Teaching in English for Academics: The TEA Project

The goal of the TEA Project is to support ULB academics and PhD assistants who are teaching in English. It provides provides a flexible, personalised programme focused on language teaching and pedagogical advice.
 

• An individualised programme with sessions at times that suit you
• A collaborative space to reflect, learn and implement evidence-based strategies and perspectives from international research
• Improve your written and spoken English and feel more confident 
• Adapt your pedagogical strategies in order to be a more effective teacher to non-anglophone students

Academic Exchange 

• General and academic language classes: C1 advanced
• Fridays 12pm to 1pm (Solbosch)
• Audience: Open to all members of the university but it is most suited to researchers, doctoral students and teachers.

Test Your Talk

• Small group feedback on an academic presentation of your choice.
• 13 October, 9.30am to 12pm (Solbosch)
• 6 November, 9.30am to 12pm (La Plaine)
• 20 November, 9.30am to 12pm (Solbosch)
• Audience: Researchers, doctoral students and teachers
• Also available on demand (ideal for groups of doctoral students or research teams). Follow up language support is also available.

Writing workhop: Supporting your academic writing with AI

• 20 October, 9.30am to 12.30pm (Solbosch)
• Audience: All members of the university

Oral language workshop: English for teaching: giving constructive feedback to students

• 25 November, 9.30am to 11.30am (Solbosch)
• Audience: Teachers delivering their courses or supervising doctoral students in English
• Individual or small group classes are sometimes available, depending on resources and your location. Priority is given to those people teaching in English.

Workshop: Teaching a content course in English - 5 tips to boost student engagement and learning

• 15 December 10am to 12pm (Solbosch)
• Audience: Teachers delivering their courses

Workshop: Using AI to enhance learning in courses taught in English

• 4 December 9.30am to 12pm (Solbosch)
• Audience: Teachers delivering their courses
• Individual coaching is always available. Get in touch to discuss your course and your students.

Click here to sign up for pedagogical support

Marie ( PhD assistant): oral language and teaching methodology
Marie is teaching a course on research methods to Masters’ students with very diverse levels of English. She engaged the help of the TEA Project over two academic years to help improve her oral language (all of the bi-weekly sessions were in English) but also to collaboratively design more interactive activities to ensure the students could understand and apply the relevant concepts and that they were secure in the specific vocabulary used on the course.

Elena (Academic):  course review
Elena is responsible for a group of courses taught in English and engaged the TEA Project to conduct a review after a few years of implementation. This covered the students’ perspectives, the teachers’ views, comparisons with best practice from research and recommendations for strengthening the structure and delivering of the courses in English.

Jean-Marc (Post-doc researcher): language certification
Jean-Marc teaches a Master’s-level course in English. Although he already had a high level of English, he joined a weekly exam preparation class in order to boost his CV. After a year, he obtained a C2 evaluation and affirms that the rigour of the exam significantly helped him to improve his vocabulary and grammar.
 

Pierre (Academic): methodology
Pierre teaches several courses in English but was feeling frustrated because the students were very unwilling to speak in English in one of his seminars. He invited the TEA Project trainers to design a training session for the whole teaching team on the course. This served to identify some of the issues that the students had and helped to restructure the seminars, resulting in significantly more interaction and other adaptations to support the students’ learning.
 

Where do classes take place?

The TEA Project is based on the Solbosch campus but generally the teachers can come to your office if you are based at Solbosch, La Plaine or Flagey.

Can I have lessons online?

No. The lessons and courses are taught in-person.

Do I have to pay?

No. The TEA Project is free for ULB staff.

How many hours of support can I get?

We allocate the number of hours to each participant according to their needs (priority to those with a lower language level) and in terms of the global number of hours we have available.

Do I have to do language and methodology together?

Ideally but not necessarily. We will draw up an individual programme for each participant, according to their needs.

Are the lessons at the same time each week?

The timing and frequency of the individual lessons is arranged between the teacher and participant and we try to be flexible. If you cannot make a session, we ask that you give us as much notice as possible. If you miss too many sessions, we will cancel your enrolment so that we can use the time for other participants.