CELT event - Scholarship of Language in Higher Education
Scholarship of Language in Higher Education
This event, with well over 100 participants, took place on the 15th of January 2021. You can access all the talks below (it will open in a new window). Video of Scholarship of Language in Higher Education.
The aim of this event is to showcase and celebrate colleagues’ recent scholarship exploring the complex role(s) language(s) play in HE teaching and learning. This event will take place on:
15th of January (9.30 - 12.30) on zoom (email Alex Ding for details: a.ding[@]leeds.ac.uk)
Everyone is welcome
Programme:
9.30 -10.15.
Bee Bond: Making Language Visible in the University (Chair: Simon Green)
Bee will be discussing her recently published book ‘Making Language Visible in the University: English for Academic Purposes and Internationalisation’. Her book focuses on the nexus of language, disciplinary content and knowledge communication against the background of the economic, cultural and ideological forces of Higher Education's current push for internationalisation. It suggests the need for a greater synergy between language and content experts and argues that change needs to be implemented through policy rather than on an ad-hoc basis by individual teachers.
10.15 – 11.
Jeanne Godfrey, Melinda Whong, Marion Bowman, Clare Maxwell, Diane Nelson and Valentina Brunetto, Sara Montgomery, and Simon Webster: What is Good Academic Writing? Insights into Discipline-Specific Student Writing
The field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) developed to address the needs of students whose mother tongue is not English. However, the linguistic competence required to achieve academic success at any university where English is the medium of instruction is a challenge for all students. While there are linguistic features common to academic literacy as a general genre, closer investigation reveals significant differences from one academic field to another. This volume asks what good writing is within specific disciplines, focussing on student work. Each chapter provides key insights by EAP professionals, based on their research in which they bring together analysis of student writing and interviews with subject specialists and markers who determine what 'good writing' is in their discipline.
The volume includes chapters on established disciplines which have had less attention in the EAP and academic writing literature to date, including music, formal linguistics, and dentistry, as well as new and growing fields of study such as new media.
11 – 11.15 BREAK
11.15 – 12.30
Each of the following colleagues will give short (10 minute) presentations on ongoing or recently completed scholarship.
Simon Green: Scaffolding Academic Literacy with Low-Proficiency Users of English
The book sketches out the specific context of English-medium higher education in the Gulf Cooperation Council nations (Saudi, Oman, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain) and highlights a structural problem within this context: the direct entry into E-M disciplinary studies of students with very low English Language proficiencies. The book considers the consequences of this for the construction of academic literacies and considers options for addressing the problem. Specifically, the book considers alternatives to discrete EAP/ESP instruction delivered by language centres. Drawing on the example of a large-scale teacher education project run jointly by the University of Leeds and the Omani Ministry of Education, and contemporary theorising in Sheltered Instruction, Integrating Content and Language in HE, and Writing in the Disciplines, the book considers the ways in which academic literacy instruction may be integrated with disciplinary instruction and this integrated curriculum delivered through a 'language-aware pedagogy'. Finally, the book considers the wider implications for higher education beyond the GCC.
Jody Bradford and Anna Murawska: The Reading Project
In this session, we will present the aims of this collaborative project, which is in its early stages. We hope to re-evaluate and review the use of academic language and skills in context and as embedded in curriculums here at the LC and feed into the development of syllabi, classroom materials, assessment practices, types and criteria.
We would like to work towards a more comprehensive understanding of the teaching and learning of academic reading and how this can further inform our LC assessments, both formative and summative.
To this end, two members of the Reading Project group will present some of the reading and theoretical underpinnings which may help to inform our work in this area.
Jess Poole: Comics and The Serious Art of Learning a Language
A brief dip into ways in which we might use comics and graphic novels to offer deep and engaging language learning experiences.
Milena Marinkova/Joy Robbins: Assessing the impact of online rubrics for feedback and assessment
In this session, I/Milena will report on some interesting preliminary findings of a LITE funded project investigating the impact of online rubrics on EAP students’ assessment literacy and academic writing development that Joy Robbins and myself have been working on since September 2019. I will outline approaches our respondents have taken in making sense of and using online rubrics for their formative development. These findings might have implications for how tutors' introduce (online) assessment rubrics and module their use for students.
Milada Walkova: Proposing a curriculum for English for Research Publication Purposes
Writing for publication is one of the skills that international PGRs need to master during their doctoral study. This presentation will discuss what competencies this mastery involves and propose ingredients of a comprehensive curriculum for English for Research Publication Purposes, namely (a) focus on publication process, (b) language and rhetorical conventions of ERPP genres, (c) writing for an international audience, (d) collaboration, and (e) sharing research outcomes.
Roya Alimalayeri & Barbara Himmelreich: Creative Inquiry
The rapid spread of the Covid-19 outbreak seems to have significantly impacted the foundations of higher education, creating implications for practitioners and students. The implementation of online courses into programmes to keep students’ retention and maintain their access to learning is believed to have impacted EAP practitioners’ creativity in teaching as well. Trying to explore the unfixed, ‘floating’ (Coffey and Leung, 2020) nature of creativity in EAP, the multi-phased Creative Inquiry project aims to investigate the impact of structural and socio-political components of the pandemic on the creative voice of EAP practitioners.
Milada Walkova: The Language Scholar
Cecile De Cat: Language@Leeds - pedagogical linguistics