IATEFL ESPSIG Pre Conference Event in Brighton on the 20th of April 2026
Get ready to share your expertise at the ESPSIG Pre-Conference Event (PCE) on 20 April 2026 in Brighton!
Following last year’s success, we’re bringing back our interactive format! Join us for a dynamic day combining engaging talks, discussions, and workshops designed to foster real collaboration.
Theme: The Changing Faces of Teacher Identity within ESP
Speakers-
Ho Yuen Raymond Cheung
This workshop begins with a discussion focusing on 3-4 writing processes of how students commonly employ AI tools to “assist” with their essay writing and research. Participants will evaluate the ethical considerations and critical thinking involved in these scenarios. This aims to highlight the current ambiguity and ambivalence in the concept of plagiarism, as well as a common phenomenon that students in HE, empowered by a plethora of AI-tools, can submit grammatically impeccable essays that, I would argue, lack stylistic varieties and personal touch.
Considering these significant shifts in students’ academic writing processes, this workshop then invites EAP practitioners to further discuss and reconsider the rationale behind common assessments (e.g. in-class writing exam and research essay writings). Through this open discussion, participants will come to realize that language proficiency may signify a change of focus from grammatical accuracy to pragmatic competence in writing and heightened criticality in research. The goal is to lead participants to inductively establish a new or expanded framework of EAP skills for students to produce academic writing in an academically rigorous and ethically responsible way.
Unlike current relevant literature, which primarily focuses on how EAP curricula should teach students to understand and effectively use AI tools through prompt engineering, participants at the end of the workshop will analyze how some suggested classroom activities and teaching materials can possibly train up students’ ability to critically evaluate academic sources during AI-driven research process, while preserving their individual voice and style, and resisting the depersonalizing influence of AI-input during writing process.
Evan Frendo
Learning in the flow of work (LIFOW) represents a significant shift in how language learning is conceptualised and delivered in professional contexts. Traditionally, ESP pedagogy has been underpinned by systematic needs analysis, leading to carefully structured, data-informed course designs aimed at addressing clearly identified linguistic and communicative demands. However, as workplace communication increasingly integrates with digital platforms, learners now access on-demand, contextualised language support through technology, redefining when, where, and how learning occurs.
This talk uses examples from the world of corporate language learning to examine the implications of this transformation for ESP practitioners. It argues that the teacher’s role is evolving from that of course architect and content provider to facilitator of adaptive, autonomous, and situated learning, from the traditional “sage on the stage” toward a “guide on the side.”
From the clients’ perspective such a change offers three important advantages. First, it minimizes the time that learners must spend away from their workplace, and focuses instead on a culture of continuous learning in the workplace. Second, it embeds personalised just-in-time language support into digital workflows, aligning learning with modern workplace environments. And third, it is agile, and in a world where needs emerge unpredictably and change rapidly, it offers an improved solution to the traditional linear design cycles which are increasingly too slow and too rigid to be effective.
This is a renewed professional identity for ESP practitioners—one that balances expertise in language teaching with the capacity to support experiential, technology-enhanced learning embedded in everyday work activities.
Fatihah Guessabi
This study explores the transformation of ESP teacher identity in the AI era, examining how generative AI tools—capable of producing domain-specific texts, translating specialized terminology, and providing instant language feedback—challenge traditional conceptions of ESP expertise. ESP teachers face critical questions about their professional identity: What constitutes ESP expertise when AI can produce field-specific language? How do teachers redefine their roles from language providers to critical AI literacy developers? What new identity “faces” emerge as ESP teachers guide students in ethical, effective AI use for professional communication? The study also explores how institutional pressures, student expectations, and professional community norms shape the reconstruction of ESP teacher identity in technologically mediated environments. Through examining these “changing faces,” this research illuminates the dynamic, contested, and evolving nature of ESP teacher professionalism in an age where the boundaries between human linguistic expertise and artificial intelligence capabilities are increasingly blurred. Survey instruments of this research, including a questionnaire and an interview, have been addressed to ESP Teachers (tenured, tenured track, and non-tenured track). The target sample size is 100 participants from the University of Tahri Mohamed of Bechar in Algeria. The findings have revealed that a new expertise and identities tension emerges, teachers report spending less time creating basic materials, and ESP teachers are transitioning from being primary creators of specialized materials to becoming curators and evaluators of AI-generated content.
Blair Matthews
How would you feel to be accused that the writing you produce is AI generated? How about if you were tempted to use generative AI (Gen AI) to complete work in a way that you knew broke the rules but did not get caught? How would it feel to then get caught? Each of these experiences represent different registers of how writers may confront ethics in relation to the attribution, non-attribution or misuse of Gen AI in academic writing. While they represent real concerns that writers are using Gen AI to unfairly enhance the quality of their work, they also say something about the potential for the breakdown in trust in writing processes. In this workshop, I argue that ethical practices should recognise the relational and affective nature of human-technology interaction, which can help better account for the capacities and constraints that digital technologies such as Gen AI offer. First, I outline a framework to distinguish between discrete and entangled attribution in academic writing and the subsequent affective responses to accusations of academic misconduct with Gen AI. Then, I present a series of ethics vignettes for discussion in the workshop.
Eftychis Kantarakis
ESP teachers often find themselves caught between dense terminology, demanding texts and the institutional pressure to “cover the book”. This fast-paced, practical session offers a simple four-principle framework for redesigning ESP lessons around real professional and academic tasks rather than isolated language items. Drawing on examples from a range of disciplines (such as business, tourism, engineering and healthcare) and classroom experiences with the Career Paths series from Express Publishing, the session shows how to make specialist vocabulary genuinely communicative, how to use texts and audio as springboards to speaking and writing, and how to exploit learners’ own subject knowledge as a powerful resource.