available for download on this site by the beginning of 2016. Designers stay in touch between seminars through the new forum devoted to the project.

Stage 2 Seminar Snowday The first cold weather of the season hit right before our seminar, resulting in closed roads from some areas to the city, so a “Snowday” was held, repeating the seminar on Sunday, the 25th, for those designers who couldn’t safely travel to Tashkent for the Friday meeting.

We are currently training new designers who wish to continue offering the Fundamentals of Materials Design training after this year-long project. More Stage 1-type sessions will become available as trainers become ready late in 2015 and in spring of 2016. If you missed Stage 1, watch this website for the next available opportunity to get this training. View training topics.

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.