Personal Blogs

I have just finished marking first assignments for LB170 and L161.  As I have two groups for both courses at the moment (I am covering for one L161 course), it has been a busy time.  As usual, there is a great variety but it seems some students have underestimated the amount of work they needed to do and wrote answers that they could have written without studying the courses.  I hope that my feedback will encourage them to make use of what they are studying in their future assignments (and presumably this is a major reason why they have assignments so early in the course.

I have recently finished teaching on a pre-sessional course and I was intrigued by some of the ways some students were using sources.

One aspect I noticed was that many students tended to put a full stop before references that should have been at the end of sentences.  I notice that this is also common with students on online courses.  This seems to suggest a mindset that regards the reference as being separate from the rest of the sentence (and perhaps the text).

This is perhaps reinforced by the way that some students inserted references after they had drafted quite extensively.  This is something that I do not really see in my teaching of online students as I tend to only read the final products (the TMAs) although LB170 allows for some reading of drafts.  Again, this seems to suggest a lack of integration with the text. 

I wonder if the problem is that there is too much emphasis on the mechanics of referencing rather than the purposes and opportunities.  Referring to sources allows a writer to be able to show that they are aware of how what they write relates to what others have written and that academic texts are often dialogues with the ideas of previous writers.

I mentioned some of the points in a twitter thread that begins at https://twitter.com/patrickelt/status/1174635019555487744

Yesterday, I was interviewed on reading strategies (along with a colleague, Anna Calvi) as part of the development of listening materials for a rewrite for LB160 "Communication Skills for Business Studies" (the new module will be LB170).

It was an interesting experience.  I was surprised at how quickly we finished the recording and most of it was done on the first take.  One of the few parts that went to a second take were the result of my drinking some water being picked up by the microphone.  Other reasons for second takes included very obvious stumbles over words and a missed cue (I though Anna was responsible for one answer I should have spoken on).

I think there will be some editing of the product but authenticity is more highly prized than linguistic polish.  So, some hesitators, false starts etc will be included.