Bringing everything together

As this project enters its final stages, a reflective summary of what has taken place is called for. Firstly, here is an overview of what I feel I have accomplished through my thorough reading over these last few months:

• gained an understanding of how prevalent mental health conditions are deemed to be amongst HE students,
• grown in my knowledge of the environmental factors that can have a negative affect upon students’ mental health, and importantly
• examined how we can best interact with students in a manner that should not induce necessary stress and anxiety.

And through doing so I have been able, to my own satisfaction, to answer my research question and am in a position to consider changes to my teaching practice.

Additional to this is my greatly enhanced appreciation of research approaches, methodologies and terminology, and have designed a questionnaire which reflects what I have learnt about some of these matters.

Except, I haven’t made use of what I have gained from conducting the questionnaire. The unfortunate fact is that, from the 14 students the questionnaire was shared with, 14 didn’t respond. Maybe I could have anticipated this outcome – I certainly did not expect a large number of returns, and with a qualitative aim it would have been perfectly fine to get only 2 or 3 responses.

So, why did the questionnaire seemingly fail? I cannot say for sure, but I do not believe it suffered from any major flaws within itself. The reality is that I have not had any communication with the student group since August (as is the nature of Pre-sessional), and whilst I do genuinely believe that the students appreciate the PSE course, for them it is simply a stepping-stone to where they are now. In addition to this is the fact that PSE can have a stigma for some international students, and once they have moved on it is very much in their past. And of course they are expected to be very busy on their present course.

But that doesn’t get me off the hook entirely: I must still consider what I may have been able to do to increase the likelihood of responses. I could have chased them with more emails, but better, could I have offered them incentives? Coffee? A free tutorial? Of course, this would have impacted on anonymity to a degree, but there are ways it could be done. This is an area I would need to give considerable thought to if I am to do something similar in the future.

Also, this lack of responses exposes a possible weakness in my project aim: I have immersed myself in a great deal of reading, and through doing so I have a satisfactory answer and am beginning to plan how I can implement changes to my practice – this has been a success, but that renders the primary research I attempted totally redundant, and whilst responses to the 5 questions would have been interesting, I do wonder if that extra input would have made a meaningful difference to my end findings. More food for thought.

This leaves me with summarising the aforementioned changes to my practice. Some of these things are already established practice for me, but I will continue to do these with an increased realisation of their value:

• ensure mistakes (whether linguistic or academic) are not judged, but are capitalised on as learning opportunities
• give sufficient time for students to work together in small groups, but having a clear objective is vital when doing so
• provide a short lesson summary after a session (I’ve often emailed after a class to reminds students of what they need to be working on, including any homework set, but this needs to be balanced with lesson content)
• evaluate a task or assignment prior to giving it to students, to judge whether there are any skills or knowledge required that may not yet be developed
• give concrete advice on how a large task can be subdivided into smaller tasks, or request students to develop a plan (individually or in small groups), with timings, and then review this with them in a tutorial
• when students are free to make a choice in regard to a task, determine whether it is appropriate to set boundaries on their choices.

And finally some areas for further research:

• the Mental health Toolkit is an extensive document, and I have not had time to get into it all – so I should find the time to return to it
• techniques for self-efficacy improvement, and how aspects of this could be shared with students
• Takako Inada’s article Teachers’ Strategies for Decreasing Students’ Anxiety Levels to Improve Their Communicative Skills has been helpful to my research; I should also read her PhD thesis Determinants of foreign language classroom anxiety in a Japanese EFL university classroom and its relationship to native language use by students
• learn more about how the arts, both as a creator and a consumer, can help maintain good mental health – a good place to start may be Arts and Humanities Research Council (2017).