Challenges in Teaching English for Professional Purposes

I did my teaching practice during the Spring Term 2020 for the course English for Architecture. This course is designed for first-year students of Architecture with the overall aim of developing their professional communication skills in English. The core content focuses on architectural building critique; the main objective is to teach students how to critique and describe architectural buildings or designs and what elements belong to that. These include, for example, the context of the building, the environment, the design idea, the function of the building, internal and external features, building materials, structural features, or technical parameters, such as light, color, and size. Each lesson focuses on a different aspect that is designed to enlarge the students’ professional vocabulary. Throughout the course, the students get to focus on developing oral and written English language skills, which enable them to follow developments in their own field of architecture and get along in an international environment with a sufficient level of proficiency. The course takes a student-centered approach in the social-constructivist tradition, and my classroom situation is similar to the following describtion: 

In the student-centered class, teacher talk has diminished drastically to give way to student talk, student-student interaction and student assertion. In this way students are encouraged to create and develop their own learning style. The teacher acts as a mediator and guide rather than as a main source of information. Besides promoting  peer communication, collaboration and active learning or learning through discovery, student-centeredness also aims at turning students into independent, autonomous learners by creating and developing self-motivation and self-regulation skills. (Boghian 29-30)

For my teaching practice, I had chosen three aspects which I wanted to particularly focus on, both in order to develop my own pedagogical skills and to improve the course: time management, digital pedagogics, and written communication. I improved with regard to all three aspects, though some with more limited success. The move from classroom to online teaching because of the coronavirus situation affected my plans to some degree, but it also  had a positive effect on some other pedagogical aspects. 

Time management during the first lessons has been somewhat of a problem when I taught the course in earlier years, because I often have too much material and too many activities planned. I wished to avoid having to rush the students through the exercises or having to move activities into the next lessons. While I improved a bit on this aspect, the problem still remained during the first 2 or 3 lessons. However, I realized that the time issue is not so much due to poor lesson planning on my behalf as to the fact that the students in this class have different levels of English. Some work faster than others; some need more guidance from the teacher. And it takes precisely those first three lessons for me to figure out a suitable pace for this particular class. However, I decided to cut some of the content for these lessons in the future and to take along the cut-out materials as extra materials for the faster students. That way, the slower students won’t feel that they are being behind the others.

Secondly, I had planned to include more digital pedagogics into the course, particularly the use of Padlet, which I had tested in the previous year and which was received very well by the students. I wished to include more Padlet-related activities as well as to test Kahoot and Flinga. In addition, I was using Moodle for the first time ever and wanted to use this particular course to test out as many of its interactive tools as possible. Moodle became a very useful resource, especially when switching to online teaching, and I discovered a lot of useful tools within it, especially the interactive quizzes, of which I will make even more use in the future. The use of Padlet, Kahoot, and Flinga had been planned mostly for the second part of the course after the skiing holidays, but the move to online teaching forced me to revise some of the activities. I managed to use Padlet only twice, but Kahoot and Flinga not at all. On the plus side, I thoroughly learned how to teach via Zoom, which will be of great benefit for the future. If Zoom teaching continues, I will try to find ways to combine it better with these other digital tools.

My third aim was to the develop the written communication aspect of the course and to align it better with one of the course’s assessment methods, which is a final essay on a building that the students have designed themselves. Written communication is one of the 4 core skills of language learning: reading, writing, listening, and speaking (cf. Harjanne and Tella 213-214). While the students get plenty of oral communication practice and listening and reading practice during the course, I have always felt that the written aspects falls a bit short during the lessons. The move from classroom to online teaching afforded me with the best opportunity in this respect. I turned some of the discussion tasks and pair activities which we would have had in the classroom into small individual writing tasks, and the students got to write opinion pieces and practice reflective and critical thinking/writing about architecture much more thoroughly. I also provided the students with individual feedback for these tasks and with tips on what to improve. Overall, I think that this prepared them much better for their final essay assessment. As described by educational scholars, Biggs’ model of constructive alignment “suggests an ideal synergy between the intended learning outcomes, teaching and learning activities which meet those outcomes, and assessment and evaluation which demonstrate the achievement of the outcomes” (Paskevicius 128). The bigger focus on written interaction during the latter part of the course helped creating a better synergy.

Overall, the feedback I received from the students for the course was very positive. They all had enjoyed the course and found that it had greatly improved their English skills. They also thanked me for my friendly and supportive attitude. The fact that everyone completed the course is also a sign that the overall teaching objectives were achieved. My comments from my mentor were also very supportive and encouraging, which gave me much confidence. She also gave me some useful advice on various aspects of language didactics, for example, on how to practice the students’ pronunciation. While this is not a specific aim of the course, my mentor had a good point there; after all, improving your pronunciation is part of improving your English communication skills. These are things that I will more consciously pay attention to in the future.

Question: Do you have any tips and tricks for teaching classes in which students have a different level of skills/knowledge?

Sources:
Boghian, Ioana. “The Didactics of English Literature from the Perspective of Student-Centered Strategies.”  Journal of Innovation in Psychology, Education and Didactics 16.1 (2012): 29-36.

Harjanne, Pirjo, and Seppo Tella. “Foreign Language Didactics, Foreign Language Teaching and Transdisciplinary Affordances.” Foreign languages and multicultural perspectives in the European context; Fremdsprachen und multikulturelle Perspektiven im europäischen Kontext. Dichtung – Wahrheit – Sprache, edited by A. Koskensalo, J. Smeds, P. Kaikkonen, and V. Kohonen. Berlin: LITVerlag, 2007. 197-225.

Paskevicius, Michael. “Conceptualizing Open Educational Practices through the Lens of Constructive Alignment.” Open Praxis 9.2 (2017): 125-140.

Kirjoittaja:

Katrin Korkalainen

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