A day in the life of a newbie ESP material developer

This June, Natasha Jovanovich will share with you the presentations they delivered at the 44th Annual International IATEFL Conference in Harrogate.

A day in the life of a newbie ESP material developer
Who is afraid of making a transition from general English to ESP? No worries. I’ll just follow off the shelf course book. Allegedly, it only takes three Cs: curiosity, collaboration and confidence or does it? A fat chance! In this talk I will explain insights I gained and hurdles I encountered while designing content - based syllabus for English for human rights.

To sum up, should a non-native speaking teacher & non-expert in the field - be a scenario for an imminent disaster? It might be a major disadvantage in any effort to develop content based material but I hope I will come up with arguments that this doesn’t necessarily mean a cul–de- sac of ELT, provided there is a resilient and motivated teacher and abundant resources around.

In the workshop part of the seminar we will try and test some activities and lesson designs and share views on the participants exerience in ESP material design.



ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Natasha Jovanovich has had a substantial 15 year - long experience in ELT working with a private language studio for more than ten years now; her ESOL experience and a range of ESOL courses taught extended over the years to teaching advanced levels of proficiency and Cambridge ESOL exams and IELTS, TOEFL and ESP English, to name but a few. She has also been running teacher trainings and seminars with British Council Serbia, American Corners in Serbia and has presented at two international conferences this year: IATEFL Harrogate, England and Estonia.

Apart from teaching, both material development for ESP and translations feature in her work as well. Her translation of the book by Dr. Helen Fisher, an American author and research professor at Rutgers University, USA was published in 2005. The book embraces the issues of gender studies and the role of women in today’s world, business, science and family life.