Writing successful proposals: engage, enrich, empower

QUESTIONS TO BE ANSWERED
Did I show that I was knowledgeable?
Did I report some previous work to show that this is real?
Can I convince the reader that this is current/relevant?
Did I explain step-by-step what I want to discuss?
Did I explicitly present the outcomes/materials?
Did I show how my idea is relevant to a larger audience?

INFORMATION TO INCLUDE…
Territory
Reporting Previous Research
Gap
Goal
Means 1 & 2
Outcomes
Benefits
Halleck, G. B., & Connor, U. M. (2006). Rhetorical moves in TESOL conference proposals." Journal of English for Academic Proposals, 5(1). 70-86.

TERRITORY
Establishes the situation in which the activity in the proposal is placed or physically located
The development of the Academic Word List and concordance software has facilitated vocabulary, both solving the problem of which words to teach and illustrating their collocations.

REPORTING PREVIOUS RESEARCH
Refers to text that reports on or refers to earlier research in the field, either by the proposing researcher or by others.
Findings argue for and illustrate the value of making explicit the grammatical patterns, lexical features, text structure, and other key features of academic discourse (see Biber, 2006; Meara & Fitzpatrick, 2000; Sinclair, 2004).
Refers to debates and/or terms used in the research.
This shift [to college] requires students to look at text as discourse; at writers as operating within certain critical frameworks and following certain rules; and at themselves as analytical, questioning readers engaged in interrogation of text, and eventually as producers of academic text.

In order to make this transition to the college-level academic discourse community, students must master numerous reading skills, both in print and electronic media, including:
identifying main and supporting ideas
reading and identifying author’s purpose, frame, and methods of development
critically evaluating the author’s success in achieving his/her purpose
relating ideas across texts or to their own experience and ideas
negotiating new academic vocabulary and increasingly complex grammatical structures.

MEANS 1 (RESEARCH)
Indicates the research methods, procedures, plans of action, and tasks that the proposal specifies as leading to the GOAL.
In the project, classes met once a week with the majority of instruction and classwork delivered in an online format.
Thus, this cross-sectional study was designed to explore the reflective practices of pre-service teachers (N=10) registered in two mandatory 7-week courses (i.e., Methods of Teaching EFL and EFL Practicum) in a TEFL certificate program

OUTCOMES (RESEARCH)
Describes the anticipated results, findings, or achievements of the study
Results indicate that by the end of the …
This study contributes to the field in different ways. First, it provides evidence that… Second, it describes what strategies…

OUTCOMES
Explains the intended or projected outcomes which could be considered useful to the ‘real world’ outside the study / presentation itself.
In addition, these results provide insight into the importance of English language ability in these same classroom roles.
We end our colloquium with a call for more forums in widely-distributed publications for sharing classroom practices and results of reflective teaching.

SUMMARY
Territory
Where (physical/ theoretical)
Reporting Previous Research
Relevance via citations
Gap
What we need to know
Goal
What we will do
Means 1
How we will achieve this
Means 2
How the talk is organized
Outcomes
The findings
Benefits
What attendees gain