The specific context in which I developed this approach was an institution representing a partnership between a UK university and a Chinese university delivering English language undergraduate degrees in design in south east China. I was the subject leader of the credited EAP course in the first year of operation and was faced with predictable problems (e.g. students being much weaker in English language ability than the course entry requirements, no existing course) and other problems that occurred due to COVID travel restrictions, which impacted in a myriad of different ways and exacerbated time constraints issues for both me and the students.

I needed to:

• find a way of pushing reluctant students to discuss topics they were studying in other academic units so they would re-encounter and recycle core vocabulary, and to undertake required reading to enable them to take part in such discussion.
• to encourage the students to reflect on their speaking performance to raise their awareness of the specific strategies they could use to more successfully participate in such classroom discussion.
• cope with severe time constraints. With my teaching schedule being at its maximum number of hours and the managerial workload made more complicated due to the virus restrictions, I also needed a way of filling a significant number of scheduled classes without necessitating much in the way of materials preparation.

My solution was to fill one class per week with a student-led seminar.

This approach has a history. Student-led seminar sessions were an explicit part of the language component on the University of Bristol’s pre-sessional course for postgraduates that I worked on in 2016, albeit with greater scaffolding and the convenience of a textbook. I had also pioneered student-led seminars on the University of Bath pre-sessionals between 2017-2019, again with postgraduates, significant scaffolding and pre-existing materials. The innovation that I was developing in China was attempting the approach with undergraduates who were mostly far below the English level required for the course and to do it with vastly reduced scaffolding, pushing the responsibility to find information about the discussion topics almost entirely over to the students.

The plan developed on one straightforward Word document with a page dedicated to each week of the semester. The first two weeks were given over to explaining the process, establishing student groups and modelling the expected seminar format with a focus on specific strategies the students could use to prepare and participate. Thereafter, the plan consisted of a long list with each week’s seminar lesson assigned a topic from the previous week’s teacher-led lesson content (either subject-related or focusing on academic skills). Thus, apart from the first two weeks of set up, the seminar class was operating a week behind the other classes, providing a deliberate opportunity for students to review the content and re-encounter necessary vocabulary.

The students were required to get into groups and then each group signed-up for one of the seminar sessions in which they would be responsible for leading the seminar. To help them choose, the planning document with its list of weekly topics was given to the students in the first week so they could sign-up for the topics they felt most comfortable with and would have time to prepare.

From week 3 onwards, the groups of seminar leaders arrived in the classroom a little early to set up their seminar and then lead the seminar, aiming for about 20 minutes in duration. This allowed 15 minutes for reflecting on the success (or not) of the seminar and a final 5 minutes to confirm the leaders and ensure everyone was clear about the topic to prepare for the following week’s seminar. That procedure filled the 40-minute student-led seminar class.

The group leaders were encouraged to keep any presentation they made very short and to instead focus on creating discussion questions and to think of ways of encouraging their classmates to speak.

Apart from the obvious issue of language limitations of most of the students, the seminar sessions were also complicated by the fact that half of them had to deal with a monitoring teacher who was online (a Covid-related complication). This meant that the students with the online teacher faced the additional challenge of ensuring that their performance in the seminar was picked up by the microphones so the teacher could assess their contributions in order to provide feedback. Other challenges in the first few weeks of the seminar sessions included many students not being sufficiently prepared, the leaders focusing too much on presentation and not enough on encouraging discussion, and most students lacking initiative/confidence.

By the sixth week, nearly all students had experienced at least one opportunity to lead the session. At this time, I realised we would need to create a practical method of assessing the seminar sessions to contribute to the students’ summative speaking assessment. For this reason, the two teachers involved provided some substantial feedback and advice based on the experience of the first six weeks. The following is adapted directly from that feedback to give you a clearer idea of what was happening in those early weeks.

1. Some seminar sessions have been very successful with all students contributing something and some students discussing specific examples of articles or their work.
2. Good team planning and co-ordination by the seminar lead makes the seminars much more productive.
3. Active involvement from everyone makes the seminars a success for everybody.
4. A short presentation can help focus people’s attention and get them interested.
5. Short videos can be entertaining but work better if people are given a few simple while-you-watch questions.
6. Putting thought into creating discussion questions gets a more active involvement.
7. Giving people examples to judge, e.g. of note-taking, sources, design work, etc. can generate more discussion.
8. Writing down the discussion questions helps people to remember them.
9. Giving people a fixed time to think about the question allows them to give better answers.
10. Listening to the answers and having follow up questions that politely probe and perhaps challenge the speaker, gets people to think more deeply. (e.g. Why? How? Can you explain that? Can you give more details?)
11. Inviting constructive comments on someone else’s idea is the start of a discussion.
12. Nominating people to answer can get more involvement, but it’s better if people are willing to take the initiative in sharing their views.
13. Briefly sharing your own examples and experience helps people organise their own thoughts.
14. Having short, fun activities can help the mood, e.g. drawing activities, quizzes.
15. The more the participants share their ideas in a positive, supportive way, the more willing everyone is to take part.
16. Preparation is key:
    1. doing the background reading (everyone, not just the leads).
    2. coming to the seminar with your own ideas.
    3. being prepared to express these ideas in English.
17. The most successful seminars so far included lots of examples for students to discuss with some students showing samples of text in books.
18. Providing options and examples for your classmates to analyse and talk about can really help generate discussion.
19. Giving the group options to choose from or A vs B questions seem to encourage some discussion.
20. In some groups the students arranged themselves into a sensible seating arrangement for talking with each other which obviously helped them to discuss the topics.
21. Think about the seating arrangement. One group sat in a classic U-shape. Other groups have all gathered around one table. These arrangements make it easier for students to talk together.
22. Some leaders reminded students that there should be a supportive atmosphere and that students shouldn’t be too shy.
23. Be careful not to have grammar errors on your ppt
24. Leaders listing expected learning outcomes of the session can help other students know what to expect.
25. We have access to the internet in the classroom so you can show your classmates useful resources that you have found online.
26. If you are holding the seminar online, you can use the chat function to share information and ask questions.
27. Use images to engage the audience and to help participants to express feelings.
28. Diagrams can be a very useful visual aid to help explain concepts and to generate discussion.
29. Leaders could provide some useful vocabulary to help their classmates discuss issues, and activities checking understanding of words or abbreviations, etc. can be a good starting point for discussion.
30. Seminar leaders should not feel that they need to spend a lot of time preparing a fantastic presentation. Their job is not to give a presentation but to get their classmates to discuss the topic.
31. Remember to take notes. It is useful to write down what other students say and to use your notes to prepare your own ideas. Some students very helpfully shared their note-taking strategies with their classmates.
32. After the seminar, you should reflect on your performance. You could write about your performance in your blog/journal and think about what you intend to improve next week.
33. Finally, please make sure you check out the seminar topic for each week and do the suggested reading.

Thanks to everyone who’s acted as seminar leader so far and to you all for taking part.

Keep up the good work!

As mentioned above, one of the teachers was working remotely whilst the students were in the classroom. This meant that we had to make the assessment instrument simple enough for that teacher to use despite the challenges of experiencing the seminar via video link. The instrument was, therefore, fairly crude but practical. We agreed on four criteria:

• Amount of speaking: This was simply a record of how many spoken contributions a student made. We reserved the right to award more points for a particularly lengthy contribution but this remained somewhat arbitrary as we hadn’t thrashed out a method for measuring that. It may be preferable to split this into two criteria: number of spoken contributions and length of spoken contributions.
• Quality of spoken contribution: The students scored on this criteria if they made a new point, developed/extended a point that had already been made, or challenged another student’s contribution.
• Initiative: Marks were awarded when a student spoke without being specifically called to do so by name.
• Evidence of preparation: Students were rewarded if they brought evidence that they had prepared for the seminar (e.g. notes, visual prompts, relevant sections of reading material, appropriate discussion questions, etc.).

All criteria were scored on a scale of 0-2 with two representing ‘more than once’. This made it relatively easy to give feedback at the end of the session with a kind of traffic light scheme (0 struggling, 1 progressing, 2 performing to expectations). We also reserved a possible two bonus points to reward students who went beyond merely meeting expectations and who genuinely made their seminar a great success.

Using this instrument, the leaders of the seminar had a major advantage over the other students. We weren’t concerned about this because all students had more than one opportunity to act as leader and thereby enjoy an opportunity to boost their overall speaking score for the semester.

In addition to the points raised in the Evaluation and feedback section above, several interesting outcomes were observed. First, stronger students seemed to really enjoy the sessions because it gave them a chance to demonstrate their skills and the same is true of those who were natural leaders, had good organisation skills or were good team players. Where classes were blessed with many such students, the seminars were generally very successful and bonus marks were awarded. These students made some decisions relatively early on about how they would arrange the seating to encourage more discussion and this seemed to give them more ownership of the sessions. By the end of the semester, one group in particular were treating me more like a welcome guest observer in their session rather than their teacher. However, where there were only one or two such students in the class, they tended to dominate and used the sessions as a means of practising their presentation skills rather than encouraging discussion. This suggests that streaming seminar classes by English ability and/or management skills might be beneficial.

At the other end of the student ability spectrum, there was a clear benefit derived from the student-led nature of the sessions. Nobody wanted to get up in front of the class unprepared so the leaders tended to be well prepared to give a short presentation and, once they understood that they were supposed to encourage discussion, many leaders told their classmates what their discussion questions would be in advance so they could be better prepared to answer them during the seminar. When they understood that this would mean that both leader-questioner and the student answering would gain marks, some classes started organising the seminar together so the leaders could call on certain students to answer specific questions knowing they would be able to answer because they had prepared together. In other words, in trying to game the system, the students with weaker English ability were actually doing what we wanted them to do and developing their study skills by preparing outside the classroom.

There was a very clear increase in confidence in spoken English amongst nearly all the students who took part in the seminars with particularly noticeable gains made by two groups in particular. Those were the students with low English level who were lacking basic study skills and who previously hadn’t come to class prepared, but who now understood the benefit of doing self-study outside class. The second group were those students whose English was sufficient to discuss their work but who had previously lacked the confidence to initiate dialogue.

I believe that this approach is worth further exploration and perhaps an improved instrument for recording student contributions can be developed. At the time of writing, I am preparing to try these student-led seminars in a middle school classroom with some relatively strong grade 9 students.