None of the teacher participants had a motive for learning about curriculum development at the beginning of the course design project (excerpts 37-40). In other words, the teacher participants’ motive coincides with the object set by the managers:
completing the task of designing EAP courses. As discussed in 3.1, the activity of designing EAP courses is comprised of a series of actions, each of which is driven by a specific goal. During the process of course design, some of these goals were developed into motives for learning, and the activity of completing the assigned task was transformed into a learning activity. For example, at first when preparing the teaching materials for the 3B course, Hong was driven by a goal of selecting materials of academic purposes. However, stimulated by the complaints of the classroom teachers who taught the course and her experience in teaching the 4B course, Hong recognized the materials of the 3B course did not reflect the integration between the Reading-Writing subcourse and the Listening-Speaking subcourse. This recognition encouraged her to review the materials of her course once more for significant revision. In this case, she developed a motive for selecting and organizing the materials in a meaningful way for teaching and learning. She said:
When Hue led Team 3, she created two thick books [one was for Reading- Writing skills, and the other was for Listening-Speaking skills]. The lessons were organized consistently. Although she took the materials from different sources, she did it selectively and made the contents coherent with each other. At that time, I had a desire to do something similar to what Hue did, and then I learned from the way the contents of the 4B course were organized. (Excerpt 1, Hong, Wn2)
Along with the motive for learning how to organize the teaching materials, Hong developed another motive for learning about subject matter (i.e. EAP) in her context.
The opportunity for Hong to learn about it was when she was assigned as one of the judges in the appraisal meeting on the materials for the 1B and 2B courses (in charge by Team 1). Reading 1B and 2B teaching materials and comparing them with 3B teaching materials, she realized and argued that some parts of 1B’s and 2B’s materials
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did not reflect the nature of EAP. Listening to 1B’s and 2B’s team members’ counter- arguments, Hong got confused but decided to keep silent at that time. She said:
When I heard her [the Head of Division A that controlled the quality of Team 1’s products] say ‘in case we need to understand what EAP is, there is nothing more than IELTS and TOEFL to consult’, I was confused. In IELTS for Academic Purposes, there exist conversations taking place in a library where the librarian gets a student to fill in a form’ [implying that the listening materials like such conversations are considered academic], I questioned myself: what is it meant by the fact that not all contents in IELTS for Academic Purposes are academic? (Excerpt 2, Hong, Wn2)
In the same vein, Hue developed a motive for conceptualizing the contents for the course in her context. When Hue returned from her maternity leave and was reassigned to be the leader of Team 3, the first version of the 4B course was completed, but she was not satisfied about the way it was conceptualized. She said.
When I looked into the materials that they [her team members] developed, I was a bit disappointed as I did not think that they would develop the materials that way. The materials were quite disjointed. They were just compiled from different sources (Excerpt 3, Hue, On1).
Hue had such a feeling when using those materials in her classes. She found it hard to see the coherence among the given materials as well as to teach students towards B2+ or C1 level with such a small amount of in-class listening and speaking practice.
Additionally, she reckoned the other parts of the materials to be for examination purposes rather than for language learning purposes.
I think those materials were for practicing exam skills instead of for learning and teaching. I remember I did not have much to teach, using those materials.
For listening and speaking, they had a core book and supplementary materials. Students were taught how to take notes, but the contents were so simple. Learning those materials could not be enough for students to reach C1 level. For reading, they gave the teachers a series of reading texts along with comprehension questions. Learning that way was not different from what the English centers for examination purposes were doing. The learning
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quality would depend on the teachers who delivered the lessons, and there was not much information as the core for the teachers to follow. Of course, the materials could be considered to be academic-oriented as they were compiled from IELTS resources, but the teaching seemed to be like at the English centers. (Excerpt 4, Hue, On1)
Realizing the problem of the materials, Hue desired to re-conceptualize the course that could reflect the nature of EAP and facilitate students learning knowledge and skills useful for their further development. She said:
The materials delivered at that time were not integrated although they called them so. In fact, they were still separately taught. I questioned myself what basic skills students should be taught, what it was meant by academic writing, and what it was meant by academic listening. Then I defined all of those in the context of university learning … Graph description is part of academic writing but not all; students should learn the basic academic skills which serve as the foundation for their further development (Excerpt 5, Hue, On1)
For the cases of Thu and Thuan, they developed a motive for learning about testing and assessment. Thuan said:
In the past, we did not have assessment criteria. We marked the writing assignments with confusion as we just based on our own teaching experience… It was time to change; we needed to have standard to assess the assignments and we needed to define the difficulty level of the test items.
(Excerpt 6, Thuan, On)
This motive was developed when they were required to design assessment tasks and tests in accord with competence-based EAP courses and received some references from their Dean.
She [the Dean] provided us with a test specification … She said that in a test for B1 level, about 70% of the items were at B1, 20% were at B2, and 10%
were at C1… Then we desired to define the level at which each item was at…
We discussed a lot to define the difficulty level of test items, but most of the time it was based on our sense. (Excerpt 7, Thuan, Wn2)
For the other teachers, their object did not change during the process of course
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design; put it differently, they cared more about how to complete the assigned tasks instead of developing a motive for professional learning.