On April 12, 2016, State Department-sponsored English Language Specialist, Dee Broughton led her final seminar to officially wrap up a year-long project titled “ESP (English for Specific Purposes) Materials Design Partnership Project.” The project aimed to train all interested educators in Uzbekistan in the fundamentals of materials design for second language acquisition.
The ESP Materials Design Partnership Project was hosted from May 2015 to April 2016 by the Republican Scientific-Practical Center for Developing Innovational Methods for Teaching Foreign Languages at Uzbekistan State World Languages University and funded by the English Language Specialist Program of the U. S. Department of State. During the project, the English Language Specialist, Dee Broughton, offered over 20 training programs to English teachers in three stages.
According to the Specialist, “It was important to me that the training program be open to all teachers who might be interested, so I designed the project in stages and tried to offer the first stage as many times as possible to accommodate different groups and different schedules.” In Stage 1, Dee was able to offer nine week-long sessions of fundamental training to 134 English teachers. In these sessions, participants learned how to choose legally available texts that avoid copyright violation and plagiarism to preserve international standards of academic integrity, how to test and modify those texts to provide the correct CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) level of target learners, and how to create tasks that stimulate creative thinking and language acquisition.
For Stage 2, 32 English teachers from Tashkent, Andijan, Nukus, Bukhara, Samarqand, Namangan, Fergana, Termez, and Navoi, continued the project in a four-month intensive training where the Specialist guided them to produce a model textbook, B2 Ready. B2 Ready will serve as an example of a textbook that meets the fundamental principles of second language acquisition. Future materials designers of Uzbekistan will be able to use the activities in the book as templates to adapt activities to their own cultural or academic needs. B2 Ready is also a self-contained textbook that can be used by students who wish to learn the fundamentals of academic writing while raising their level from CEFR level B1 to B2. B2 Ready is freely available for download and copyright allows unlimited printing of copies. To receive a link for download, sign up for the mailing list on the project website: http://kitoblog.com. As the Specialist described the book, “B2 Ready is designed to be consumable, self-contained, and easy to print. Students just need a book to write in, and they can download one and print it easily. Other than a copy of the book, B2 Ready doesn’t require any additional resources and it doesn’t require any additional preparation from the teacher.”
During Stage 3, the Specialist provided support through a 2-day training session and individual consultations to 24 trained designers as they planned their own projects in which they will use B2 Ready as a template to write ESP textbooks in their own fields.
Dee Broughton is an editor, teacher-trainer, and specialist in materials design and in teaching academic research writing in developing educational systems. Dee received her Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts from Excelsior College and her Master’s degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from the University of Idaho. She holds a Diploma in Spanish as a Second Language from the Department of Education of Guanajuato, Mexico.
The English Language Specialist Program is funded worldwide by the U.S. Department of State through the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The English Language Specialist Program sends U.S. academics and professionals in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) to work on programs that contribute to the host country’s capacity to teach English. English Language Specialist assignments can include intensive workshop presentations, teacher training, needs assessments, material development, curriculum development, and other English capacity-building activities.
