International Students Projects

[André Schappo]

I frequently do things that to me are obvious and so usually I do not bother to write it up and frequently do not even bother to mention it to colleagues. Yesterday I attended a Learning and Teaching conference at Loughborough at which I gave a presentation. My presentation is not the subject of this email. As a participant I attended the session: "Building empathy and understanding to support the teaching of international masterʼs students". During this session I joined a breakout group and during our discussions I briefly described some of my practices with respect to international students. It made me realise that there are many things I do that are not standard practice and maybe I should write up some of my non standard practices.

So, here is what I did with my China Programme project students.

This year I had four China programme students for software projects. I was their supervisor. My standard practice with student projects is to have  weekly individual 30 minute meetings. With my four China programme students I organised the meetings differently. Instead of individual meetings we had weekly group meetings of two hours. I did this for a number of reasons, which includes:

① With individual meetings, none of them would understand everything I say in English because English is their 2nd language. As a group, I work on the principle that together they will understand all/most of my English. 

② As I have stated before, I appear to be the only Computer Science academic that teaches internationalised programming. So I use part of these combined meetings to explain some of how to build internationalised software. This would not be possible with individual project meetings.

③ I encouraged these students to solve problems I pose, collectively and in their native language Chinese. When they explain their solution(s) to me then they have to explain in English because my Chinese is rubbish.

One could argue that I should enforce the use of English but I do not consider that realistic for (difficult) problem solving. My primary goal is that the students fully understand the computer science. I reason that they are much more likely to understand the computer science in their native language.

The usual scenario is:

㊀ I set an internationalised programming task during our meetings.

㊁ The students chat away together in Chinese. They search the internet, a mix of Chinese text and English text search. They program.

㊂ I sit there quietly and do not interfere. I do occasionally understand a little of the Chinese they speak😀

㊃ When they are ready they explain their solution(s) to me in English. Sometimes they do not arrive at any solution(s).

It is worth bearing in mind that all the students have Windows laptops and they all have them set to the Chinese language user interface. I have never seen any of them switch to the English language interface.

PS. Switching Mac OSX between different language user interface is really easy and a restart is not required. It always makes for a quick "Wow factor" demo😀 I frequently switch my OSX to Korean or Chinese or multiple other languages just for the fun of it. Actually, switching oneʼs mobile phone to other languages is also really easy (the harder part is getting it back to English😀)

André Schappo

[Valerie Clifford]

Hi Andre

Your group work with your Masters students sounds really useful. I like that you fell comfortable about switching between languages. Our goal is for our students to understand and then be able to communicate their understanding in the language of their host institution, and varied pathways can lead to that end. 

I had an experience in Fiji of running some group work in a class for a colleague. While I presented in English and the students responded in the plenaries in English, I could not monitor their group work as it progressed as they were talking in their local languages. I found this a bit nerve wracking as there use of body language is also different and I wasn’t sure that some of them were doing any work! imagine my pleasure when they reported on what had obviously been in-depth discussions on the topic.

Have others had experiences with negotiating multi—language teaching scenarios?

Valerie

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Associate Professor Valerie Clifford

Affiliate Oxford Brookes University

Visiting Fellow, Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes University

http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/cci/

[André Schappo]

Actually, to a certain extent, computer science assessment can be human language independent.

Letʼs suppose I set a programming assignment to my China programme students. I let the students write variable names, function names and comments in Chinese. I then treat their code as a black box. I have a set of input to their code. There will be an expected set of correct output. This assessment method can all be automated.

It would make for an interesting experiment. One could compare the assessment results of a group which wrote code in their native language and a group which had to code in a second language such as English.

André Schappo