Five week pre-sessional course

image inside Manchester's iconic University Place Building. Pictured my class, me top right :)

This summer I was working in Manchester for the University Language Centre. In many ways it was an eye opener, and really gave me a taste for working in higher education. Working in Switzerland at Les Roches gave me some insight into university life, and this has perhaps been an extension of that work. However, Manchester is huge in comparison, and the students I am working with here are more diverse in their studies than those in Les Roches who were all doing hotel management, or similar. The bulk of my work was with a class are all 'social science' majors, most of them Chinese, all in their 20s. They are hoping to join schools as diverse as economics and education, dependent on their successful competition of the course. Most were potential master's candidates, but a few were going to join undergraduate programmes. They ranged from B1-C2 in language level, and were equally varied in their interpersonal / intercultural communication skills.

Generally, it was nice to be in a class with such bright people who I could share my MA experiences with. I am a good advert for doing an MA at Manchester, I have thoroughly enjoyed mine, so far, and rabbit away about how good it is to anyone willing to listen. This has bothered my sister, and some of my friends, given that now I talk about learning with glazed, fundamentalist eyes!

For the language centre managers, and co-ordinators, this was by far the biggest pre-sessional course run by the ULC (University Language Centre). There were 90 teachers, ninety! Thousands of students in a variety of buildings, studying a range of subjects, and so on. The scale of this meant that we were afforded generous amounts of freedom, which of course is a double-edged sword.

I was coming back in after quite a long lay-off, as they say in football, meaning I hadn't done much teaching in the months preceding, and I had never worked on such a course before. In essence I had a bit of classroom rust which manifested itself in perhaps being less reflexive in my actions. Ideas, and reflections had to be a bit more drawn out, and thought about, than perhaps would have been in a more familiar context.

The materials used were in-house produced, and generally pretty good, I was surprised how many activities I was able to supplement with my own materials-free/low alternatives. One major problem for me was that the majority of the texts (apart from those dealing directly with referencing) contained references, or were strictly speaking 'academic'. By strictly speaking I guess I mean used source material, and had a reference list of some kind, not perhaps the more spurious distinction between full, and contracted forms. My desire to have this kind of 'hard' text led me to reflect on a number of interesting points relating to my beliefs about teaching and learning.

This focus suggests that I believe we acquire language, and notice features of genres, by reading. The second is linked to the purpose of the course. Is it a language development course, or a academic preparation one? If it's language focused, then perhaps 'easier', 'shorter' more practical texts (newspaper articles, bbc news, etc) are relevant. Alternatively, I was more in favor of finding 'easy', shortish, academic papers (with referencing) for learners to read. Though I was only able to do this to a certain extent, a larger quantity of 'academic' texts, would have been preferable.

Linked to this was the ESP / EAP content. My students were from a variety of disciplines. This meant the shared knowledge base was fairly limited. More generally, we frequently found our selves in real, content-rich discussions linked to input material, sometimes I felt to the detriment of the emergent language. I.e, we / I got so involved in discussions that a focus on form was sometimes absent. Balancing this, or choosing between the two reminded me of the hard v soft CLIL debates, though I believe that a soft CLIL approach would have been more productive as their wasn't fixed content to be taught / learnt.

The positive feedback from students and observers was good to hear, but I felt I didn't end the course particularly well. This may well have been due to context factors, but I am still keen to end on a higher note in the future. Making more of the post project period (PPP) may be an avenue for me to consider. It seems obvious to me now, that using the papers more, after they had been assessed may have brought more learning to this period.

There were a number of other challenges that I faced in this context which I haven't covered. These included:

1. the general sense that I talked too much, and dominated the space, more than I usually would have.
2. the lack of taught mediation between people from different cultural groups.
3. enabling learners to deal with others' rudeness, yet, avoiding being rude themselves
4. a lack of chatting, and sharing, with other teachers (hardly the learning teacher that I want to be)

Overall, this was a significant and enjoyable experience. I now have a feel for this kind of work, and would like to be involved in again in the future. As I said, the students were wonderful, generally well motivated, and all were able to demonstrate what they had learnt.

As, I move on into my third, and final MA year, I am conscious that I should make an effort to include more citations in my writing here, 'stepping this blog up'. I am also entering into a new context, Al-quds/ Jerusalem, in which I can continue to grow as a language learner again. I am really looking forward to the journey, though am cautious of the territory.

A map , Manchester and permanent BETA

Manchester isn't home for me, but I will feel a bit like I have gone somewhere close to home this summer when I set foot on the hallowed turf of their campus for the first time (since visiting mates as an undergraduate). Strangely, I have been studying 'at' the university of Manchester for the last two years linked only by a VPN (virtual private network), and a series of web interfaces. This VPN has many benefits including enabling me to access a lot of articles, and other texts via the John Rylands library server. I can also watch Eastenders and skip round access issues with blogspot addresses here. What is strange here is that without the VPN I can post to my blog (as the address is blogger.com) but not view my blog (at the blogspot address). Due to the slow web speeds here using the VPN is problematic, and like most of the world I 'suffer' from a lack of connectivity, thus I cannot actually view this, my own blog very often. Your comments get mailed, so please feel free, I will make the effort to get back to you when I am in a place with access.

My studies have been situated in Bulgaria, Switzerland, Mauritius, Lebanon, and Syria and the VPN has been like an anchor chain, keeping my thinking moored in the academy. Each module has been different but most of the communicating I have done has been asynchronous, but there have been occasional adobe breeze (web conferencing software) sessions where I saw a few moving faces. I have met, face to face, just a handful of course mates, and tutors including the i-Boy, the dodgester, and Dr Fry. Of course, I also feel a certain proximity to those I have interacted with virtually as well. This summer I look forward to meeting some more Manchester folks hopefully I will have a spark of research inspiration that will propel me, Olympian-like, towards a September 2012 finish.

As an aside, I am glad Manchester United got schooled by Barcelona, this should make the locals more tolerable, should I meet any who support United. I hope to do some schooling of myself as I learn more about working with teachers. I believe they are a group of Chinese English teachers. That is as much information as I have currently, still a while to go. Hopefully, I will play like Barca when the time comes and plan like Pepe Rena.

This experience with myself and Manchester has been great, I know my thinking about things education has changed, and my confidence is high. As a professional development junkie I know the good hits from the bad and this qualifies as some good stuff! Aside from affective factors I have become more aware of the industry that foreign language teaching is, the relationships between the academy, schools and so on.

Before the MA my topography of TEFL lands and sea was quite good, and like google maps I could go into more detail in some areas than others. Though my mapping isn't anywhere near complete (as an aside, incompleteness, and permanent BETA are concepts I have really taken on board over the last few years) I feel now I can zoom in on, and have street views, as well as having greater perceptual coverage then I had before. It is a tough time as I really need to specialise, both in my career and academically, and go beyond street view . To continue the metaphor I need to go macro, get microscopic and atomic views. The two areas that really stand out for me at the moment are teacher education, psychology and Inter-cultural stuff, but how many 'focus areas' is one allowed? Scott Thornbury has Dogme (a big thing), Gary Motteram has learning technology, and so on. I guess I think it may help to be known as that Dogme guy, that Tech guy, that X guy. Not only will this make me sound like a super hero, it will also stop me spreading myself to thinly, like the earth's crust.