New approaches to materials development for language learning - Olwyn Alexander

This volume contains a selection of papers from the joint conference run by the British Association for Lecturers of English for Academic Purposes (BALEAP) and the Scottish Association for the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language (SATEFL) held in Edinburgh in 2005. It highlights current issues in the teaching of English for academic and specific purposes. The papers reflect the willingness of teachers and researchers of EAP to come together specifically to share good practice in the development of learning and teaching materials and to focus on how this good practice is underpinned by insights from research. A number of key themes run through the collection: the increasingly diverse nature of the student population, socialisation of these students within their specific fields of study, research in genre analysis and corpus linguistics to understand these fields and design targeted teaching materials, the importance of critical thinking and academic literacy for learner autonomy.

The Editor: Olwyn Alexander was the main organiser of the BALEAP/SATEFL conference 2005. She is a Teaching Fellow at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, and is involved in the design and development of materials for academic English courses delivered to overseas students studying applied science and business degrees.