2. Summer presessional courses: the interview

In my last post I mentioned my upcoming round of interviews for a position as a tutor on a summer presessional course. I attended four interviews in total, in various cities around England. Three of these interviews were in prestigious Russell Group universities. As this will be my first time teaching on such courses in the UK (previously I taught at universities in Turkey), I wanted to get a feel for what they were looking for, and to give myself plenty of options for employment. I was fortunate enough to be offered all the jobs I interviewed for, but I settled on a 10-week contract at Imperial College London Business School teaching pre-Master’s students, which will start at the end of July. Here I would like to share a list of questions you may be asked in such interviews:

• What are the aims of a presessional course?
• How does EAP differ from EFL and how has your experience prepared you to teach presessionals?
• What are the academic needs of presessional students?
• Would you use the same or different materials to teach discipline-specific cohorts and mixed cohorts? (this touches on the debate about to what extent it is appropriate/feasible for EAP teachers to teach ESP – English for Specific Purposes. Many universities pair EAP teachers with a teaching assistant, who is often a graduate student in a particular discipline, so that you are not expected to be an expert in the subject students are studying).
• Students often have difficulty synthesising information. How would you help them with this?
• What are some difficulties students have with reading and how would you help them?
• How would you teach a student how to paraphrase?
• Apart from language, what other academic difficulties do students face?
• How would you encourage time management in your courses?
• How much experience do you have of large marking loads which need to be completed to deadlines?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses with regard to administrative tasks?
• How would you describe your approach to plagiarism?

It should also be mentioned that many universities will expect you to complete a written task, either prior to or during the interview. In one case, I was asked to send two tasks in advance to determine whether I should be invited to an interview: a) diagnosis of errors and provision of feedback based on a two-paragraph sample of student writing and b) an academic reading lesson plan based on a scholarly journal article. I put in a good number of hours preparing these, but more typically, you will be asked to evaluate a piece of student writing during the interview itself. They want to see that you can pick out the most productive areas for improvement, and that you are tactful yet directive in the way you give feedback.