MrRob Playfair, RP

At Imperial's Centre for Academic English (CfAE) Rob teaches academic communication across a wide range of provision. This includes one to one academic writing coaching for doctoral students, tailored commissioned writing workshops for students on specific modules and guided writing activity sessions. Rob also develops CfAE commissioned writing workshops, producing materials to help students across Imperial develop their academic communication for greater impact. Within the team Rob is also invovled in teacher development and CPD, co-developing a training resource for 1:1 consultations. 

Beyond Imperial, Rob's interests include teacher development, disciplinary discourse analysis and ethngraphic approaches to understanding academic work. Rob acts as External Examiner for STEMM language programmes at the Universities of Warwick and Leeds. Rob is involved in the professional English for Academic Purposes association BALEAP as a reviewer, mentor and dissertation award judge, and was a founding committee member of the Testing Assessment and Feedback Special Interest Group (TAFSIG).

Prior to joining Imperial, Rob taught English for Academic Purposes at Queen Mary University of London, University of Liverpool and University of Reading. In these roles he designed discipline-specific English for Academic Purposes courses on programmes such as Environmental Science, Creative Arts and Law, and led the development of integrated speaking and listening assessments for entry into Higher Education.

Membership of professional bodies:
• Fellow of HEA
• Fellow and Mentor of BALEAP
• Member of BAAL

Rob holds a MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from the University of Nottingham, with a focus on English for Academic Purposes and assessment. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Birkbeck College, University of London. Rob's PhD aims to better understand the contexts of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) in UK Higher Education. Using ethnography, it focuses specifically on the knowledge, beliefs and values of teachers involved in EAP course development activities and the influence of the social and cognitive contexts in which these activities take place. 

He has published on teacher education, language assessment and professional communities.

Publication list:

Driscoll, J., Hardman, W. & Playfair, R. (2024) ‘Scholarship on our own terms: evaluating the impact of an EAP Teachers’ Forum’, The Language Scholar. Available at: https://languagescholar.leeds.ac.uk/scholarship-on-our-own-terms-evaluating-the-impact-of-an-eap-teachers-forum/

Playfair, R. and Cowling, E (2024) ‘It tends to be a pretty lonely path …: Exploring the role of a new cross-institutional piloting network for EAP practitioners’, in Baker, B. and Taylor, L. ed. Language Assessment Literacy and Competence Volume 2: Case Studies from Around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Assessment, pp. 166–178. 717471-silt-volume-56.pdf 

Playfair, R. (2024) ‘Playing with social theory for EAP [Book review of social theory for EAP: foundations and perspectives’, ESP Today, 12(1), pp. 178–183. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18485/esptoday.2024.12.1.8 Available at: ESP Today

Playfair, R. (2022) ‘Book review of: MacDiarmid, C. and MacDonald, J. J. eds. 2021. Pedagogies in English for Academic Purposes: Teaching and Learning in International Contexts’, The Language Scholar. Available at: https://languagescholar.leeds.ac.uk/book-review-of-pedagogies-in-english-for-academic-purposes-teaching-and-learning-in-international-contexts/