Various forms of proofreading of student writing take place in university contexts. Sometimes writers pay freelance proofreaders to edit their texts before submission for assessment; sometimes more informal arrangements take place, where friends, family, or coursemates proofread. Such arrangements raise ethical questions for universities…

This paper provides an overview of UK Arabic language teaching in supplementary and mainstream schools from available research papers and provides a synopsis of recent developments in supporting Arabic teaching at school level and pathways to Higher Education. The largest study cited is the 2016 research collaboration between the British Council,…

Where academic literacies are understood as situated social practices, effective academic literacy support needs to reflect the disciplinary and institutional specificity of the practices. However, the institutional separation of academic literacy teaching from disciplinary subject teaching, typical of UK universities, creates significant…

A growing body of research, largely from the global North, and particularly from North America, highlights the increasing psychiatrisation, medicalisation and psychologisation of children and childhood, and suggests that schools and educators play a key role in these processes. This increasing diffusion of psy-expertise within educational spaces…

Despite assessment and feedback being important elements of the student experience, it is not clear how students connect these two elements together to improve their learning. What are students doing with the assignment feedback that they receive from tutors, and how do they make use of this feedback in their future assessments? A research study…

This paper explores the potential for book-gifting programs to initiate cooperative learning between a dynamic whole group composed of children, parents and teachers. It uses the results from a series of book-gifting program evaluations (three Randomized Controlled Trials with N=1694 participants in total) and investigates whether the pattern of…

This paper explores the potential of technology to enhance the assessment and feedback process for both staff and students. The "Making Connections" project aimed to better understand the connections that students make between the feedback that they receive and future assignments, and explored whether technology can help them in this…

This article, using a student outcomes definition of academic standards, reports on academics' sense of standards as enacted through marking practices. Twelve lecturers from two UK universities were asked to "think aloud" as they graded written assignments followed by a semi-structured interview. The interview data were used to…

The lived experience of academic teachers as they engage in feedback has received relatively little attention compared to student perspectives on feedback. The present study used an ethnographically informed methodology to investigate the everyday practices around undergraduates' writing of fourteen UK HE teachers, in a range of disciplines and…

What do lecturers look for when marking essays? What impresses them and what frustrates them? In this paper, we present the results of a survey which asked lecturers to address these questions. Thirty-two lecturers responded to an email survey in which they listed the problems they found most frustrating when marking essays and the factors which…

Feedback is a key element in effective teaching and learning. The issue of how teachers perceive the role of feedback will impact significantly their feedback approaches, the amount of the detail of their feedback and the time and effort expended on the feedback provision. This research was designed with the purpose of exploring how a group of…

This paper explores how the critical learning dimension in an English for academic purposes (EAP) programme in a British university is developed in the context of one classroom task. The focus is on the speaking element of the activity which requires students in pairs to explore each other's personal language history (PLH), present the account to…