Participant recruitment: English teachers with Chinese as mother tongue

Dear English teacher,

Invitation to participate in a text simplification research project.

Text simplification is defined as the process of modifying texts written for L1 readers with the intent to reduce these texts in language complexity and increase their accessibility to L2 readers (Tickoo, 1993). To find out more about text simplification strategies for English learners and features of comprehensible input, I, Irina Rets, under the supervision of Dr. Ursula Stickler, Dr. Tim Coughlan and Dr. Lluisa Astruc, am conducting a study as part of the doctoral research project at the Open University (‘Processing of authentic and non-authentic simplified texts in L2 among EMI learners).

If you are a native speaker of Spanish, German or Chinese, you are an English teacher on any institutional level and you have minimum 5 years of experience of teaching English, we would like to ask you for your co-operation in this research.

You will be asked to fill out a short background questionnaire followed by a task on simplification of two texts from the reading materials of the OpenLearn platform. Each text will be up to 500 words in length. You will be asked to simplify the texts to make them more accessible to intermediate level students. You can complete both tasks (questionnaire and text simplification) by following the link https://openuniversity.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/simplification-study-with-english-teachers-2

If you wish to participate in a Skype interview following the text simplification you have carried out, we will be able to reward you for your time in the form of £10 Amazon voucher.

By participating in this research project, you will make an important contribution to making learning through English more accessible for the English learners at lower levels of language proficiency.

If you have any questions and/or are interested in participating, please get in touch with us (irina.rets@open.ac.uk).

Best wishes and looking forward to hearing from you,

Irina Rets

Research student

Ph.D Candidate in Eucational Technology, FHEA

Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, UK

irina.rets@open.ac.uk