Teaching Innovation Project

Participants: Laura Gimeno, Susagna Tubau, Montserrat Capdevila, and Clara Román

The faculty of the English Studies Degree and the Combined Degrees with English have long observed, both in subjects within the Literature branch and in subjects in the Linguistics area, an increasing difficulty among a significant group of students, not only in connecting theory and practice independently, but also in being consistent and proactive in the necessary preparation to both effectively follow the content delivered in classes and to apply the skills acquired.

In the specific case of Literature courses, teachers believe that the root of the problem lies mainly in the lack of reading of the primary texts, which will later be analyzed in depth in class. In the case of Linguistics courses, teachers point out that students do not put enough effort into consolidating the sequential content that is assumed to be known from one class to the next in a subject that increases in its level of abstraction—and, therefore, potential difficulty—week by week.

This teaching innovation project, therefore, will focus on (i) collecting data through anonymous questionnaires directed at the students, which will allow the faculty in a Literature course (Literature of the United States I: 19th century) and in two Linguistics courses (English Syntactic Analysis and Advanced English Syntax), to objectively evaluate the accuracy of their perceptions regarding the previously mentioned lack of student preparation; and (ii) piloting pedagogical activities with the students to demonstrate and quantify the positive effect of preparation on academic success.

 

The goal of this teaching innovation project is twofold:

Objective 1: To assess, using empirical data, the degree of validity of the perceptions of the teachers of the involved subjects regarding the lack of preparation of the students to follow the class content, as well as to explore the reasons that supposedly lead students to neglect this aspect of their learning in order to propose, in the future, improvement actions.

Objective 2: Also quantitatively evaluate (i) the correlation between reading primary sources and academic success in different types of assessment exercises in the literature subject, and (ii) the correlation between completing guided practice and academic success in different types of assessment exercises in linguistics subjects.

 

Why this teaching innovation project?

This teaching innovation project arises from the observation by the faculty in both the Literature and Linguistics areas of the English Studies Degree that a large part of our students face difficulties when trying to connect theory with practice independently. In order to find the root of the problem and address it, this teaching innovation project proposes classroom activities that, combined with a series of student self-reflection questionnaires, will allow us to design and carry out future meaningful actions that will have a direct impact both on the improvement of student learning and on teaching tasks, while also enabling us to change the dynamics observed in the classroom.

Participants: Susagna Tubau, Laura Gimeno, Montserrat Capdevila and Clara Román

Our proposal is structured as a teaching innovation initiative inspired by challenge-based learning and, as such, is designed following the phase structure (engage, investigate, act) typical of these educational approaches. Thus, the challenge we propose is to help students see the importance of prior preparation to make the most of face-to-face sessions at the faculty and improve their learning. The phase structure is organized as follows:

-Phase 1 (engage) → Present the problem to the students: a worrying lack of preparation among students has been detected, which results in a systematic lack of reading and content review.

-Phase 2 (investigate) → Ask them to discover the reason through a series of questionnaires that they will prepare (under the supervision of the responsible teacher) and that will allow us to divide the students into interviewers and respondents (roles that will rotate later).

-Phase 3 (act) → Complete the surveys and assess possible solutions together with the students through a classroom discussion (for example, discussing how their teachers should act so they read more, what techniques students could apply to improve their engagement with the subject, etc).

Why this teaching innovation project?

In recent years, lecturers teaching both the BA in English Studies and degrees that combine with it have detected a growing difficulty on the part of students in relating theory to practice independently, both in literature and linguistics subjects. This has resulted in a clear decline in the effectiveness of face-to-face sessions and in the satisfactory acquisition and understanding of knowledge, exacerbated by a general lack of proactivity and consistency in their work outside the classroom.

 

In the case of Literature courses, the root of the problem lies in the lack of prior reading of the primary texts assigned for discussion and analysis in class. In the subject of Syntax, on the other hand, students do not show consistency in reviewing the content given in class, which progresses in terms of abstraction session after session, nor do they practise the syntactic representation of the structures studied sufficiently on their own. In both Literature and Language, a lack of preparation and practice can have a negative impact on students' results in subject assessments. The educational interest of this project, therefore, is to make students more aware of the effect that not reading and/or practising can have on their learning process and to propose ways to reverse the situation.