EXPLORACIÓN DEL REVESTIMIEMTO CUTÁNEO.

My actual practice was built up with some of the material provided and with other material and tasks that I chose to meet my own and my students’ needs. More specifically, while keeping the topic-based organization including some of the projects and some of the material provided, I also added original sources such as

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current newspaper articles, literary book excerpts and academic English language books, and asked the students to bring their own material. I provided them with options of tasks they could do on this or other material for them to choose from according to their academic English language needs. I asked them to reflect about their learning through different mediums, that is, orally, in writing and via drawings. My aim was to encourage criticality, autonomy and the principles of exploratory practice. Below is a description of practice week by week based on what I recorded in my lecturer-researcher’s diary.

4.1.2.1 Week 1

The theme of week 1 was ‘Changing Society’. By looking at the syllabus one could identify subthemes such as changes in today’s cities, climate, in the way people move around the globe and how they cope with living in different societies. I chose three of them: a listening task about factors that contribute to making a good city to live in; devising a survey about cities, especially, the development of Chinese cities; and a discussion about the differences between the British, and the Chinese culture based on info-grams by artists. Coincidentally, the latter is resonant with meanings of criticality, as I understood it at the time, which I had set out to explore while teaching in this programme.

We used the three pieces of material in the syllabus and I developed other tasks around them which I considered were important in helping students develop their academic skills. Also newspaper articles from the local newspaper in English as well as excerpts from literary books I had copies of were added. For example, based on the listening material about factors that contribute to making a good city for living, I asked students not only to discuss what the speakers said but also to engage their own opinions and create a poster in groups evaluating those factors in their views. For homework I also asked students to choose one factor only and individually write an essay about why that factor is important in making it a good city to live in. This would help me identify their academic writing needs to provide better guidance and would be an opportunity for them to think, express their views and exercise their putting ideas in writing. Secondly, based on the material provided, that is, a PowerPoint presentation on art-works on differences between the Chinese and the

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British societies, and on a textbook page about differences between the two cultures, including a list of English phases, their common uses in the British culture and how they might be understood by speakers of other languages, I first asked students to discuss their ideas about whether there are typical characteristics associated with these two cultures in two groups, one society/ culture each group. Subsequently, they would share their group discussions with the other group. After engaging their own previous knowledge about the subject matter, I provided them with excerpts from two literary books, whose authors enquire into these cultures. After they had read these excerpts, discussed them, and presented their understandings, I suggested evaluating their own discussions and presentations all together, by eliciting their own views about their performance. By doing this I was incorporating original and more challenging reading sources; I was spending time in directing their attention to reflecting on their performance and becoming aware of what they had done well and also what they needed to work on; and in doing this I was also developing my autonomy, thinking about the content suggested for this week and how to own it and make sense of it. By the end of this week I was already feeling frustrated with the syllabus, choosing bits and pieces from random textbooks that had been chosen by others in charge of creating materials for this course, and trying to create some kind of meaningful unity. Despite my attempts to do this, I still felt by the end of the week that keeping the topic-based already-made syllabus was not working well with my students and me. I knew the academic functions they needed to work on and I would have rather worked with material we could find according to their and my interests. Textbooks present abridged information and students need to learn to find sources and engage with them in deeper and more meaningful ways in higher education. Lastly, I devoted one session for students to work on the aspects of language they were weak at, as shown in the feedback I had given them on their essay writing. Again I provided them with original sources, online books and online educational websites, where they could find information and exercises about the academic language items they needed to work on, in class. I wanted them to learn to find responses to their language problems and to provide them with a space in class to work on this and discuss it.

91 4.1.2.2 Week 2

Week two is about IT and Social Media. Like in week 1, in the second week three pieces of the material suggested were used: a listening task about smart-watches; questions and answers about this week’s topic for discussion; and a project to complete a survey and write a report on it.

This material was complemented with other material and tasks such as an episode of a popular British comedy show to introduce the students to examples of British humour and to work on pronunciation; the students’ own material; and their reflections on their weekly learning via painting and drawing. These extra material and tasks were aimed at making students reflect on what they were learning, and work on their own needs, and the lecturer-researcher use her creativity and expertise to make decisions about her teaching practice. However, despite doing this, I felt that doing bits and pieces of a topic- and textbook-based syllabus was taking my autonomy to make sound decisions about my teaching and the students’ full potential away. It is also true that every educational situation has its own constraints, which educators must learn to deal with. In this case these were the constraints I had to deal with and it is worth stressing that despite these constraints I tried to find spaces to develop a more learner-centred, function-oriented and criticality-facilitating educative practice.

4.1.2.3 Week 3

The topic of week 3 was Brands and Advertising. Local newspapers in English and articles from a specialist magazine online were used to work on aspects of academic English that the lecturer considered important. Some of the tasks I suggested included finding a newspaper article that related to week 3’s topic and discussing how it related to it; reading two specialist magazine articles to identify textual patters, the SPRE (Situation-Problem-Response-Evaluation) pattern (Edge & Wharton, 2001, 2002), and to work on paragraphing and the sentence structure; and talking about their reflective drawings from the previous week. From the syllabus I chose this week’s project, which consisted of designing and selling a product. Spontaneously, I video-recorded their presentations so that they could evaluate their own performance as homework.

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Using local news and current news from specialist magazines was aimed at promoting student engagement with the everyday (Chun, 2015), with the social and the political, and ultimately, with what is going on in the world in connection with the syllabus topics. Once original sources are brought to the classroom, different aspects of academic English language and of reading and writing can be studied in them. If the lecturer has expertise in teaching academic English language, a syllabus can be easily organised by selecting original sources of interest to the students and by working on identifying different aspects of the language, of reading and writing in those texts. Bringing academic English books to the class, asking students to investigate a specific item and explain it to their classmates before identifying them in texts or incorporating them in their own writing, as well as encouraging students to continually reflect on their learning via tutorials, painting or drawing and/ or writing was integral to this educational practice.

4.1.2.4 Week 4

In the fourth week like in the previous ones some of the materials provided were used and new tasks were tailored to the students’ academic English needs. Students’ work on the last week include: discussing and sharing what they had done for homework regarding vocabulary and writing; checking the lecturer’s feedback on their reports and setting up homework based on it; presenting their self-designed products and evaluating their presentations including good aspects and aspects to improve all together; practising speaking by discussing the topic of this week, which is ‘business’, and considering an alternative, less market-driven society as introduced and sketched by the lecturer (Benesch, 2001); and finally, reading an article, writing a summary of it, reading it aloud and giving and receiving feedback from the lecturer and their classmates in class.