‘Lend me your ears’

I was asked by some colleagues at the University of Leicester to give pre-sessional students a short lecture on some aspects involving culture and language. This is  an overwhelmingly broad field. As some of those students are going on a study trip to Stratford-upon-Avon soon, and as my latest teaching experience was in Shakespeare and language modules, we came to the conclusion that I should talk about ‘something related to Shakespeare’.

In my experience, most students – and tutors -  tend to see literature in general, and Shakespeare in particular, as something far too detached from the needs of learners of academic English. In their view, that is a luxury that most cannot afford because time is short and there are other  more pressing matters to be dealt with. Fair enough.

However, EAP students do not cease to be human beings and human beings can benefit a lot from any form of reading that opens up their minds, triggers their thinking and critical skills, and helps them become better readers and writers of any kind of text, including academic English.

My approach to this presentation was to try to show them that there is quite a lot of misconception about Shakespeare’s texts.  There are some ‘facts’ about Shakespeare’s language that really do not stand careful linguistic scrutiny. Moreover, I wanted to show them that even without knowing  we are very likely to often  ‘meet’ Shakespeare in our everyday lives. In order to do that, I drew heavily on David and Ben Crystal’s material  (please see the Bibliography slide).

Here are the slides I used in the lecture. Comments and questions are more than welcome.

Lend me your ears’ from Chris Lima

BALEAP Conference 2013

BALEAP Biannual Conference took place at the University of Nottingham this weekend but unfortunately I could only attend it on Saturday and certainly missed a lot.

What I did attend though was a very interesting presentation by Louise Pullen and Rachel Abounouar, University of Leicester, on using podcasts to give students feedback on their presentations, provide extra support to students, and complement the content delivered in class.

Rachel and Louise on podcasts

I was also present at the Panel Discussion on the History of EAP and of BALEAP, chaired by Richard Smith, University of Warwick. History is one of my passions and it was fascinating to listen to John Swales, Andy Gillett and Meriel Bloor telling about their experiences and recollections.

Panel discussion chaired by Richard Smith

And I attended a presentation by Ellie Kennedy, Nottingham Trent University International College and one of the editors of the ISEJ, on adopting communicative strategies to teach specific subjects in degree courses. Her point it that international students need extra support to deal with the language in order to be able to understand and respond to the content of lectures and papers and that lecturers can achieve better results in essays and seminars if they scaffold the tasks using some of the techniques EAP tutors use.

Ellie Kennedy on FLUTE

Besides that, since most of the ISEJ Editorial Board members were present at the conference, we used the opportunity to have a face-to-face meeting. We made quite important decisions there and I invite everyone to keep an eye of the website for news and the call for papers for the Autumn issue.

All in all, it was really worthy going there because Leicester will be hosting the Conference in 2015 and it was good to have an idea of the size and organisation of the BALEAP event. Pity we had to stay indoors on such a glorious spring day – I don’t think we will have many more of those.

University of Nottingham campus

Thinking international in HE

It is old news that higher education has become more and more international in the sense that an increasing number of overseas students has come to the UK – an other English-speaking countries – to study in undergraduate and graduate degree programmes. For instance, at the University of Leicester, where I teach Shakespeare and language, I can see that pre-sessional courses are busier and busier these days and people are already bracing themselves for the summer course that is likely to attract over 500 students, mostly from China. I don’t think the picture is very different in other HE institutions around the country.

Besides that, UK universities have opened campus extensions overseas and have engaged in partnerships with universities in different countries around the world to offer English language teaching courses and academic support programmes, which increases even more the extent of English language provision to international students.

All these puts a tremendous pressure on  institutions as tutors, lectures, and universities staff have to adapt to new realities, forms of thinking, academic cultures  and the need to provide a wider range of students’ services. Above all, it is very important that academic institutions offer a generally good experience to international students, since they are the ones who bring substantial new forms of income in a time when the budget for education has been seriously affected by government cuts.

To open a forum where tutors, academic staff and international students can discuss their experiences studying in English-speaking countries, a group of EAP academics from different institutions in the UK has just launched a new free online journal – the International Student Experience Journal.

The first issue is now out and I would like to invite everyone reading this blog to check it out: http://isejournal.weebly.com/

This is a brand new publication and we still have a lot to learn as new issues come out, but I am sure it will mature and become a forum for all those interested in improving the experience of teaching English to international students.

If you like to contribute with an article, review or research paper, please check the Submissions page on the website.

If you would like to become a reviewer or proofreader, please do Contact us.