English Language Skills

As reported earlier in this blog, and at the second TASH meeting, I am running a pilot project, as part of TASH, to make some of excellent material on English Language skills which already exists, available to undergraduates in Geography. Many of our home undergraduates have quite poor written English - reports in the press suggest that this is a widespread problem which seriously affects the employability of graduates. With help from Paul Wigfield and Claire Allam I have put together a selection of the materials from the ELTC teaching materials and the support site for dyslexic students and constructed a module called 'English Language Skills for Geography Students'. In the spirit of TASH, very little has been done to the existing materials - so there is no specific reference to Geography and the examples which are used are not geographical. One of the interesting things will be to see whether students regard this as a problem or not.

The plan is to

• Let all staff in Geography know about it so that when they meet personal tutees to review the feedback on their assessed work, they can refer students to it if need be.
• Let all students in Geography know about it. We hold a 'welcome back' meeting each semester, with each Level separately, which will be a good vehicle for this.
• Build it into our Level 1 skills module, GEO163, which focuses on essay writing among other things.

If anybody would like to take a look at the material, just send me your Novell login (e.g. I am gg1smw).