Professional doings as promised and more - ENGLISH WORKS! A Workplace Based English Course

The main and exciting professional 'doing' in my life is working on the new staff course ENGLISH WORKS! James referred to it in his comment on the Almost the Holiday post.



Anyway I have led this process from its inception. Along the way wonderful colleagues have supported, criticised and expanded and now while still very much in process it is starting to take shape and although there are still grey areas it is looking good.



The first thing was to work with the original needs analyses and supplement them. Then I wrote a Vision statement which passed muster with little controversy. The Head of the Curriculum Development Unit told us that this is an opportunity to do so mething different. So we proceeded to do just that.



The result is a course which incorporates most of the good things we learn about when looking at the best ways to facilitate language acquisition as well as doing what the bosses want which is to add value to the employees work at the University by improving their facility in English.



We have based the shape of the course on the ALTE (Association of Language Testers of Europe) descriptors. Thus we have 4 modules which we have named Working in English, Out and About in English, Everyday English and Thinking in English. They correspond to the 4 ALTE sections. We will also offer IELTS/TOEFL training. Our students will work a lot online, maybe even have one class session a week in a virtual classroom! They will get thorough training in emailing, using the internet and Moodling for their learning journals which will be a major source of assessable data.



The teaching team will be dedicated to this programme and will take their class through the 8 week block/module. The students will be assessed regularly during this time and will each do a small research presentation as part of that assessment. No student will be asked to do something beyond their reach and our expectations will be based on what we find out they CAN do.

Well we have started to find this out - we gave them the Language Centre Placement Test and we now know that we have a majority of Level 1 learners. and at least 30 Level 6 - this in terms of the Language centre levels. We are going to administer a BULATS test which will place them on the ALTE levels but in the meantime we know that we have to prepare for a very wide spectrum of learners. We have adopted the principle of heterogenous groups but are seriously questioning our resolve.

The highest and lowest level students are going to require such radically different materials that it is hardly conceivable that we can place them in the same groups. So to some extent it is back to the drawing board... And in this regard we are all trying to work on the drawing board already - we have wikis on the SQU Moodle site and are trying to flesh out our programme. I am struggling with the technicalities of things like how to load pictures and format the pages.

Fortunately we have Moodle-savvy people to help us and for the next week we should have a bit more time to work on these things. It is going to be very useful for the students to do their homework as it is accessible online off campus and they will be able to read and work in their own time. We just have to increase our skill level.

Administering the test was interesting for us as it gave us a 'look' at our students, 134 turned up for the test and they are a motley crew. They are mostly male and mostly pretty playful!

This has been too long in the writing so I am going to post it now and hope that it is of some interest to some of you.