Sample task-based lesson
Concision in Conference Proposals
Description of Context:
Students in this scenario are in an English for Academic Purposes (EAP) class at an English-medium university in a non-English speaking country (EAP in an EFL setting). Students are in a masters or doctoral program in the Graduate School of Education and are expected upon graduation to be able to present in English at international research and/or practitioner conferences. They have upper-intermediate to advanced (B2-C1) proficiency in English.
Rationale of Target Task and Language Focus:
Students have been encouraged to use their thesis projects to apply for an upcoming conference, the International Conference on Building Cultural Bridges, and this lesson is scheduled to be one month before the deadline for submissions of proposals, which is the target task for this lesson. While many students have attended an academic conference, few have presented there, and none as a solo author.
Students in this program tend to write with long sentences with complex structures, an influence from Russian writing which places great importance on eloquence and complexity in “good writing”. As a result, student writing has been described as “wordy” or “flowery” by the students’ content instructors. This lesson focuses on concision as the language aspect.
Lesson Plan
Objectives
SWBAT:
- recognize clear and concise language in an English-language conference proposal.
- identify and practice using strategies of concision in writing a conference proposal.
- use strategies of concision in writing their own conference proposal.
Materials: Conference call for proposals (CFP), One authentic sample text, access to GoogleDocs on computers.
Procedure:
| Pre-task (20 min) | Students are reminded about the conference proposal that is coming up and the teacher pulls up the conference website. The teacher asks how students are feeling about the conference (Are they excited, nervous, indifferent?). Going through the conference “tracks”, the teacher highlights the importance of students seeing themselves as members of a discourse community, where writing and presenting is for a real audience of their peers. Students are given the conference CFP and asked to brainstorm in small groups the following three questions: What track(s) does your thesis fall most closely under? What do you expect to be the biggest challenge in writing a conference proposal or abstract? What are some similarities or differences you might expect to see in this type of writing compared to others we have covered in class (article summary, annotated bibliography, argumentative writing, literature review)? Students share the highlights of their discussions as a whole group. The teacher acknowledges all ideas as valuable and leads the discussion to the challenge of meeting the 250-300 word requirement. Students are given a sample conference abstract that exceeds the word limit by 50 words. |
| Main task (45 min) | Give task instructions on GoogleDoc and put students in pairs. In pairs, they are given 15 minutes to eliminate unnecessary words while maintaining the ideas presented in the text. They record their changes in a shared GoogleDoc. As a class, we examine the changes and build a repository of strategies used to improve concision. After the students share, the teacher can provide further strategies not identified by the students. |
| Post-task (in class) | Students discuss as a whole class: What was helpful about this task? What was challenging about this task? How prepared do they feel to revise their peer’s writing? |
| Post-task (after class) | Students exchange partners and repeat the task by exchanging their own conference proposal drafts. Students are given additional resources on concision (from UNC and Purdue) which they can use to add to their concision-improving strategies. |
| Preview of next class: | Students will share and discuss their peer feedback with their partners. Students will discuss any strategies that were particularly helpful. Students will reflect on their own style of writing and brainstorm goals for writing with more clarity and concision/ Independently, students will prepare their conference proposal for submission. |
Handout 1: Conference CFP
Sample text 1:
Managing Implementation of English Medium of Instruction in Higher Education in Kazakhstan: Practices and Challenges
Abstract (354 words)
The beginning of the implementation of Strategy 2050 in Kazakhstan amplified the importance of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) in education within the frame of trilingual policy (TLP). In achieving this goal some higher educational institutions in the country of Kazakhstan started to introduce EMI into their curriculum. Due to this reason, it is important to explore how it is being implemented in the present. This research study aimed at exploring how English as a medium of instruction in higher education is managed within the frame of trilingual policy implementation in Kazakhstan. More precisely, this research was aimed at actually addressing perceptions held by university administrators and faculty towards TLP and EMI, management practices in EMI implementation and challenges that accompany the introduction of this process. Given the limitations of a quantitative approach, the study employed qualitative case study design with face-to- face in-depth interviews with three university administrators and seven university faculty members selected by means of maximal variation sampling in one state university and document analysis as one additional document to elicit insights into the practices and challenges EMI implementation in universities in Kazakhstan. The study revealed that the perceptions held by participants about TLP and EMI were positive, and it was considered to be beneficial for social cohesion, modernization of current education and better competitiveness of graduates. Various practices in managing EMI implementation were revealed with workload reduction and possibility for professional development courses as examples of good practices and student admission process and organizational problems in EMI program as instances of poor management practices. After analysis of these practices, some external factors such as top-down management approach on the side of Ministry of Education and Science and lack of resources for EMI execution were identified as challenges hindering effective and successful EMI implementation. One of the implications implied by the findings was the real need for establishing much better collaboration between policy makers and universities to address immediate problems of universities for successful EMI management as well as the necessity for providing faculty with better facilities and proper organization of EMI groups on the side of university administration.
(299-word original, available here)
Developing the task
Designing this lesson allowed me to reflect on and revise some of my teaching practices. For my TBLT lesson, I chose to focus on concision, a topic that I had taught before in an EAP setting in Kazakhstan. I had previously taught from a genre pedagogy perspective, moving through a Teaching and Learning Cycle in which students 1) develop knowledge of the field through meaningful content-related work, 2) deconstruct sample target tasks, identifying the rhetorical moves and steps used to achieve the text’s purpose, 3) co-construct a task with guidance, 4) construct a text independently. This approach prioritizes the explicit discussion and scaffolded instruction of the linguistic choices and resources that are available to writers in a given discipline. In my TBLT-inspired redesign of this task, the greatest innovation I adopted was taking a PowerPoint lecture followed by practice and flipping it on its head in the form of a real-world task. I reframed the focus from “students will be able to write concisely” (which, by the way, they will be able to apply to conference proposals, among other genres) to “students will be able to write a conference proposal” (which, by the way, requires concision among other writing skills). This reflects TBLT’s prioritization of real world communicative tasks as the organizing principle of a syllabus, rather than a list of linguistic elements. Students were encouraged to actually submit their work to this conference, and therefore may see the task as more meaningful and relevant to their professional and academic goals.
This task was developed with the input from four peer reviewers, who each praised the lesson’s connection to a real-world communicative task. Based on their feedback, I made a few substantial changes. Two reviewers commented on the need to ease into the task with a more personal connection to the students’ lives. I created space for a personal reflection about the students’ own ideas about conferences and conference presentations before launching into the activity. One reviewer highlighted the challenge of taking on what is essence two tasks: 1) working with a model text and identifying revision strategies, and 2) Revising their own work using those strategies. I have revised the 60-minute lesson to only focus on the first task. I moved the peer revision to the homework task, and the re-writing for the next class session. Finally, one reviewer mentioned the need for smaller-level objectives under the overarching aim of being able to write a clear and concise conference proposal. I have split my one objective into three that deal more specifically with the identification, practice, and independent use of concision strategies in their writing. These suggestions helped me narrow in and conduct a more cohesive lesson. In this process, I wrestled with the comment from one reviewer who suggested giving students one wordy and one non-wordy text as a pre-task activity. While this felt like a sensible recommendation, I decided not to implement it, as it felt too much like PPP, and I wanted to see what it would look like if I used the students’ prior linguistic knowledge to jump into the task.
Delivering the lesson
I demonstrated this lesson in a class of my peers (all graduate students in TESOL and Applied Linguistics) and was eager to see how this hybrid TBLT-infused genre pedagogy approach would work in practice. As my lesson plan describes, I began with some context building and then jumped write into the task of revising a text to meet the conference proposal word count. It became apparent that students were able to apply what they knew to the task of identifying wordy or unnecessary phrases. They were able to make many suggested changes without my “instruction” about how to do so. As the students made suggestions, I challenged them to name the strategy they were using. What type of language was being cut? What type of language was replacing it? As each group shared out a few edits and comments they made, my role as teacher shifted considerably from “provider of knowledge” to “facilitator” or “synthesizer” as I helped them organize and extend their knowledge. My value for them is not in teaching them something they don’t know (like strategies for concision), but rather helping them achieve something they want to achieve (like present their original work at a conference) with greater efficiency and confidence. I still had my presentation slides with my own list of concision strategies, but they took a back seat to the list generated by the class.
The lesson itself was engaging and the students were able to proactively and productively participate in improving concision in their writing. Students reported enjoying the GoogleDoc setup where each pair was assigned a text in a document that both students could simultaneously mark up and edit. The ongoing challenge I had, and which was raised in the post-activity feedback, was systematically generating and commenting on the strategies students used to reduce wordiness in academic writing. This type of activity needs time to breathe, and it was this point that I felt most constrained by time in the demo. In my revised lesson plan, I included more time for this part of the lesson, and I am continuing to reflect on how to transition more smoothly from the brainstorming phase to the knowledge consolidation phase. It is important to keep my teacher role of “provider of knowledge” in check, and perhaps extend this activity as pair work in which I provide a list of strategies and ask them to reflect on which ones they used, and add any they used to the list. This push and pull between knowledge providing and learning facilitation is central to the task of making each learning task student-centered and hands on. In future iterations of my teaching of academic writing, I will continue to explore opportunities to adapt and incorporate the best practices from both TBLT and genre pedagogy.
D. Philip Montgomery 