Date: Friday 11th June 2021 
Time: 15:30-17:00 (UK time)
Platform: Zoom 

The BALEAP SIG Developing, Teaching and Testing Academic Listeners will be holding a ‘Listening in the Disciplines’ Event on Friday 11th June from 15:30 to 17:00 (UK time). We have a great range of really interesting presentations from some fantastic speakers lined up for you, and each speaker will be discussing an aspect of how they deal with listening with students in specific discipline groups. Please see information directly below this email on the speakers and their presentations (with information on one more to come shortly) - Jisc is being fussy and now allowing attachments at the moment. Some of the questions we hope to address during this event are: 

• What types of listening do students in specific disciplines need to do during their studies? What are the main demands of these types of listening? 
• What specific areas of language/listening need to be developed with students on EAP pre-sessionals and in-sessionals so that they can listen successfully in their specific disciplines?
• What is the role of listening in how students are taught and/or assessed in their specific disciplines? 


Format

Each presenter will have 5-10 minutes to present. There are 9 speakers confirmed for the event, 4 speaking on STEM-related practice and 5 on a mix of others (Fashion, English, Business, Law).
We are planning to divide into two separate presentation stream rooms for the first hour or so - one room for STEM-related and one mixed discipline presentations. Attendees will be asked to select presentation stream at the beginning of the event and will move to that room. Unfortunately, switching between streams will not be possible. After the presentations and some time to chat in these rooms, we will all come back together for a short discussion before the event closes.  


Registration

Please register for your event via the following link:
https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=qO3qvR3IzkWGPlIypTW3y5AXdQxkTuRIo15U116a8e1UQk5BUVlFOFoyWjBMMElVSzVPMVNMT1lIRS4u

We look forward to seeing you then!
Many thanks
The Organising Committee


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We look forward to seeing you at the Academic Listening SIG’s upcoming ‘Listening in the Disciplines’ event on Friday 11th June 2021, 15:30-17:00 (UK time). The event presentations will be divided into two streams, one STEM-related (Presentation Stream A) and the other mixed non-STEM (Presentation Stream B). We will ask attendees to choose one stream to join at the beginning of the event. Unfortunately, switching between streams will not be possible.

Presentation Stream A: STEM-related

Jane Sjoberg

About the presenter: Jane Sjoberg has over thirty years' experience teaching and developing materials in EAP and other related EFL fields both in Italy and the UK. In her current role at the University of Birmingham's International Academy, she works mainly on the in-sessional teaching programme, juggling CPD responsibilities as a coordinator of teacher training and development on pre-sessional courses in the latter half of the academic year.

About the presentation: In my in-sessional teaching role I was tasked with creating bespoke departmental materials to i) support lab work for first year students in STEMM and ii) develop academic listening skills for first year undergraduates studying Computer Science. To gauge listening needs I peer-observed foundation and first year labs in Bioscience and Mechanical Engineering and arranged access to lab materials on the university’s VLE - Canvas. I also gained access to lecture recordings for Computer Science with permission to download and edit recordings. In both lectures and labs, I was struck by the listening demands placed on students, in particular the gap between what Cauldwell calls 'garden' and 'jungle' listening (https://www.speechinaction.org/greenhouse-garden-jungle/). I also noted the challenges in vocabulary that students encountered when attempting to decode and understand what they heard. In my short talk, I will highlight some of the listening challenges I identified and illustrate how I attempted to incorporate my observations into my materials.


Liz Chiu

About the presenter: Imperial College London is a STEM focused research and teaching university. At the Centre for Academic English Liz teaches and co-ordinates listening and speaking provision for in-sessional and pre-sessional courses and is Deputy Director of pre-sessional courses. She focuses on course design for in-person and online delivery and on EDI and accessibility for all. She is responsible for ICL’s pre-sessional Test of Spoken English, an interactive viva which tests real-time speaking and listening on a technical subject.

About the presentation: STEM lectures and classes assume a level of listening comprehension above the required IELTS 6.0 minimum. Speed of speech is a big problem for many students so habituation to fluent speakers with a broad range of accents is essential. We provide self-study materials for processing fast speech, concentrating for longer, and catching the main point. As non-scientists we cannot test our students’ understanding of their STEM disciplines, so rather than follow the standard model of Academic Listening we give students the choice of subject matter and set communicative tasks for them to complete in Specialist Subject groups. One task is the Listening Circle: students choose suitable topics for their group to present at a subsequent Poster event. Each student submits one video to a collaborative space, then watches all the videos submitted by classmates. Following this high listening load pre-class, the Listening Circle is a small-group, student-led discussion; it tests their comprehension and activates higher-level processing to apply information from the videos they watched.


Annette Margolis

About the presenter: Annette currently teaches Foundation Mathematics for mainly engineering students as well as provides additional language support for those foundation students on a one-year visa. She also assists on the in-sessional programme with essay writing on a one-to-one basis. In teaching mathematics there are those students better at understanding the concepts, and then there are those who are more able linguistically and therefore better at getting across their difficulties; Annette’s job lies in spotting those who are unable to voice their misconceptions.

	
About the presentation: When lecturing in mathematics to a sea of faces how does the lecturer find out who does and doesn’t understand? And what is the actual cause of this non-comprehension? Is it the mathematics and/or the language of the explanation? In this talk I will report back on findings from colleagues in mathematics related disciplines on how they can judge whether the majority of the student audience understand, as well as looking at ways of creating an atmosphere or ‘safe spaces’ in lectures where students are more at ease in signalling their non-comprehension: waving to attract attention rather than drowning in mathematics.


Caroline Challans

About the presenter: STEM lectures and classes assume a level of listening comprehension above the required IELTS 6.0 minimum. Speed of speech is a big problem for many students so habituation to fluent speakers with a broad range of accents is essential. Caroline and her colleagues provide self-study materials for processing fast speech, concentrating for longer, and catching the main point. As non-scientists, Caroline and her colleagues cannot test students’ understanding of their STEM disciplines, so rather than follow the standard model of Academic Listening they give students the choice of subject matter and set communicative tasks for them to complete in Specialist Subject groups. One task is the Listening Circle: students choose suitable topics for their group to present at a subsequent poster event. Each student submits one video to a collaborative space, then watches all the videos submitted by classmates. Following this high listening load pre-class, the Listening Circle is a small-group, student-led discussion; it tests their comprehension and activates higher-level processing to apply information from the videos they watched.

About the presentation: The presentation will look at listening materials centring around the TED talk with the aim of students exploring a more general topic in their field, listening to a variety of speakers, possibly presenting material from a new perspective and addressing current topics. The presentation and motivations fitted into wider themes within HE and Kent, namely EDI and decolonising the curricula.  The materials also focused on listening for discourse markers and intonation. The topic teacher and I are not Computing specialists but wanted an 'accessible' and topical topic. The students fedback that the topic and presenter were both interesting and caused pause for thought (gender bias in algorithms/AI and data gap), and become a motivation for two of the groups to investigate bias in Computing for their final essays.  Such parameters employed here could be replicated across subjects/fields and followed up with rich discussion around the topic.



Presentation Stream B: Mixed 

Zoe Gazeley-Eke

About the presenter: Zoe is a Lecturer in Academic English and TEFL at Coventry University and is also the Course Director for the BA English Language and TEFL programme. Prior to working at Coventry University Zoe taught various forms of English as a Foreign Language in Mexico, Russia, Japan, China and Saudi Arabia. Zoe is also a PhD candidate at Coventry University. Her thesis is investigating the development of ESAP (English for Specific Academic Purposes) pedagogy and teaching materials for Fashion.

About the presentation: Over the last four years I have been undertaking linguistic ethnographical research into a fashion department at a UK university to enable an in-depth needs analysis of international fashion students. My research has enabled me to observe fashion lectures, workshops and studio work and allowed access to teaching materials and assessments. In addition, I have interviewed teaching staff to obtain their perspectives on the language needs of a BA Fashion student. This presentation will share some of the findings on the multimodal aspects of fashion lectures and the different types of listening needed to successfully participate in studio work. It is envisaged that the findings will be useful to EAP practitioners in developing more discipline-specific listening activities not only in fashion but also in other creative subjects which involve studio work.


Samantha Stark

About the presenter: Samantha currently teaches on a variety of pre-sessional courses at the University of Leeds and co-leads the 6-week Language for Law summer pre-sessional course. Part of the reason she became the co-leader of this course was that she has an LLB (HONS) Law and an LLM Human Rights Law, so has first-hand experience of what is expected of law students.

About the presentation: The types of listening law students do can vary slightly depending on their university. Generally, teaching takes the form of lectures and seminars on undergraduate degrees, but on master’s degrees, there might only be seminars. This can present quite a challenge for students, because instead of having to listen to just one person in a logically organised lecture, they may have to listen critically to several people, synthesise their contributions, and consider how they are going to respond to them. This challenge needs to be borne in mind on pre-sessional courses in order to prepare students properly, as listening practice with standard lectures will not be enough. Instead, helping students develop bottom-up skills, and considering how students would prepare for listening in such circumstances, are important aspects that need to be taken into account when designing a listening course.


Noémi Yoza

About the presenter: Noémi has been a language teacher since 2011 and an EAP practitioner since 2017, specialising in Business, Finance, Admin and Marketing subjects. After doing a Dip TESOL at the University of Brighton she did an MA TEFL at the University of Sussex where she subsequently taught EAP and French as a foreign language. Last year she spent the pandemic in Zaragoza, Spain, teaching Business English and coaching business professionals online as well as teaching remotely on the Heriot-Watt University pre-sessional course.

About the presentation: While observing her international students struggling to follow lectures on her first pre-sessional course Noémi decided to investigate the international cohort experience of attending lectures during their first academic year. Her research shows that while international students continue to find lectures challenging and develop strategies and habits that help them make the most of this input, some issues might still be further remedied during pre-sessional courses, namely pre-lecture preparation and research process (importance of context), preferred note-taking techniques and media, finally, ways of anticipating and coping with listening comprehension challenges. The recent surge in online instruction prior to and especially during the pandemic will also help challenge the way listening skills can be developed.


Paula De Pando

About the presenter: Dr Paula de Pando teaches EAP and Study and Research Skills in business-related pathway programmes at Newcastle University London. Her previous experience includes teaching EAP in the UK, EFL in Spain, and she’s also been a lecturer in the MA in Education with TEFL specialism at the University of Seville. She has a strong background as a lecturer and researcher in the field of English literature, which underpins her approach to teaching academic skills.

About the presentation: By using lectures and TED talks with a business focus, students learn subject-specific vocabulary that they will need for their essays. However, although comprehension questions play an important role in teaching and assessing, it is important to go beyond IELTS-style tasks if we want to design activities that work on a number of levels for differentiation purposes. One way to ensure this is to formulate critical listening questions where students are required to identify main claims and supporting evidence and evaluate the strength of the data provided. By encouraging students to think of talks as oral texts and use them as models for their written outputs and oral presentations, we can support them to demonstrate criticality in their work.


(Information on one more presenter in this stream coming soon)
(Information on one more presentation in this stream coming soon)

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