Learning & Teaching

COIL Experience

Neil convened the English for Legal Purposes course in 2019 in partnership with the Islamic University of Gaza. The overall design for this project is storytelling, which can help to increase student engagement via personalisation and emotion. The course was structured around group work with minimal teacher instruction.

Benefits

• Students gain a raised understanding of other cultures by participating in a cultural exchange.
• Students are motivated to practice spoken communication in English and thus progress to Master’s study (this is important as the cohort are not native English speakers and they need to demonstrate proficiency in listening and speaking English).

Challenges

• Lack of administrative and technical support.
• Need for training on leveraging cultural differences.
• Maintaining student motivation with clear goals/incentives.
• Providing reassurance around risk assessments.
• Articulating the career value of participating in COIL to colleagues.

Recommendations

• Consider how to ensure student engagement, for example by using checklists and providing sample activities.
• Investigate how to implement COIL more effectively and sustainably

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COIL Topic/Theme	Gaza Glasgow pre-sessional English collaboration
Partner Institutions	Islamic University of Gaza
Course Co-ordinator/staff involved	Neil Allison, University of Glasgow Ahmad Al Karriri, Islamic University of Gaza
College/Subject(s)	College of Arts, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, English for Academic Study: pre-sessional English for law
Length of Exchange	5 weeks on 2 occasions (2019 and 2021)
Language(s)	English
Size of cohort	Approx. 30 Palestinian students in 2019; approx. 15 in 2021. Glasgow Students (mostly Chinese) around 40 in 2019, around 80 in 2021
Level (e.g. Pre hons, hons, PGT)	Masters (or more technically for Glasgow students, pre-Masters)
Goals/ILOs	Glasgow students are on an intensive English for law course to gain threshold grades in IELTS equivalent to enter LLM programmes at University of Glasgow. Their ILOs include writing 1200-word researched essays on law topics, delivering presentations in English on a case study, reading legal sources, etc (I can provide the full ILOs for the course if you need). For Palestinians, the goal is to improve their oral English, their understanding of legal discourse, and promote a cultural exchange (linked to intergroup contact theory – breaking down cultural barriers and reducing bias/prejudice)
Description of project	Glasgow students study full-time with 4 weeks of input on introductory law topics Common law; Corporate law; International law and human rights, together with academic and academic legal skills (essay writing, reading and understanding legal cases, etc). One major piece of assessed work is a project where students research a factual scenario (could be hypothetical) and consider what international rules and frameworks could theoretically be applied. Palestinian students work on this project. Ideally groups of 4 (containing 2 pairs) are formed (2 Palestinian and 2 Glasgow); each pair provides the factual scenario for the other pair to apply the law to). Students are encouraged to choose something of particular importance to them to promote engagement and incorporate an element of personal storytelling into the task. After around 2 weeks, both pairs present a summary of the case and the law they found that might apply. This is by way of an assessed 10-minute presentation (10 minutes per pair) with the other pair providing comments on content afterwards (teacher providing assessment on linguistic and presentation strengths and areas to work on). The above task is set in week 2 and presentations are delivered in week 5. Week 1 – 2 involves the Glasgow pair meeting Palestinians online a couple of times, and communicating via chat (could be Facebook, WhatsApp, whatever) to pass on skills and knowledge they have gained from attending the course e.g. how to search legal databases for international treaties, commentaries, etc.
Assessment	Glasgow students are assessed on the presentation mentioned above, among other assessments (writing; reading; listening). Palestinian students are not assessed. They receive a certificate to show they have completed this partnership project.
Synchronous Activities	Very few – Palestinians attend a day 1 online introduction to the project, and attend to deliver their presentation online live in week 5, though they also record it in case of internet problems.
Asynchronous Activities	Most activities are self-determined – students arrange meetings periodically. There is a guidebook that suggests meeting points.
Platform(s) used	In the first year we used Facebook, but in 2021 we used Zoom.
What worked well?	The project, especially the story telling. Palestinian students were very motivated to tell their stories.
What would you do differently next time?	This collaboration would really only work going forward if we had stability in numbers that made the groupings predictable. What we experienced in 2021 was a large drop-out and so many project groups involved a single nationality – Chinese (the Glasgow students). A group of only Chinese worked much faster to complete their projects, but of course lost out on speaking opportunities. Also, IUG were unable to find many law students (many of the students were business students).
Links and references	Intergroup contact theory and related Kim, Y. Y. (2017). Contextual theory of interethnic communication. The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication, 1-10.   Paluck, E. L., & Green, D. P. (2009). Prejudice reduction: What works? A review and assessment of research and practice. Annual review of psychology, 60, 339-367.   Patchen, M. (1999). Diversity and unity: Relations between racial and ethnic group. Nelson-Hall Publishers. Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of personality and social psychology, 90(5), 751.   Theory related to interaction and the project groupwork: Vos, H., & de Graaff, E. (2004). Developing metacognition: a basis for active learning. European journal of engineering education, 29(4), 543-548. Vygotsky, L. S. (1980). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes: Harvard university press. Willis, J. (1996). A flexible framework for task-based learning. Challenge and change in language teaching, 52-62.

 

Reflection on Teaching COIL

Aims of the Project

The aim of this project is firstly and chiefly to provide motivating, communicative English speaking development opportunities to the fee-paying students on the course; 80-90% of these students are Chinese and have tended in the past to make far less progress in speaking (and to some extent listening) than they do in writing and reading. Since students will progress to their Masters’ courses on satisfactorily demonstrating attainment of the proficiency threshold in the four language skills (writing, reading, listening, speaking), it is imperative that speaking progresses through development of appropriate language (including language specifically for law) and fluency.

Another aim, though secondary, is to widen access to Gaza and Ukraine, who, due to their locations and circumstances, are less included in global citizenship initiatives and less able to find English practice compared to those in more economically privileged countries. In terms of global citizenship, this project will use international law (encouraging a focus particularly on Human Rights) as a context for communication and also English-speaking practice. One perspective on global citizenship is that it aims to provide “a global orientation, empathy, and cultural sensitivity, stemming from humanistic values and assumptions” (Dill, 2013, cited in Goren & Yemini, 2017, p171).

The Project

Bearing in mind that this project is largely a groupwork activity with minimal teacher instruction, I feel it is important to talk first about the project holistically and show the justifications that can be labelled active learning. However, a problem I’ve found is trying to settle on a concise definition of active learning. I think the focus of education literature in this area is more commonly on engagement, with active learning being any educational approaches that promotes engagement (Mann 2001) i.e. active learning is a means to promote engagement. Reading across a wide range of literature which uses the term “active learning”, I was able to distil two key elements in the light of this active learning > engagement relationship:

1. Teachers designing activities that prioritise engaging students’ cognitive processes and taking into consideration motivation, behaviour, and emotion as part of this (Chi and Wylie, 2014); I noted that social activity also commonly underlies these (influenced by Vygotsky, 1980);

2. Meta-cognition: students need to identify and reflect on the processes in item 1 (Vos & de Graaff, 2004).

Element 2 (above) can be addressed here more succinctly than element 1 by highlighting the reflective journal I have incorporated in the project. This will not be assessed. However, students will be asked at the end of the course to review their journal and write a summary of what they learned about their learning and what they valued or didn’t value about the project. 

Element 1, particularly cognitive processes, is obviously very complex and is influenced by the underlying education paradigms or instructional theories (Van Merriënboer & De Bruin, 2014), what is being learned (e.g. procedural knowledge or declarative knowledge), and engagement considerations such as those detailed in the complex flow framework (Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi 2009). I was particularly influence by social constructivism that encourages group learning and problem or inquiry-based learning (somewhere between guided and open - Banchi, 2008). Because the course outcomes are not primarily focussed on knowledge change but behavioural i.e. they are primarily concerned with student activity and the connected language development as evidenced through actual language use in realistic legal academic contexts, theories of language learning need to be considered: socio-linguistics and cognitive linguistics have influenced my design. These theories of language emphasise, among other things, the social nature of language and the contextual nature of language meaning. Thus, group work and negotiating meaning across different cultural contexts I consider to be of high value. Also, language development needs practice, and thus the project is designed to maximise speaking time (indeed, as mentioned earlier, one of its original aims was as simple as just giving students speaking practice outside class).

In addition to the above, via new perspectives that this course opened up, I have incorporated some quite specific activities within the overall project that I believe will enhance student active engagement.

Where and How

In 2019 the teachers had no direct interaction with the Palestinian students aside from one-way communication: course convenor to students at a welcome event (a broadcast lecture via Facebook). Increased online delivery makes it feasible to add an interaction element via the Day 5 session whereby the O and P students can join their class and teacher.

In addition, the social intersection between students and between students and place can be improved, if only slightly, by the introduction of a map activity and a group-working and cultural preference questionnaire.  The former involves students on day 1 introducing themselves in their relevant location on a Padlet map. The latter concerns groupwork expectations e.g. how quickly you would expect someone to reply; what days you would not work, etc.

I think also in the spirit of the relativity idea of space brought by Löw (2008), group-working preferences highlights that students have some control over what their learning space is like (space changes as we change it: Clifford, 2008, Ch.5)

Storytelling and Objects

The overall project design in some ways is a story that one group tells another for the other group to finish for them; the “case studies” are essentially stories requiring legal analysis and legal responses. Exposure to the literature on story telling has helped me realise that this project can be viewed as a story and it can be more effectively exploited to increase engagement via personalisation and emotion. Interestingly, this dovetails nicely with the humanistic language teaching approach called Dogme (Thornbury, 2011) whereby students learn more (according to the theory) by bringing what they want to say to the lessons rather than what the teacher wants to teach. This is seen as a refinement of task-based learning (Willis, 1996): in practice, the process and result are the drivers of what content or language is learned; I’d see this as a language-learning equivalent of inquiry-based learning where the collaborative elements of tasks maximise communication. It is also well-supported that such collaborative projects lead to friendships and sustainability (Spiro, 2014), and cross-culturally may lead to a reduction in prejudice (Pettigrew, Tropp, Wagner, & Christ, 2011).

I also realise that stories could be improved by encouraging students to photograph something that to them links the conceptual element of the problem in their project with the tangible (and possibly emotional). That link might reduce the space between students, but most importantly provide a more tangible element of their stories. On this latter point, it would help students consider the “gravity” of concepts within their stories. The idea of gravity of concepts comes from Legitimation Code Theory (“LCT”), and relates specifically to how we access the semantics of particular codes. In simple terms, we better understand concepts when we think of them both theoretically and in specific contextual application (Maton, 2013).

Note

I wrote this report as part of a portfolio for fellowship of HEA qualification. It was written before the 2021 course when the plan was to include students from Ukraine - Odessa National Polytechnic University and Odessa National University.  This didn’t prove possible.

Reference list

Banchi, H., & Bell, R. (2008). The many levels of inquiry. Science and children, 46(2), 26.

Chi, M. T., & Wylie, R. (2014). The ICAP framework: Linking cognitive engagement to active learning outcomes. Educational psychologist, 49(4), 219-243.

Clifford, N., Holloway, S., Rice, S. P., & Valentine, G. (Eds.). (2008). Key concepts in geography. Sage.

Goren, H., & Yemini, M. (2017). Global citizenship education redefined–A systematic review of empirical studies on global citizenship education. International Journal of Educational Research, 82, 170-183.

Illeris, K. (2014). Transformative learning and identity. Journal of Transformative Education, 12(2), 148-163.

Löw, M. (2008). The constitution of space: The structuration of spaces through the simultaneity of effect and perception. European Journal of Social Theory, 11(1), 25-49.

Mann, Sarah J. 2001. ‘Alternative Perspectives on the Student Experience: Alienation and Engagement’. Studies in Higher Education 26(1):7–19.

Maton, K. (2013). Knowledge and knowers: Towards a realist sociology of education: Routledge.

Nakamura, J., and M. Csikszentmihalyi. 2009. ‘Flow Theory and Research’. in The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pettigrew, T. F., Tropp, L. R., Wagner, U., & Christ, O. (2011). Recent advances in intergroup contact theory. International journal of intercultural relations, 35(3), 271-280.

Spiro, J. (2014). Learning interconnectedness: Internationalisation through engagement with one another. Higher Education Quarterly, 68(1), 65-84.

Thornbury, S. (2011). Afterwards: Dogme for beginners: The autonomy of the group. Realizing autonomy: Practice and reflection in language education contexts, 257-265.

Van Merriënboer, J. J., & De Bruin, A. B. (2014). Research paradigms and perspectives on learning. In Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (pp. 21-29): Springer.

Vos, H., & de Graaff, E. (2004). Developing metacognition: a basis for active learning. European journal of engineering education, 29(4), 543-548.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1980). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes: Harvard university press.

Willis, J. (1996). A flexible framework for task-based learning. Challenge and change in language teaching, 52-62.

 

First published: 25 July 2024