1. Research setting
• The research described here concerns designing a pre-sessional
EAP course.
• The view taken of students is not one of cognitive lacks but people
needing to adapt both their approaches to learning and their views
of themselves as learners (Spack 1997). The focus hence is on
change rather than deficit.
• An earlier part of the research analysed student accounts of
adapting to living in the UK, recognising that the telling of the
narratives is not just about the students’ adjustment, but actually
forms part of that adjustment, as the events related become
integrated into a student’s biography by the telling
2. Space and Place
For Tuan, experience can transform the openness of space to
the familiarity of place: “What begins as undifferentiated
space becomes place as we get to know it better and
endow it with value” (1977, p6).
Relph (1976) proposed three components which constitute the
identity of any place:
• the static physical setting,
• the activities therein,
• the meanings related to it
3. Seminars
Seminars in UK HE were studied as a place by analysing
descriptions of the features of seminars from interviews
with experienced international students, interviews with
academic staff, and from the Quality Assurance Agency’s
guidelines for Masters courses in business and
management (QAA 2004).
4. Physical setting of seminars,
Extract 1 (student from China)
Even the layout of the classroom … in China is more face-to-
face teaching: the teacher sit here and all the students sit
one line after another and facing the teacher, and … it’s
more like in a theatre, the audience … sit in the seat there
at the back and the actors sit in the front, so the teacher in
China is more like actors, they play just by themselves,
without interactions with the audience.
5. activities related to seminars
The importance of interactivity
Extract 2 (Switzerland)
[…] Another interesting aspect of the education in the English
universities is the participation. Students are encouraged to
participate in seminars, to discuss, to say what they think.
Even if the teacher is not right, is wrong in what he says,
the student can take part to say “Yes, I see that
differently”. I find this very nice, very interesting, very
different from Switzerland.
6. Meanings related to seminars
Extract 3 (QAA documentation)
Graduates are expected to be able to demonstrate a range of
cognitive and intellectual skills together with techniques specific to
business and management. […] These include:
– Critical thinking and creativity: managing creative
processes in self and others; organising thoughts,
analysis, synthesis, critical appraisal. This includes the
capability to identify assumptions, evaluate statements
in terms of evidence, detect false logic or reasoning,
identify implicit values, define terms adequately and
generalise appropriately (QAA 2004).
7. Relph’s classification
Three types of outsideness:
• ‘existential outsideness’: feeling alienation, rejection,
uninvolvement;
• ‘objective outsideness’: dispassionate separation, e.g. in
geography textbooks;
• ‘incidental outsideness’: place as backgrounding, e.g. experienced
by truck drivers and flight crews.
Four categories of insideness:
• ‘vicarious insideness’: e.g. from literature or film;
• ‘behavioural insideness’: “seeing it as a set of objects, views, and
activities arranged in certain ways” (Relph 1976, p53);
• ‘empathetic insideness’: identifying at emotional levels;
• ‘existential insideness’: “knowing implicitly that this place is where
you belong” (Relph 1976, p55).
8. ‘Empathetic insideness
Most of the experienced international students interviewed
demonstrated ‘empathetic insideness’
Extract 4 (Switzerland)
It’s fundamental, the communication, the discussion with people,
knowing what other people are thinking. In particular today we
see that the level of business is even more international, so we
are always working with different kinds of people. And so it is
necessary to know what they think, because, it is funny, at the
beginning we always think we are right, that our point of view
is the right one, but when we come here in England and we
met other cultures, we saw that in fact there is no right and
wrong just different points of view.
9. EAP course coverage of seminars
• explored the epistemology underpinning seminars – for example
examining the approaches of Kolb and Bloom
• practised the language requirements stemming from these approaches
• included sessions using various forms of seminar activities
• asked the students to write a reflective essay (both the theory related to
reflective learning as well as the linguistic requirements of reflective
writing were taught to enable this)
• provided the extracts which will be analysed below.
10. The adaptation of new students
From ‘vicarious insideness’ to ‘behavioural insideness’ : students were
attracted by what they had heard but not really sure of all ramifications:
Extract 5 (student from China)
Before I attended this course, I had thought discussing ideas in small group is
useful, but I had no idea about how useful it is. When I took part in the
group discussion, I was completely astonished. At the beginning, I had no
any idea about how to structure the presentation, and I was not sure
about if we could work it out. But in the process, I found out every
member in the group contributed a little bit idea, this made the work
easier and more interesting, just like many calm streams flowed together
and become one larger noisy river. Discussion is really a great method to
learn, it makes students enjoy learning, it also gives students a chance to
communicate, organise and cooperate.
11. The adaptation of new students
Not all of the participants found such an easy route:
Extract 6 (student from China)
At the beginning, I am shy to discuss with my classmates. Lots of
times when teachers asked [us to] discuss something, I always
keep silent. I did not know how to explain what I thoughts in
English. Especially, I felt hard to do presentation because I have
never done it before. Even I did enough preparation for the
presentation; I still felt too much stress when I stood in front of
the classmates and teacher.
12. • Most of the new students combine this respect for the values of
the seminar whilst not yet having achieved the degree of
insideness which gave the experienced students their unreserved
empathy, so are for the moment in the category of ‘behavioural
insideness’.
• This is not a fixed end-point, for Relph (1976) there is not a clear
distinction but rather a ‘fading’ between behavioural and
empathetic insideness.
• In all of these reflective accounts the role of experience,
reflection, and changes in expectations of the required behaviours
of learners are linked.
13. Hybridisation
A further point concerns ‘hybridisation’, these students are already,
in Grossberg’s terms (1996), possessors “of other knowledges and
traditions”,
Extract 7 (student from China)
In fact, I can't enjoy the team work at first, maybe because I'm
influenced by the Chinese educational model, just used to
listening, only little chance for us to talk about something in class.
But now, I feel I can make my assignment better after discussion
in class in England, I feel I can learn something from others' idea,
so now I can enjoy it.
