BEST Test of English Proficiency - websiteOverview
The seven lesson plans and slide decks are open-access resources for university English teachers who want to support students’ development of speaking and writing skills through integrated visual–textual tasks.
Users are encouraged to download, adapt, and localize these resources according to their own course orientations (EGAP/ESAP), teaching objectives, learner profiles, and institutional settings.
Background and Rationale
Analyses of BESTEP performance have revealed a recurring challenge among Taiwanese university students: difficulty integrating information from charts, diagrams, and texts in speaking and writing. To respond to this need, the LTTC developed the resource book titled EAP Power Up: Synthesizing Textual and Visual Information for Academic Success and initiated a follow-up collaborative project to bring these assessment insights into everyday classroom teaching. Faculty members from four partner universities integrated the EAP Power Up resource book into their own courses and contextualized the materials to meet the specific learning needs of their students.
Together, the seven selected sample lessons illustrate how assessment-informed teaching can be implemented in real EGAP and ESAP classrooms.
What these lesson plans offer
- Seven complete lesson plans with accompanying course slides (EGAP: 4 lessons; ESAP: 3 lessons).
- Ready-made tasks focusing on graph description, summary writing, group discussion, and discipline-specific language use, including engineering, management, and construction.
- Activities that mirror the kinds of visual–textual integration required in the BESTEP speaking and writing sections.
How to use these resources
- Download the lesson plans and slides that fit your context (e.g., EGAP skills courses, departmental ESP offerings) and adapt them to your learners’ level, class size, and syllabus.
- Use them as flexible starting points to design tasks that ask students to describe, compare, and synthesize information from posters, tables, and graphs in spoken and written formats, tailoring the ideas to your own EGAP and ESAP contexts.
Acknowledgements
The LTTC extends its sincere appreciation to the project directors and faculty teams from the four partner universities for their leadership and contributions. Their collaborative efforts made it possible to develop context-sensitive teaching resources meaningfully linking assessment, teaching, and learning.
(Universities listed in alphabetical order)
| University | Project Director |
| National Chung Cheng University (CCU) | Wen-Chun Chen, Director of the Center for Language Studies |
| National Taiwan University (NTU) | Chen-Hsiu Kuo, Assistant Director of the Student Division, Center for Bilingual Education |
| National Taiwan University of Science and Technology (NTUST) | Shao-Ting Hung, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences |
| Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology (STUST) | Chiung-jung Tseng, Director of the Center for Bilingual Education |