Teaching & Learning English
This page introduces my work on the development of the Discussion Skills Assessment (DSA) instrument and its current status at the time of writing. Historical Development and Rationale The student-led seminar approach I have been pioneering in different educational contexts was first inspired by a student-led seminar activity that formed part of the University of … Read more
This post introduces a pedagogical approach I have been pioneering that might usefully contribute to discussions of transforming learning spaces to increase student ownership within the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classroom.
This page is set up to help students explore the use of the BAWE corpus as a tool for informing vocabulary choices in academic writing. The examples below come from either common errors in student writing or questions my students have asked about specific lexicogrammar features of English. If you search for words or phrases … Read more
As part of an induction to a pre-sessional programme for postgraduates that I will be teaching on this summer, I attended a session with several academics from four different disciplinary areas (Education, Engineering, Management, Biological Sciences) to discuss the particular issues that their international students faced. This was very useful not only because it enables pre-sessional … Read more
I have spent most of July and August teaching on the University of Bristol’s pre-sessional English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programme. This was a very rewarding experience. It was a chance to get back into the field in which I am now a certified expert. I was especially pleased to discover that visualisations formed a very important component of the course … Read more
Late in 2015, I started tutoring an undergraduate student who was studying education and creative writing. She had employed me to help her better organise her academic writing with the aim of raising her grade for her final dissertation. The first piece of work I helped her with was her proposal and this contained the … Read more
Upon returning to England I took on a tutoring assignment to support an undergraduate student in her writing with the aim of moving her from a 2:2 to a 2:1. We got off to a slightly shaky start when the first assignment with my input returned a 2:2. However, the strategy of using it as … Read more
How good it is to have no deadline coming up! My doctoral (EdD) thesis was accepted by the Open University last week and I am now free to get on with all the creative projects that have been on hold for the last year and a half, such as the construction of this website 🙂 … Read more