OPPORTUNITIES ARE RIGHT BEFORE US: AN EPIC STEP TOWARDS EPIC

The evolution of EPIC - the CHE directives which require aligning English in higher education in Israel with the CEFR - has for the first time provided standardized learning outcomes for all proficiency levels. Practitioners from a group of Israeli colleges and universities formed a special interest group to grasp the opportunity provided by this reform to investigate how to best prepare engineering students for their real-world English language needs. To achieve this, over the last eighteen months, we have been working towards creating a CEFR-aligned engineering-specific framework. As part of this endeavor, we have identified the key input and output genres engineers are most likely to encounter, and have created CEFR-aligned exemplars of tasks and authentic application projects requiring meaningful engagement with these genres. While this work does not suggest a standardized curriculum, it provides a rigorous platform to help inform the development of engineering English language programs.

While this began as a special interest group, we quickly evolved into a community of practice, which can be defined as a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (Wenger-Treyner & Wenger-Treyner 2015). Through mutual engagement and negotiation of meaning, our community of practice fosters grass-roots professional development, within a climate of openness among professionals from diverse institutions which had not previously collaborated at this level.