I've just returned from a visit to a UK university where, for the last five years, I have been an external examiner on a postgraduate bridging programme for international students. I want to write a little about this programme because I feel the changes that have happened to it recently are symptomatic of attitudes to EAP and ELT more generally.
When I joined the programme it had been in operation for four years and I was initially a member of the programme revalidation board. This brought the programme in line with university quality procedures, documenting aims and learning outcomes for all modules, and ensuring that appropriate procedures were followed for checking quality, including appointing an external examiner.
The programme offers high quality EAP teaching, with plenty of tutorial support for students. Students study academic English and learn how to do research by completing a major research project in a topic related to their degree studies. In this they are supervised by a member of staff from their discipline. This programme is an excellent preparation for students who do not have experience of the UK academic culture and prepares them well for their masters degrees. In so doing it makes the task of the lecturers teaching these degrees easier because the students are more independent and know what is expected of them.
The programme attracted large numbers of Chinese students who wanted to study postgraduate business or computer science degrees. However, since then the number of students has fallen and the demographic has changed with more students from India and Nigeria. The programme has been redesigned to meet the needs of this new customer base.
Now, however, in response to a shortfall in the university budget overall, the vice chancellor and his management team have decided to make drastic cuts in this and several related EAP programmes. Falling student numbers mean this programme is no longer making as much money for the university as it did before. It is being transferred to another faculty and 2 academic managers, 4 lecturers and several administrative support staff have been made redundant. The university is claiming, however, that these redundances are not compulsory! Some form of EAP teaching will remain but it is to be run as a support function with 1.5 teacher/managers and hourly paid staff.
Thus, the quality of the programme will inevitably be reduced but the university management team is not concerned about this. In any case, it will not become evident for a number of years when academic staff realise that the students on their masters degrees cannot cope and there is no adequate EAP programme to support them.
This situation represents the attitude to EAP programmes in many universities in the UK. While they are making money everyone is happy to align them to university norms and procedures. If they stop making money, they are vulnerable, regarded as expendable, because the monolingual English speakers who run most universities don't see the problems for international students coming to new academic cultures.
I wonder if this situation exists in other places?
- Olwyn Alexander's blog
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Comments
Hi Olwyn,
What you have described makes a perfect example for my discussion on 'Money making in ELT' (see Forums > General discussions on teaching English). I think this is generally a universal problem as long as the world is still ruled by 'Business' and money-making will always be on top of the list. Very often the English language centre is regarded as only a supporting unit in a university, which unlike other faculties, does not generate direct profits to the organisation. Thus any businessperson will see no point in investing so much on English language programmes.
Very often the English language centre is regarded as only a supporting unit in a university, which unlike other faculties, does not generate direct profits to the organisation. Thus any businessperson will see no point in investing so much on English language programmes.
Thanks for your comment elchwa, and I also read the posts on your forum as well.
It seems to me that in order to stop university management treating English Language Centres as support units, the staff in the centres have a job to do to 'sell' the work of the centre to the university management. However, this is hard to do if the status of the staff in the centre is not high.
One successful way to make university management aware of the quality of provision is to seek external accreditation by bodies such as Baleap because generally managers are familiar with accreditation by professional bodies of accountants or engineers etc. Another way is to fit English courses to university quality assurance procedures, documenting programmes, courses and modules in ways which the managers recognise.
I think it is also the responsibility of the centre manager to make university managers aware of the added value of the centre in bringing in students who then go on to study on degree programmes. Too often this full economic benefit is not included in costings.
Actually, what is rather sad is that the large private companies who are setting up foundation and pre-sessional programmes in universities all over the UK are actually much better at selling themselves to the university managers than the English centres already within the universities. I suspect this is also a status issue. The university managers feel they are talking to people at their level when they hold meetings with the managers of these large private companies, whereas they feel they are talking down to people who run the English centres.