Tag: pre-sessional

Perceptions of Autonomy

Posted on by Rachel Wall

by Rachel Wall

Last year, I embarked on a series of research projects which led me on a merry dance through the avenues and rabbit holes of autonomy. They led me to question my own practice and the precarious balance of appropriate scaffolding; dive into the baffling world of Legitimation Code Theory (LCT); experiment with coding; observe the language choices of my fellow tutors; design surveys and observation instruments and fundamentally left me wondering if autonomy can ever really exist. I’m not going to lie: the process ‘flawed’ me on many occasions – in both senses of the homophone – and forced me to rethink my own approach to life, as both a tutor and a citizen of this luscious planet. (more…)

East meets West: an international student’s observations of Confucian values within western teaching contexts

Posted on by Yen-En Kuo

by Yen-En Kuo

Introduction

This blog was inspired by the writer’s observations of Eastern and Western students studying on her post-graduate course, focusing particularly on the experiences of Asian students within the UK higher education (HE) system. The author is an international student from Taiwan pursuing an MSc Management at the University of Bristol. (more…)

Thinking around task design on the pre-sessional (summer of 2023)

Posted on by Grant Hartley and Tony Prince

by Grant Hartley and Tony Prince

Addressing a need

CALD’s pre-sessional courses attracted around 580 students this past year, with roughly 80% studying online, all with the hope of being better prepared for their PG or UG courses at the University of Bristol. As such, the focus of the course is on providing students with an experience where they can become more used to the demands and expectations they will meet in their disciplinary studies. With this in mind, students are taken through a weekly cycle of learning activities, starting with accessing academic texts receptively, before being asked to generate a response to that content. (more…)

Recommendations for the pre-sessional course from a student’s perspective

Posted on by Alec Orrock

by Siqi Wang
Siqi WangAs an IGP student, I benefited much from last terms and I am willing to share some experience from student perspective. (more…)

The role of criteria in shaping our work on language

Posted on by Alec Orrock

by Katherine High

“Academic Language is nobody’s mother tongue…” is one of the many colourful quotations you will notice splashed across the walls of CELFS when you next visit. But how relevant are Pierre Bourdieu’s words to our pre-sessional students and teachers? (more…)

SFL: carrying a torch for language analysis since the 70s

Posted on by Alec Orrock

Marbles

by Steven Peters

With JEAP (Journal of English for Academic Purposes) publishing a special issue titled 25 Years of “Genre Analysis” (September 2015), it seems appropriate to pick up on talk during the 2015 pre-sessional of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). (more…)