Guidelines for planning ESP shadowing with a web component

The following is a list of guidelines for the design and creation of an ESP shadowing curriculum, and for the creation of a web component for that course.

1. Have a curriculum planning model before you begin. In order to deal with the number and complexity of impacting factors, a model, preferably graphical, is very helpful. Figure 2 below is one such model, from Hunter (2001).

2. Clarify the mandate from the client department, and determine ownership of the course. The client may not have an articulate vision of the course's objectives, content, methodology and evaluation principles. Also, it is important to clarify who will manage the course, who will deliver the course and who will give credits for it.

3. Design the learning experience. Create a detailed flowchart of what the learner will do, and when, and in what order.

4. Determine your needs for creating the materials, and ensure that those needs will be met.

Calculate the time per week required for authoring (and for content negotiation with L2 faculty).

Determine what infrastructure will be required for all facets of the creation of the materials (computers, web accounts, microphones, software, digital cameras, scanners, printers, and...).

Determine how much help of various kinds you will need (printing hard copy sets, marking papers, making web pages, creating sound files, converting sound files to different formats).

5. Expect to be authoring on-the-fly.

6. Design a materials flow. Decide when L1 content must be delivered to you by each participating faculty member. Remind faculty regularly of the schedule expectations.

7. Have back-up topics prepared in case materials flow breaks down. Even better, have back-up lessons prepared. These are also useful when the materials submitted by faculty are too abstract, too short or otherwise unusable.

8. Maintain frequent liaison with the course manager (this should not be you) and the personnel who deliver the course.

9. Create a simple method for sending materials and sound files to your web page maker. In the KUT case, at first files were dispatched on zip disks, but conflicting timetables made this unworkable. Email also proved unacceptable for large sound files. A workable approach is to create a folder on a web page and dump the week's files in there for the assistant to download. This necessitates planning the labeling of files so that the whole year's files can be ordered alphabetically.

10. Work with L1 faculty to foster awareness of the discourse component of their instruction. Ask faculty to articulate how they talk about their topics in L1, and show them the finished L2 version of their content. This can be an inroad into better L1 teaching as well.