When starting a new teaching job, it is unrealistic to expect much information to rather magically flow your way. In a typical HE setting on an hourly paid contract, you might be mostly isolated from other teaching colleagues, arriving on campus only to deliver your lessons, then leaving again immediately afterwards. If you’re lucky, you’ll have an office space where you can hot desk, or at the very least, there will be an online repository of teaching materials such as box.net, which you’ll still have to trawl through to find anything useful, and you’ll probably need to revise/adapt the materials besides.

In the private sector, colleagues will all be on full teaching workloads, which means they may have little time to ‘orient’ you. In many cases, you’ll be expected to dive straight in with the bare minimum of knowledge. Bear in mind that locating and familiarising yourself with a new syllabus and all the materials is extremely time-consuming. You’re likely to have a million questions to ask, and it pays to come prepared to a new teaching role with a list of questions you need answered. (You can then go around pestering everyone until you are satisfied). The following questions will help you to help yourself get oriented:

Questions to ask:

• When will my contract be sent out? Is it permanent or fixed-term?
• How do I get my ID card?
• How do I get on the payroll? When is payday?
• Do I need a CRB check?
• How do I get my IT account?
• Where is my desk/space?
• How do I print?
• What are the door codes?
• How do I use the photocopier?
• Where is the stationery cupboard?
• How do I access the shared drive/cloud service?
• Where are the course books/teachers’ books?
• Are we using a VLE?
• Where is the syllabus? When are the assessments?
• How prescriptive is the syllabus?
• Are we taking paper or electronic registers?
• What is the policy on late arrivals? How should I record them?
• Where can I get a staff handbook? a student handbook?
• What is my teaching timetable?
• Am I expected to remain on site between certain hours or only for classes?
• What’s happening in the first week? Is there a ‘standard’ first lesson I can use?
• Will my students already know each other?

This is a good time to start blogging again for another reason as well: I’ve finally landed my first full-time teaching job since returning to the UK in September 2010! I will start teaching on the Graduate Diploma and International Foundation Programmes at INTO East Anglia London campus on 16th January. INTO is a private network of study centres in partnership with a number of top UK universities (e.g. Exeter, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow) which offers pathways into undergraduate and postgraduate degrees for students who do not qualify for direct entry into their chosen programmes. The London campus is a fantastic purpose-built centre very near Liverpool Street station – I’m looking forward to using interactive whiteboards for the first time!

In my next post I’ll share some pointers on how to get prepared so that you don’t drown on the first day of teaching!

Imperial College Business School runs two back to back 5-week sessions for pre-Master’s students, the first for Finance and the second for Management. The course is mandatory for students with a conditional offer, i.e. students who have not met the minimum 6.5 score for all components of the IELTS exam. This results in a mixed profile: I have students who have scored the maximum of 9.0 in Reading, for example, but only 6.0 in Writing. In addition, we have a few students who have an unconditional offer, but who have chosen to do the presessional anyway in order to ensure they are prepared for their course in September.

Students are kept quite busy: each week, they attend 3 Academic Writing classes, 1 Intro to Britain class, 1 Presentation class, and 2 optional classes – they can choose from Pronunciation, Accuracy in Writing or Current Affairs. Detailed feedback is provided on all pieces of writing, many of which are completed in class. In addition, they attend a 90-minute lecture + a 90-minute seminar delivered by a subject specialist, and there are two sessions a week to prepare them for these. They also attend a 30-minute tutorial, and there is an optional trip, for example tours of the Bank of England and the Houses of Parliament, an afternoon in Greenwich and a chance to see War Horse.

There are 4 assessment components:

1. a 1500-word essay

2. a 30-minute timed essay

3. a 20-minute group discussion task

4. a 15-minute group presentation task

This year the total cohort is 37 students divided amongst 4 teachers, which means 12-13 students per class, a very manageable number that guarantees plenty of individual attention for each student.

The book is organised around 5 stages of writing:

1. Interpretation of the question
2. Research
3. Planning
4. Writing
5. Revision

I really like the fact that he devotes no fewer than 10 chapters to interpreting the question. On the 8-week insessional writing courses I teach in the autumn and spring terms, ONE 2-hour session deals with this (and of course we have to fly through it). He presents a 3-step technique for analysing a concept and discusses the importance of flexibility, i.e. using the right strategy to achieve the right outcome. I have already decided to rewrite some of my teaching sessions to incorporate some of what I’ve read.

He also provides outstanding advice on note-taking, probably the best I’ve ever read. He advocates training students to use a combination of linear and pattern notes: typically, linear notes for analysis and structure, pattern notes for criticism and evaluation. This also encourages students to read texts more than once, for different purposes.

I found his analogies quite useful. Here is an example: ‘Reading someone else’s work is like entering an unfamiliar city: you can get lost easily, you’re dependent upon others to give you directions and, even worse, you really don’t know why you’re there in the first place, unless somebody tells you’ (Greetham, 2008, p. 148). Such a vivid situation is undoubtedly far more comprehensible to students than the standard advice ‘Make your ideas clear to your reader.’

For some reason, Greetham is highly critical of teachers who ask their students to write thesis statements – ! – and this threw me for a loop at first. But after reading his examples carefully, it seems that he and I just have different definitions of what a thesis statement is. He seems to see it as the student’s (presumably uninformed) opinion, tacked onto the introduction just for the sake of it, ‘an opinion of their own which they must defend’ (Greetham, 2008, p. 185), whereas I define it as the overall argument of the paper, which the student has selected after careful consideration of the evidence. I think this section could be slightly confusing for students, likely to contradict the advice on thesis statements they are receiving from their instructors. It is the first time I’ve ever seen such an ‘attack’ on thesis statements – I wasn’t aware that instructors disagreed over what the thesis should express, so this was a helpful insight: we must always clarify our use of terminology! Writing instructors are obliged to show students plenty of contextualised examples of what they mean by thesis statements – deductive and inductive, direct and implied. In my experience, the thesis statement is one of the most difficult components for a novice writer to grasp, yet once they do grasp it, the organisation of their ideas improves immensely.

• 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.

Qualified and experienced EAP tutors are in high demand in the summer period; some universities start advertising and recruiting as early as September for a July start. On the plus side, these positions are well-paid, the classes are small, and the contact hours reasonable. Should you choose to work outside of your city of residence, accommodation is offered, either in halls of residence or in shared staff flats, and the cost is subsidised, giving you the chance to work in prestigious universities around the UK to build up your CV. Above all, you have the opportunity to make a real contribution to students’ future studies, to give them confidence in their abilities and to help them to make the transition to British academic culture.

On the down side, it is important to understand that working as an EAP tutor, unless you are one of the few teachers fortunate enough to have secured a rare permanent position as a lecturer, is cyclical. Once the summer is over, you can of course enquire whether there is any hourly paid work going at your university, and if you’ve done a good job on the presessional, they may be happy to keep you on for the subsequent insessional programme; otherwise, you will need to try to get work as an hourly paid lecturer (HPL) elsewhere. This work is part-time and hours can vary widely according to budgets, number of teachers already in the pool, and particular insessional needs. For this reason, many HPLs supplement their income by working at several universities on a part-time basis, or in language schools teaching English as a Foreign Language.

In 6 months of a gruelling search for a permanent job as a Lecturer in EAP, exactly two jobs in London or within commuting distance have opened up; this was ahead of government budget cuts and tuition increases, the effects of which remain to be seen. I heard nothing back from either university despite my considerable qualifications and experience. What I have heard from colleagues who have been doing this in the UK longer than I have is that networking and internal recommendations are extremely important, so short contracts, despite their uncertainty and insecurity, may well prove to have a cumulative effect.