I=Interviewer; T-Teacher

I: Could you start off by telling me a little about the class and the programme?

T: This is a class of 10 students, the lowest level reading and writing group on the undergraduate program, obviously mixed nationalities and mixed levels. Some are quite weak in terms of writing production. Some of them are fairly competent and perhaps could be in a higher class. This is the term one of three terms and so the first term is usually more general, looking at language and language expectations. We move into more academic writing in terms two and three in order to prepare them to study in September.

I: Are they all going on to academic study?

T: Of one kind or another. Some might go back to their own countries to study. Others might go on to the foundation course here and then move on to do more and greater things in the future. They have got academic aspirations. In the first term, we alternate between doing more general things and more academic topics. Previously we have done things like film reviews and personal statements and interspersed that in alternate weeks with an academic report or an academic essay. But it is still the early stages. It is all quite light touch.

I: Is it chunked into weeks?

T: We usually contain the whole topic within one week. The topics we have done include jobs and the media, travel, that kind of thing. Because they are writing a long essay we have spread that over two weeks. They started it last week with the input, the reading. They wrote a timed essay on Tuesday this week. Now it is Friday so I have had a couple of days to look at those essays and can pull out the specific and common errors.

I: How many lessons on reading and writing would they in a week?

T: Reading and writing is one component of the overall syllabus. There are six hours or three blocks of two hours every week for writing. They have a similar amount of time for speaking and listening.

I: Can you tell me about the materials you use? You don't use a textbook. How are the materials designed?

T: There is already a bank of materials that were developed historically. There are four classes running in parallel. I have the lowest group. All the four teachers for those classes would meet at the start of term, look through all the materials that were available, discuss the cohort what the cohort is like and what we would aim to achieve and then think about whether the materials we have got can do that or not. Typically we would assign a teacher to a particular week. For example, I was to look at the jobs section to evaluate the materials. I made sure the materials are up to date. The materials are bespoke. They are designed to be differentiated between the four classes. Teachers will often overproduce materials and say: “Cut out that text or miss those activities if you are working with a lower group”. The materials for this class I made myself independently but the other materials are written by teachers.

I: Can you talk about the materials for this lesson and how it all fits together?

T: The materials were specific for this class because they had done their first timed essay. At the end of term, they do have an assessment in reading and writing, which is an essay so we give them a mock or practice this week. I think it is important that they get some good feedback on that so I did write comments on their scripts and give them back to them. Traditionally, those are largely ignored so it is good to do something with that in class so that the key points are rammed home. So when I read through the essays I pulled out what I considered to be the common errors, things that I had seen in other students’ work and could perhaps be more easily dealt with in the session and I noticed that a large number of those errors were formal/informal language, which is not something that they have covered particularly though they have had one session on it. So I thought that would be an easy way to start the lesson because they were vaguely familiar with what they shouldn’t be using, words like “big” and “things.” Then by doing that activity, giving them the resources, they can change that in their own work and in any future and it flags up not to do that. Formal and informal language seemed like an obvious one to do and then more than half the students were getting muddled with “contact” and “communicate” so I thought it might be nice if they explored the meanings of those words themselves to a certain extent. We do try to encourage them to use their dictionaries in an active way so when they try to write they are looking at the words and thinking, “Does this word mean what I think it means?” The other thing was “most of people,” that’s a common error and Arab learners often put in “he” when they mean “a person”, not a specific person. So that all came from the essay directly.

T: In previous lessons, we had talked about introductions and conclusions but only briefly and that was shown in their essays where they had not done particularly well. Not a major focus at the moment. We were more interested in paragraph structure.

I: I think your style is that you don’t kind of present things. You give them an activity and you give them feedback on the activity. So what is your kind of thinking behind that?

T: These are things which have been presented to them previously so in other classes this term I have stood at the front and done a more traditional PPP kind of lesson. They kind of know this already so it’s good for them to get into it and show what they know or don’t know about a topic and then work from that. They seem to respond well to activities they get involved.

I: I think it makes it more interesting for the students to do it that way round.

T: They seem to be more engaged than in the lecture approach.

I: The final activity, where they were evaluating each other’s paragraph. Would you do that quite often?

T: It is a difficult one to do because there are such mixed levels. But today, they were sitting with people of a similar level. I tend to move them around a lot more than today. For reasons of space they kind of stayed together. But also they were sitting with people of a similar level so that worked quite well. The issue of course is if you have very strong students. They look at their partner’s paragraph and think, why am I in this class? This person can’t even write a sentence and the other person think I’ll never be as good as they are. In certain situations. It is nice to do that in writing because otherwise you are constantly providing them with models, that they can never realistically be producing. They see another student with warts and all. They get the basic idea. That is quite an affirming thing. I am not too far away from the standard.

T: You identified six points on your outline. Do you have a rough idea of how long each one is going to take before you come into the class or do you play that by ear?

I: That’s a good question. Because we have these three two hour sessions, early in the week I think I am much more kind of fluid in how long things last. I just make sure I have enough and I am happy for them to extend something and lead over into the next class if that is for the benefit of the students. On the Friday, because it is the weekend and we are moving on to something different in the next week, I kind of measured out in my mind how long I thought it would take. If we don’t finish the paragraph, it is not the end of the world because they need to rewrite the essay anyway. I want them to get on to it. For this session, I was quite fixed in my mind that these six tasks needed to be done in the two hours.

I: You did not seem to be rushing them.

T: Hopefully it had a reasonable pace to it. Personally, I felt that I should have had more time for the paragraph at the end, the burger paragraph, which in my mind seemed very logical, “write five lessons in the paragraph”, was differently interpreted by half the class. Some thought they had to write the whole essay into those parts of the burger, some thought they could do the introduction, and that was not the task and so some of them spent the first few minutes doing it incorrectly. I would have liked them to spend longer. If I was to do that again, I would probable speed up the earlier activities and have more time actually writing that paragraph again.

I: OK. Thanks. I think that is about it. That last point was what I was going to ask you. Is there anything you would like to add?

T: I don’t think so. I do think it is good to use students’ own errors. That is a nice thing to do. And when I am doing writing, I like to use their feedback in the class. I tend to get them to do an uptake form, where they pull out three or four errors and write them down and say what the error is, which I did not do this time. I did it sort of globally. But in the past I have done it more specifically. I am interested in what kind of has the best effect.