Case Study 1
Knowing and Responding to Your Students’ Diverse Needs
Contextual Background
Pre-sessional English provides courses of various durations so as to cater for students with different language abilities on entry. The majority of the courses are ‘conditional’, meaning students must attain a pre-defined level to progress onto main courses.
Evaluation
With classes consisting wholly of international students there can be great diversity in culture and language; however, in practice this is not the case due to the dominance of Chinese students. This results in there being one or two non-Chinese speakers, placing them in a significant minority.
Establishing classes where all students pursue the same discipline isn’t possible, resulting in divergent specialisms and needs. Whilst students within a class will have comparable language level on entry, there will be variation across the skills of writing, reading, speaking and listening, additional to abilities in reflection and engaging in critical thought.
Moving Forwards
Linguistic Diversity: The language classroom generally expects learners to always be using the target language, so the linguistic diversity can be countered by ensuring only English is spoken. There is debate regarding the use of other languages within UAL (Odeniyi, 2022), and of translanguaging in the language classroom (Leung and Valdés, 2019), but this conversation is ongoing: the present expectation from leadership is to maintain an English speaking environment. Supporting classroom tasks for non-native speakers demands that scaffolding and required lexis be provided and practised.
Diversity of Specialism: There are many opportunities for group work, and there can be scope to form student groups of the same (or comparable) subject specialism, stressing that they are to maximise this setup. How students achieve this will depend on the present task: it could be researching an artist or designer in their field, evaluating a work, creating something or solving a problem; but all allow a group of students to explore their shared interest together. Sometimes it may be preferable to purposely form a group of mixed specialisms to see what can result from combined input, but consideration of any incompatibilities should be given.
Different specialisms each have their own terminology, and as participants within a community of practice our students are expected to develop this vocabulary. The role of an EAP (English for Academic Purposes) teacher is to be the language specialist rather than a subject specialist, whilst “students may have more subject expertise than teachers” (Alexander, Argent and Spencer, 2018, p. 12). The EAP teacher cannot be expected to be knowledgeable in all the subjects an institution offers, and this holds true in a specialist university as there is still an enormous diversity of specialisms. However, as an EAP specialist within an Arts institution, it is important that I continue furthering my knowledge on these various subjects, familiarising myself with core terminology.
The danger is that, by not developing strategies, we would be ‘dumbing down’, and pitching learning at the ‘lowest common denominator’, rather than utilising what the students can contribute and developing them further.
Diversity of Language Skills: An understanding of assessment criteria allows for addressing needs within the limited duration of the Pre-sesssional. A viable approach is to take maximum advantage of any feedback opportunities, with comments directly addressing assessment requirements, and to follow these up with either written or spoken responses from the student so as to check and reinforce what they need to work on.
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References
Alexander, O., Argent, S. and Spencer, J. (2018) EAP Essentials: A teacher’s guide to principles and practice. Second Edition. Reading: Garnet Publishing.
Leung, C & Valdés, G (2019), ‘Translanguaging and the Transdisciplinary Framework for Language Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual World’, The Modern Language Journal, vol. 103, no. 2, pp. 348-370. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12568 (Accessed 17 February 2024).
Odeniyi, V. (2022) Reimagining Conversations. Project Report. University of the Arts London. (Unpublished).