Collaborate with language and learning skills support staff

Work out for yourself the degree of responsibility you are prepared to take for teaching the language arts of your own specific discipline.

Locate and contact the Language and Learning skills support staff and/or other language and literacy specialists in your faculty or on your campus.

At Monash the Centre for the Advancement of Learning and Teaching (CALT) provides a wide range of support for both staff and students , including various forms of staff consultation, workshops, etc., as well as online resources such as the Writing section of the Language and Learning Online website. Several faculties also host language and learning support staff specifically for their own students.

Find out how these staff can help you "[identify] the literacy skills that underpin your discipline" (Schmitt 2004, p. 71), and in what ways you and they can work together to develop these skills in your students.

Be aware of the possibilities for joint research and publications implicit in such collaborations.

Do some diagnostic assessment

Forewarned is forearmed. Do whatever you can at the start of a course to build up a profile of the language and academic literacy levels of the class.

Get information from Student Records about your students' language backgrounds, language levels, and admissions pathways: for example, find out as early as you can how many students in your class have taken a bridging course which could be expected to have given them at least a general understanding of the basic principles of assignment writing.

Given the limited information available from the numbers of an IELTS or TOEFL score, there is increasing interest in administering on-site diagnostic assessment with such instruments as the DELA. Find out if your students have undergone assessment of this sort, and get hold of their reports if so.

But the best information is what you can obtain for yourself at first hand. Schmitt (p. 71) recommends that you:

Set an early diagnostic task that includes some of the basic skills that students will need to use in credit-bearing assignments. If students have gaps in their skills set, then look at ways of building some teaching into your course or identify language or study skills sessions that students can attend, stressing the importance of attendance.

Head off cognitive overload

Evaluate the complexity of the tasks you set, perhaps using the list below to judge their difficulty:

• the level of abstraction required
• the number of activities or operations involved
• the guidance provided by the prompt
• the amount of text to be assimilated
• the expected genre, and the student’s prior knowledge ( Currie, 1993, p. 112)

Is the level of difficulty appropriate for the students' level and the stage of the course? Is the amount of guidance appropriate to the complexity of the task? Compare your tasks with those of colleagues teaching at the same or at higher or lower levels. Make any necessary adjustments to your tasks.

Complex tasks should not be avoided, but achievement levels can be increased if such tasks are broken down into a series of steps with feedback provided at each stage. Feedback is most effective when it is provided at intermediary stages of the writing process so that students can respond to it in subsequent revisions.

— Schmitt, 2005, pp. 71-2; formatting modified.

See also Language in assessment tasks.

Provide your students with incentives to read

Schmitt notes (p. 72) that:

for international students, whether or not they read widely in their subject area can be a crucial factor in their success. Extensive reading contributes not only to improved fluency in reading, but it can also contribute to improvements in vocabulary, grammar and writing. Reading also provides insights into the written academic style that students do not get from lectures or classroom discussions.

She recommends that teachers:

Develop ways to bring the reading into the classroom. New words and concepts can be discussed and students can be encouraged to keep a glossary of new terms. Students' prior knowledge can be made explicit through questioning techniques as part of the discussion of readings and this can be used to connect to the new meanings and knowledge required. Make a point of discussing reading assignments and allow time for questions about the readings. If students think you care whether they read or not, it can make a big difference in whether or not they put in the time and effort. If you are able to develop a linked teaching arrangement such as that discussed in point 1 above, course readings can be examined closely to raise awareness of specific language use.

To this end, see the section on promoting effective reading.