Learning & Teaching

Experience of COIL

Piotr took over a course that had run in the past. He revived and redesigned the course by changing the specifications: involved students from Glasgow and from other institutions across the world. Piotr kept the COIL elements as the integral part of the course.

Benefits of COIL

• Students benefit from an intercultural approach to language and teaching through engagement with other learners and ideas from different settings and mindsets.
• Students are able to enact principles they were taught on the course and were encouraged via the assessment to reflect on these principles and the course content.

Challenges of COIL

• Taking over an existing COIL course can be challenging if the activity is organised by pre-existing groups and activities.
• Logistical questions about how to divide students up (e.g. group size, number from each institution).
• Ethical considerations if there are difference in ages of the paired pupils.
• Logistical challenges of trying to find a platform that would work for everyone – different technical abilities (e.g. platforms that don’t work in certain countries, like China; GDPR compliance and safety regulations).
• Challenges of different semester times and time zone differences.
• Students appreciating the value of COIL activities and engaging with assessment – why would students take part in this project if there was no extrinsic benefit? (The solution found to resolve this was to set an individual reflection on participation which was assessed.)

Recommendations

• Provide extra resources such as administrative support to offload part of the academic’s work.
• Source resources, case studies and materials from other COIL practitioners so you don’t start work from scratch.
• Consider how to co-ordinate activities within different teaching periods – for example
• Glasgow starts the teaching year earlier much earlier than other institutions. Provide a clear rationale about the benefits of COIL: there has to be a value that is seen by everyone - students and staff - everywhere - to take up COIL.

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COIL Topic/Theme	Culture and English Language Teaching
Partner Institutions	Various, and variable from year to year
Course Co-ordinator/staff involved	Current convener is Dr Piotr Wegorowski.
College/Subject(s)	Arts & Humanities; English Language & Linguistics
Length of Exchange	Variable, but typically over c.7-8 weeks of an 11-week course
Language(s)	English
Size of cohort	Variable – typically 20-30
Level (e.g. Pre hons, hons, PGT)	Honours
Goals/ILOs	This course aims to: ■ familiarise students with a number of key concepts in the teaching of language and culture; ■ provide an opportunity for students to collaborate with students from different cultures; ■ develop skills in how theoretical insights from disciplines such as linguistics, education, and cultural studies can be transformed into pedagogical practice Current ILOs: By the end of this course students will be able to: ■ explain principles of language teaching pedagogy; ■ appraise how culture and language teaching interact; ■ evaluate how theory and pedagogical practice interact; ■ construct complex arguments across genres relevant to teaching practice.
Description of project	Students are given a number of questions/topics to explore cross-culturally with partner groups over the course of several weeks.
Assessment	Essay (2000 words) - 50% Report (1500 words) - 25% Set exercise (1500 words) - 25% Report and Set exercise enable students to draw on their experiences of COIL elements of the course.
Synchronous Activities	COIL activity has been asynchronous in recent iterations of course.
Asynchronous Activities	Students work with counterparts in partner institutions to explore questions/topics from a cross-cultural angle.
Platform(s) used	This has changed over the years.
What worked well?	Students typically report appreciating the range of intercultural perspectives that they encounter during the course.
What would you do differently next time?	Reconsider platform

First published: 25 July 2024