Tag Archives: Pre-sessional

The student experience on an online Pre-sessional Course for international students

10/06/2016

Boarding Pass and Prepare for Pre-sessionalThis month’s blogpost is by Julie Watson, Head of eLearning in the Department of Modern Languages:

Since 2010, eLanguages have developed two five-week online courses, both focusing on English language development for international students who particularly need to improve their academic writing and reading skills in preparation for further study on a face-to-face summer Pre-sessional Programme. These courses are aimed at students who have obtained a lower IELTS score of 5.0 or 5.5 in reading and/or writing and they cover basic concepts and preparatory skills for academic writing; reading and critical thinking; vocabulary and grammar and developing students’ study skills awareness. A process approach is adopted towards writing development and each week there is a related reading or writing assignment as well as a grammar and vocabulary self-test.

Currently there are two versions of the five week online course. The first is Pre-sessional Boarding Pass, which is designed for students preparing for MSc or MBA study in the Southampton Business School at the University of Southampton. It forms the first component of a 16-week Pre-sessional Course in English for Academic Purposes (EAP). Globally-dispersed students on this intensive, discipline-specific course are tutored by EAP specialists based in the UK. Over 300 students have completed the course before proceeding onto their face-to-face pre-sessional since it was launched in 2011.

In 2014, a generic version of the course, called Prepare for Pre-sessional, was developed for students of mixed disciplines. The course was successfully piloted at the University of Southampton in the summer of 2014 and is already being licenced by another institution whose tutors teach their own cohorts of international students in a bespoke part of the course platform.

Student feedback on introduced technologies

The student experience on the course is an area of particular research interest and their end-of-course feedback has helped to shape the course and led to innovations in technology choices to facilitate the effective delivery of the course. Student requests for more audio-visual media to support student-tutor communication has led to the addition of voice-chat and videoed tutor feedback on course progression, approach to assignments etc, to supplement the forum and text-chat tools. Students found these beneficial in a number of ways as this small sample of forum posts shows:
• The voice chat room is useful for me because I can talk and learn to connect with the tutor and everyone. I can discuss problems in studying and receive solutions. That is excellent…
• The video helps me a lot. Now I know how to conduct my writing. Thank you for advice.
• Thanks for your advice for our writing assignment, according to this video I understand the structure in each paragraph. And I will submit it on time.
• Thank you for this video. It is very useful to me. I will attempt to complete every activities in this course.
• Thank you for your video, it helped me to obtain important information of online course. I watched the video and understood. It is also a way to improve our listening. Thanks a lot.
• Thank you for your video. I am going be more active and make more contributions.

Tutor views on benefits to students

Another area in which we are trying to gather more data is the potential of the online course for acculturating students into UK academic practice before they progress to a face-to-face Pre-sessional Programme. With this in mind, class tutors on the main Pre-sessional Programme at the University of Southampton, who receive students from the online courses, have been interviewed about their progress and there is tentative evidence that such students are more confident and perform better from the start:
• “What is mostly apparent is that X quickly recognises what I am teaching, she tends to grasp the point before the other students. In these situations it is apparent that she has prior knowledge of the topics I introduce to the class.”
• “She’s the best in the class, pure and simple…right from the beginning the very first writing task they do on the first day she had proper structure, her paragraphs were organised and had some logic.”

Institutional licensing

We hope collaboration with institutions currently licensing the online course will yield more useful data for our course evaluation. More information about pre-sessional online courses, Pre-sessional Boarding Pass and Prepare for Pre-sessional is available on the eLanguages website.

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‘SmartSkills’ and ‘Protonomy’: scaffolding the start of a transition to learner autonomy in a blended learning environment by encouraging Independent Learning and pro-active autonomy

13/11/2015

University of Southampton SmartSkillsThis month’s blogpost is from Vanessa Mar-Molinero, Senior Teaching Fellow / Independent Learning Co-ordinator, and Chris Lewis, Teaching Fellow / Independent Learning Deputy Coordinator, in the Department of Modern Languages:

The importance of the role of independent learning with its emphasis on student-centredness has been recognised as an integral part of higher education programmes. However, many students, both home and international, struggle with the transition to learner autonomy. In Modern Languages at the University of Southampton, we have developed a range of scaffolded courses with compulsory and non-compulsory elements designed to support this transition and equip different cohorts of students with skills, strategies, techniques and tools, or ‘SmartSkills’, that are vital for success in not only their language learning, but also for their academic achievement and professional skills. The courses are scaffolded through a blended / flipped learning environment whereby students use vidcasts, podcasts and interactive quizzes to achieve learning objectives before attending workshops with an Independent Learning Facilitator.

Our research focuses on data collected from a case study of the pedagogical development of ‘SmartSkills’ Independent Learning blended learning modules for international students. The approach is largely a qualitative one, supported with some quantitative data. We aim to show how the conceptual framework of scaffolding transition to more autonomous learning using different methods, including digital literacies, contributes to the transition for international students into a learning environment emphasising development of learner autonomy in a UK university.

We explore the concepts of autonomy, defined by Race (2002) as a process in which a student is equipped with the tools, techniques and strategies which over time empower an individual to learn for themselves (see also Broad, 2006). The module that has been designed to help with this transition uses Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and the pedagogical concept of scaffolding the learning process. We refer to the ZPD as the space in which are students find themselves when we facilitate blended learning workshops where they engage with SmartSkills to develop their learner autonomy.

Data was collected from c.600 students during the Pre-sessional English for Academic Purposes (EAP) programme held over eleven weeks. It included reflective student blogs, open interviews and feedback questionnaires involving students and staff, statistical data of attendance at non-compulsory elements of the module and final grades attained by students. In this ongoing study, we are examining the attitudes and changes in learning over the eleven weeks and the progress of our students. This is arrived at by comparing language level assessments in the students’ first week; data collected during the programme, and the students’ grades in their final assessments.

Findings are currently restricted to this early data collection but look exciting. For example, we have begun to see a significant statistical correlation between the students in the Zone of Proximal Development who first chose to attend non-compulsory elements of the course and then continued to do so. Their grades and learning in general indicate a greater improvement than those students who did not attend the non-compulsory elements. We refer to this as the process of ‘protonomy’ or ‘pro-active autonomy’, as the student begins to recognise the importance of autonomy in this particular form of learning, and applies skills, tools, techniques and strategies to meet the expectations of the programme.

In carrying out this research and discussing our preliminary findings we hope to contribute to the wider area of research into the impact on international students’ integration into UK Higher Education through learner autonomy and independent learning.

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