Designing Material for Teaching English for Political Science and Diplomacy or How to Be Up-To-Date With Potentially Outdated Material

Abstract

Language for Specific Purposes materials have to be designed in such a way as to meet particular occupational or academic needs of learners (Anthony 10-11) and comply with certain general principles of material design, inter alia to provide a stimulus to learning since “good materials do not teach: they encourage learners to learn.”, and to represent models of correct and appropriate language use (Hutchinson and Waters 107- 108). As the authors of this paper learned in the process of designing materials for teaching English for Political Science and Diplomacy within the ReFLAME project, these materials have to meet another important requirement – they should be up-to-date. The reason for that is the fact that political science students and professionals are immersed in current affairs, since the problems they study are always linked to the latest local, national or global developments. Therefore, an important challenge in the process of designing material for teaching Language for Political Science and Diplomacy is how to ensure that the materials are up-to-date, since they can be linked to current affairs at the time of designing the materials, but these issues might not necessarily remain relevant in the future. This paper presents the techniques and approaches the authors used in their efforts to ensure that, although not necessarily up-to-date, the materials encourage learners to learn and make links to the current affairs of the present time