A Personalised Autonomous Model to Resolve a Catch-22 Situation in International Students’ English Language Needs in Higher Education
A/prof Mira Kim1
1University Of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
International students now make up a large proportion of the total student cohort at universities in Australia. While universities offer a range of support services, in most cases these do not yet sufficiently address students’ diverse language needs. In response to this issue, I created an extracurricular program entitled Personalised English Language Enhancement (PELE) to apply a Personalised Autonomous (PA) model that I developed to help translation and interpreting students to enhance their bilingual language proficiency (Kim, 2014, Kim and Jing 2019). The fundamental principle of the pedagogical model is to guide students to personalise their own learning independently. Students identify their own linguistic needs; develop a personal project to address their needs; implement the project and evaluate their own progress. The PELE program was piloted with about 300 students in 2016 and became a credit-bearing course in 2017. Since then, it has been taken by more than 1,000 students across faculties at all levels including undergraduate, postgraduate coursework and PhD. The data collected from the entry and exit surveys over 2018-2020 (n=1023) show the PELE course significantly improved students’ confidence in language skills, self-efficacy in learning, emotional well-being, as well as their sense of belonging. In this paper, I will explain the PA model including the learning cycle, course schedule and assessment tasks, discuss its pedagogical efficacy based on the survey data and suggest ways of moving forward.
Biography:
Mira Kim is an Associate Professor in Translation and Interpreting Studies at the School of Humanities and Languages, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UNSW.
Her research interests are divided into three categories: translation studies, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and personalised language learning. The three main research fields are synergetically integrated, which empowers her to expand her research areas and share her knowledge beyond her boundary. For example, she undertook a research project entitled English Language Acquisition Support for International Students (ELASIS) funded by UNSW (SEF#2). Through the project, she developed a course called Personalised English Language Enhancement (PELE) to help students to enhance their English language skills. This credit-bearing course is offered every semester from 2017 benefiting many students, international and domestic, across faculties at UNSW.
Recently, she has published a book, Systemic Functional Linguistics and Translation Studies (2021). She now is working on another book, Korean Grammar: A Systemic-Functional Approach.